There is growing evidence that Australia's wild horses have become so proliferated that they once threatened the survival of many native plants and animals, making them a veritable ecological killer!
Recently, The Australian Wildlife Conservation Department plans to kill more than 10,000 wild horses to improve the ecological balance. Many zoologists believe that the Alpine National Park can only accommodate a maximum of 3,000 wild horses, but now there are 25,000 wild horses living in the park, so at least 22,000 must be killed, or directly let Australia's wild horses extinct, in order to truly maintain the ecological balance of the park.
In fact, the flood of wild horses in Australia has long been well known, but because of the more serious flooding of other animals and repeatedly escaped the disaster, as early as 2016, Australia's national parks have as many as 6,000 wild horses, some people proposed to leave 600 by hunting, but the plan was eventually rejected, and the wild horses were protected by the legislation of the New South Wales government.
The turning point occurred in 2019, when a wildfire in Australia burned for four months, and one-third of the Kus woodskul National Park was burned, while the number of wild horses in the Alps had soared to about 25,000, and in order to speed up the recovery of the ecology severely damaged by wildfires, the Australian Federal Court of Justice ordered the shooting of 4,000 wild horses in May 2020, in addition to a large number of wild boars, goats and deer will also be shot at the same time. It can be seen that in just over a year, the number of wild horses has returned to the original 25,000, and it is no wonder that many zoologists hate wild horses!
In fact, Australia originally did not have this species of wild horses, it was in 1788 with the European colonists invaded here, at the beginning, these horses are still domestic horses, mainly used for farms and transportation, with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, mechanization replaced the original animal power, and these horses were released into the wild, becoming a veritable wild horse. On the way to Australia, long-term sea drifting screened out excellent genes, coupled with the absence of large predators in Australia, in the absence of natural enemies, these wild horses lived a life of eating and drinking, and the number increased explosively.
If it is only an increase in numbers, it is nothing, the key is that the wild horses eat amazingly, the hooves are still very hard, and everywhere they go, the impact on fragile vegetation and soil is far greater than that of soft-legged animals such as kangaroos, which not only destroys the water source, but also causes serious damage to mosses, high-altitude wetlands, etc., and many rare species die under their hooves. With the increase in the number of wild populations and the competition with native animals for limited food resources, the load capacity of the ecological environment has long been difficult to support, and eventually became one of the most hated species of Australians, so a certain number of wild horses are hunted every year.
There are about 200 breeds of horses in the world, and different breeds of horses vary greatly in physique, with heavy breeds weighing more than 1 ton and reaching more than 2 meters tall, while small breeds weigh less than 200 kilograms and are less than 1 meter tall, and some ponies can only grow to 60 centimeters. Archaeopteryx is the ancestor of horses, living in the forests of North America, feeding on young leaves, evolving into grassland horses in the Miocene, feeding on grass, living on grasslands. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, most horses are now distributed in the Americas, with Asia accounting for about 24%, Europe accounting for 11%, and Africa and Oceania accounting for a total of 8%.
The world's top 10 noble horse breeds: thoroughbred horses, Arabian horses, Andalusian horses, Hanover horses, Russian Orlov horses, sweat blood BMW, Ili horses, Three Hippos, Mongolian horses, Farabella horses. The reason why the prestige is first reflected in the price, ranging from $64 million to tens of thousands of dollars, but also in the value, including in speed, endurance, explosiveness, and even temperament, such as: the fastest speed of the sweat horse is recorded as 84 days to run 4300 kilometers, the three hippos run 1 kilometer in 1 minute and 10 seconds in the case of manned, and the Farabella horse has a gentle temperament and is a good partner for the child.
Speaking of Australian wild horses, they are not really wild horses! The real more widely recognized wild horse breed is the Przewalski's wild horse, which is the only extant wild horse, which is about 2.1 meters longer than the domestic horse, and at the beginning, they were mainly distributed in Xinjiang and Gansu in China, as well as Mongolia and other regions, and the reason why they were given a foreign name was because it was believed to be discovered by the Russian explorer Przewalski, and the wild horse was brought to Europe for sale.
And Europeans are very interested in this animal skin, so there are people under the guise of exploration, poaching, because adult wild horses are difficult to be caught alive, so they have been hunted and killed, and foals have also been sold to many zoos in Europe, as long as there are wild horses there are constant hunting and hunting, so Przewalski's wild horses are on the hands of Europeans to go wild extinction, the most embarrassing thing is that the origin of Przewalski's wild horses is to be imported from abroad to maintain the population.
Mongolia captured a wild horse in 1947 and let it participate in the breeding of Przewalski's wild horses, and by the 1960s it was declared extinct in the wild, and China also declared the wild extinction of Przewalski's wild horses 10 years later. After 1985, 24 wild horses were brought back from Europe and the United States and other countries, and the 9,000 acres of breeding and breeding centers in Xinjiang were reared and rewilded, and now the 6th generation has been bred, with a total of more than 760 horses, accounting for one-third of all the Platts wild horses in the world, and the number of wild populations has reached about 500. And all the Przewalski's wild horses are the descendants of the first 10 horses, and in terms of quantity, they are really more precious than giant pandas.
Compared with cattle and sheep and other animals, horses are an uncommon animal, but its uses are many, including herding horses, stallions, running horses, ornamental horses, riding horses, foals, etc. In addition to some more expensive horses, our most common is meat horses, ponies, improved horses, Mongolian horses, etc., of course, their price difference is also huge, the cheapest is also tens of thousands of yuan a horse, slightly better to tens of thousands of yuan. For farming, the cost of grass is relatively low, while the cost of breeding in some horse clubs is even higher.
In contrast, Australia has adopted a zero-tolerance approach to wild horses and uses methods including aerial shooting to culling them, and ecologist David Watson worries that even if only 3,000 horses are eventually retained, at their super-fast breeding rate, 1,000 horses will be cleared every few years, and even a small herd of horses will cause persistent headaches. Supposedly, there are so many wild horses in Australia, why can't we sell them? At the lowest price of 10,000 yuan a horse, then 10,000 horses is the value of 100 million, are they really rich enough to squander it arbitrarily?
In fact, it is not, as mentioned above, the adult Przewalski's wild horse basically has no catch alive, let alone tame it, it is easy to rewild, and the time spent on taming is actually very long, the time cost is very high, since it can not catch the live mouth, it can only be extinguished. So isn't selling horse meat okay? In fact, the meat of wild horses does not have much value, first, there are many bacteria carried by wild horses, which certainly do not meet the standard of hygiene, and second, the related labor costs are too large, and it is not worth the loss to catch and sell.
In fact, some zoologists in the West have long announced that there are no real wild horses in the world, and even if there are numbers, they are extremely rare, so the real wild horses have long been included in the world's forbidden animals, so the Australian wild horses may not be real wild horses, otherwise they would have been protected and made a fortune!
The United States is or will face the same problem, the number of wild horses in national parks is growing, labor costs are also increasing, but the United States law prohibits hunting, so the current U.S. Land Administration can only rely on sterilization, resettlement or pay to host horses on private land to maintain the situation, but in the near future, the United States may have to face its own wild horse liquidation.