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- Newsgroups: rec.equestrian
- Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!darwin.sura.net!Sirius.dfn.de!math.fu-berlin.de!inf.fu-berlin.de!ring
- From: ring@inf.fu-berlin.de (Rod J. Ring)
- Subject: "brumbies"
- Message-ID: <FK38AGQ@math.fu-berlin.de>
- Sender: news@math.fu-berlin.de (Math Department)
- Organization: Free University of Berlin, Germany, Computer Science
- Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 09:14:41 GMT
- Lines: 42
-
- Hi.
-
- A couple of days ago, I watched an interesting documentary on German
- TV about the killing of the wild horses (called "brumbies") in the
- Australian bush.
-
- They die like flies anyhow, because farmers and ranchers fence in more
- and more land, so that the animals can't move around anymore they way
- they used to and can't reach their water wells and their grass. So lots
- of them die simply from thirst and hunger. But that's not enough for
- the farmers: they pay whole crews of people (criminals in my opinion)
- who either drive (by helicopters) whole herds of brumbies into corrals
- by hundreds and thousands, from where they sell them to be turned into
- dog food, or simply shoot them from helicopters. Either method is
- unbelievably cruel.
-
- When they drive them by helicopters, the horses are in such a panic
- and hysteria that many of them stumble or run into trees or rocks
- and break their legs etc. Inside the corrals, where the horses are
- never fed, and on their way to the trucks, the men beat them terribly
- to make them go this way or that. The horses often end up wading in
- their blood on the trucks (standing or lying, because usually the
- trucks are so crowded that the horses can't move at all). The ones
- that fall down with broken limbs during the hunt are simply left alone
- right there to die from hunger or thirst.
-
- When they shoot them from the helicopters, which a lot of the farmers
- prefer, because it's cheaper, the shooters only take care that the
- horses fall down. In most cases the shots don't kill the animals,
- but again hunger or thirst does, or loss of blood for that matter.
-
- The TV crew talked to members of parliament etc. about the whole
- thing -- only to find out that it was considered perfectly legal!
-
- Has anybody here ever heard about this before?
-
- --
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- Rod J. Ring If you can take it to water,
- Institut fuer Informatik and force it to drink,
- Freie Universitaet Berlin, FRG it isn't a horse.
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-