All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

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loomer
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All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

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All the pretty horses and all the damage done
Victoria and NSW are now sharply divided about what should be done to control wild horse numbers in alpine regions.

When the Federal Court last week dismissed an attempt to stop Parks Victoria from culling feral horses in the Alpine National Park, it put the spotlight back on a long and bitter fight in the high country between brumby lovers and environmental scientists.

The fight is far from over. The biggest herds of wild horses are across the border in NSW’s Kosciuszko National Park. And thanks to NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro, wild horses enjoy heritage protection in the state.

But the horses in the Australian Alps - an astonishing 25,000 of them at last count - respect no border and continually drift into Victoria.

Shortly before bushfires swept the mountain country over summer, photographer Joe Armao and I visited the high border country to try to understand the dispute.

We went in search of the source of Australia’s only great river, the Murray, at the best of times no more than a soak on a plain in the wilderness of the Australian Alps.

This day, however, at the intersection of spring and summer, it was elusive.

“I’ve been flying here for 17 years and this is the first time I’ve seen the source to be dry,” announced our helicopter pilot, Col de Pagter, chief pilot and director of HeliSurveys, who’d spent the previous day water-bombing bushfires.
The ruined roof of Australia

We land upon a wide green plain, Cowombat Flat - called by indigenous people Quambat, thought to mean camping place by water - a few hundred metres downstream of the dry soak.

The grass is clipped to the texture of baize on a billiard table. We walk onto dried piles of horse dung and it is clear what had been doing the mowing.

We are 50 metres into Victoria. I go in search of the stream that denotes the NSW-Victorian border, the genesis of the Murray River. It is trashed.

There is a little water to be found in a depression in the shade of trees, but it is not even trickling. It lies in a muddied bog.

Our guide, Acacia Rose, who has lived much of her life in the mountains, surveys the remnants of moss trampled and pugged by horses’ hooves, the edges fouled by manure.

“This is how we celebrate the very start of Australia’s greatest river,” she says. “We’re in a horse paddock.”

Within a few weeks of our visit, the results of an aerial survey by the Australian Alps National Parks Co-operative Management Program, peer-reviewed by world-leading experts, puts the number of feral horses roaming the national parks at 25,000.

The local state MP, outspoken NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro, who has championed brumbies in the mountains to the point of giving them legislative protection, declared in an interview only a few weeks before that he thought 3000 was the correct figure.

Days later, still opposed to any form of shooting program but clearly taken aback by the dramatic growth in horse numbers - doubling in five years - he suggested sterilising the herds. Such a task, snorted critics, would make the Man From Snowy River’s pursuit of a runaway mare look like a pony club picnic.
A fight with water at its heart

A battle is raging in the fastness of the roof of Australia. It is a fierce argument between scientists concerned about ecological destruction by herds of hard-hoofed ferals and those, like Barilaro, who invest brumbies with heritage value.

It is also an argument about the way Australia’s national parks should be run. On this driest of continents, water lies at the heart of the debate.

Around 30 per cent of all the water in the Murray River system comes from the Australian Alps, which cover only 1 per cent of the system’s catchment. In a dry year, the proportion is greater.

The mountains have evolved over many millions of years as giant sponges, slowly and reliably filtering their water catchments right through the year.

The peatlands, bogs and fens absorb the meltwaters of winter snow and the bounty of rainstorms, sleet and hail.

Sphagnum moss plants growing within these systems each hold water amounting to around 20 times their dry weight.

Their sponge-like quality allows reliable trickles of water to become slow-moving streams until eventually they form rivers.

But scientists have spent decades proving that hard-hoofed animals like horses can destroy the moss’ ability to hold water, and thus deny dependable, high-quality supplies to the Murray and the lowlands it serves.

The Murray - up here called the Indi - springs from the south-west of the mountains; the Murrumbidgee from the north. Eventually, way out in the Riverina, the Murrumbidgee flows into the Murray.

The soak at the source of the Indi/Murray ought to be healthy, even in last year’s drought. The mountains through the winter and spring of 2019 had their longest snow season anyone can remember.

“Soil is a living organism,” says Acacia Rose. She learned this at the feet of her father, acclaimed soil conservationist Dr Alec Costin. Costin’s scientific work in the Australian Alps in the 1940s and '50s led to the decision to remove cattle that had been grazed on the Snowy Mountains for generations.

The cattle, he discovered, were degrading the high country and, among other things, disturbing the amount and quality of water flowing to the lowlands. Snowy Hydro engineers - who needed high-quality, unsilted water for their turbines - listened to him, as did those in favour of pristine national parks.

Now, says Costin’s daughter, the population explosion of wild horses is once again squeezing the life out of the mountain soils.
A creature unlike all others

The horses down on the border are shy and skinny, hiding in the forest.

But away to the north of the Snowy Mountains, on a wide stretch of open snowgrass known as the Long Plain, the brumbies rule the landscape.

After a summer of bushfires they are still there, and last week, when our photographer Alex Ellinghausen visited the country outside Kiandra in New South Wales, they could be seen scraping away early snow cover to get at the snowgrass that has already rebounded from the summer’s fires.

No more than a handful of the wily horses are believed to have died or been injured in the fires.

Every few hundred metres there is a stallion and his harem of perhaps a dozen, led by a wise old mare.

The herds are undeniably beautiful. Here, however, is a paradox.

The visual beauty of the horses grazing free in the mountains has won them a legal status in NSW denied to all other feral creatures of the high country. Deer and pigs are shot. Wild dogs are trapped. Foxes are poisoned and rabbits have their warrens dug out.

But feral horses are protected not just by Barilaro’s “Brumbies Bill”, but by sentiment.

It was what fired the unsuccessful legal challenge to culling in the federal court in Victoria.

To many people of the high country, brumbies represent the last visible reminder of a lifestyle taken from them.

Sheep and cattle grazing leases have long gone, cattle stations and homesteads have been resumed, even old towns like Adaminaby and Jindabyne were drowned by the Snowy Hydro scheme and rebuilt elsewhere.

One of the largest developments at the “new” Jindabyne is Nugget’s Crossing, named for a famed local horseman, William “Nugget” Pendergast. His stock whip and leggings remain on public display alongside pictures of him with horse and dogs.

The late Elyne Mitchell’s "Silver Brumby" books, written in the shadow of the Alps near Corryong, Victoria, are still favourites, and above the ski village of Thredbo is Dead Horse Gap, where horses have perished, trapped by snow storms.

The Snowy Mountains without brumbies are unthinkable to many.

But scientists, ecologists and water and soil conservationists contend the horses have been allowed to breed until they have become a pestilence on the land.

Ironically, the scientists who want large-scale culling might have had an ally in Banjo Paterson, author of the stirring “Man From Snowy River”. In a speech in 1930, Paterson spoke of how “in the early days, the wild horses got to be as big a plague as the wallabies and rabbits were in later times”.

“It seems a terrible thing to us nowadays to think of shooting horses wholesale ... but it had to be done,” said Paterson.
Destruction and repair

Geoffrey Hope, an environmental historian, expert on peatlands and Emeritus Professor of Archaeology and Natural History at the Australian National University, leads us past the numerous brumby herds in the northern Snowies to the far reaches of the Long Plain, where the Murrumbidgee takes its spring.

He shows us where the snowgrass along the banks of the young river has been reduced to nearly bare earth. The banks have collapsed in places, pawed to black mud.

The soil is compacted and when Hope tests the water, its pH level indicates large amounts of erosive material.

Horse dung is everywhere, and here and there the shell of a squashed alpine yabby lies on a horse trail between tussocks. Unseen, saw-toothed native rats have had their burrows caved in.

For comparison, Hope leads us to Rocky Valley Creek, where horses have not yet invaded.

Since cattle were removed in the 1950s, the valley has begun to repair itself.

It is becoming a peat bog again, oozing water. Snowgrass tussocks grow thick, ensuring that when snow falls there remains space below for native creatures to scurry and thrive.

“Eventually, this will become a boggy plain again,” says the professor. “It will slow the movement of water and prevent erosion."

Then, looking up at the hill, he says: “Unless something is done to reduce the number of horses, they will come over that hill at some stage, and then all this repair will be reversed."
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Colonial romanticism aside, there is only one legitimate option here, and it's to deal with the horses by hook or by crook. The Australian ecosystems are completely unsuited to horses and cattle - those unfamiliar might like to look at the fact that no hoofed animal called Australia home until us whitefellas turned up with them, and thus, every ecosystem evolved and grew without knowing how to address the damage of a hard hoof - and where they're causing severe damage to multiple ecosystems, there's a responsibility to act. Introduced species - at least, recently introduced ones - fall under the mandate of humans to regulate human affairs as part of the broader ecological community, since we're responsible for their presence, and thus, are the ones responsible for every good and ill they do in the community as their adoptive kin.
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

Post by Jub »

Should the camels also be culled aggressively as well?

Also, just as a broad question, at what point should be just let the ecosystem sort things out? The human-caused culling of biodiversity is only temporary and new species will rush in to fill any gaps we create. We don't objectively harm the ecosystem by our actions unless we damage it to the point where it cannot self-correct and the Earth becomes barren and by all estimates, we couldn't do that if we tried. So is 'fixing' our mistakes and trying to preserve ecosystems as they are something we should focus so much on, or should we accept that changes we cause are as valid as changes that occur 'naturally'?
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

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Jub wrote: 2020-05-17 02:23am Should the camels also be culled aggressively as well?
...
God yes. Bloody plague they are. There's been a couple of surveys that suggest the numbers of wild camels here are greater than those in the middle east. (I'm not 100% certain on the 'middle east geographic area' suggested in the studies, it might just be Saudi Arabia).


I for one am all for culling the herds. It'd be sad to see all the brumbies removed from the Snowy Mountains but there's no reason for them to exist in anything like the numbers they do at the moment if at all. As a horse owner/enthusiast one question I always find lacking is what the current health of the horses is?? People care about the damage being done by the horses but rarely ask about damage to the horses health. Australian alpine grasses are pretty poor sustenance for horses and not much else up there (or named in the OP article) is edible.

20+ years ago when there were the big fights over removing horses from Fraser Island (and other islands I forget the names of) no one stopped to question why all the horses had short lives due to sand impaction [of the stomach] and even when some brumby lovers "rescued" some of the horses before the culls, many still had to be euthanased due to health problems (usually sand impaction of the gut and leg/hoof problems from walking on soft surfaces)
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

Post by loomer »

Jub wrote: 2020-05-17 02:23am Should the camels also be culled aggressively as well?

Also, just as a broad question, at what point should be just let the ecosystem sort things out? The human-caused culling of biodiversity is only temporary and new species will rush in to fill any gaps we create. We don't objectively harm the ecosystem by our actions unless we damage it to the point where it cannot self-correct and the Earth becomes barren and by all estimates, we couldn't do that if we tried. So is 'fixing' our mistakes and trying to preserve ecosystems as they are something we should focus so much on, or should we accept that changes we cause are as valid as changes that occur 'naturally'?
With regards to camels? Yes, because they're an absolute scourge to the ecosystems they've overtaken as well.

As to your second? We let it sort things out when the system isn't being overtaken by a deliberately introduced species that is actively harmful to the dynamics and methods the ecosystem in question has evolved to reach long-period equilibrium and 'sort things out'. The situation you're suggesting will happen here is, bluntly, inapplicable. Brumbies are not filling a gap - they are erasing the entire field. They are not contributing to biodiversity, they are erasing it. They are not a part of the ecosystem, they are a foreign introduction that will remain outside of that system until such a time as it collapses and a new one emerges from the ruins.

Further, all ecosystems are systems produced by human interactions with other species. There is no divide between natural and human in this respect, except insofar as humans have a rather dire propensity to introduce things that run rampant and eradicate the stability of systems over the long haul, while non-human processes tend to be somewhat slower in terms of species spread as horses have yet to develop sailboats. Now, given that those mistakes are human-authored ones that interact with collaborative ecosystems authored by both humans and other species, they are the proper domain of human actions to correct, especially before they hit tipping points at which the new ecosystem is inevitably going to replace the old.

Also, your notion that because we cannot eradicate life completely we cannot 'objectively harm ecosystems' is complete tosh, and proof you are yet again talking shit about a subject you have no understanding of. There is a vast planetary ecosystem that will endure almost anything we can throw it at, yes - but this system is comprised of many regional and subregional systems, all of which are provably impacted by human actions. This impact can be provably negative over the short-to-medium terms (in geological terms) - for instance, the introduction of microplastics into the oceans. So to say 'hey, we don't need to try and be mindful of our actions and preserve biodiversity because we can't really damage anything' is utter nonsense. We actually can damage systems (protip: the systems that evolve to repair the damage must needs be different from the ones we damaged in the first place, so the evolution of new systems is not proof that the old were not damaged or harmed) through careless action or even careful action, and we have the capacity (and with it, the responsibility) to consider whether damage to a system is acceptable or not. Your proposal that any and all changes to vast multi-species systems authored by humans alone should be considered valid abdicates human responsibility for our actions and responsibility to the rest of the system and indeed, to ourselves, to act carefully with the tools at our disposal.

Since I suspect you're just posting on your lunch break to amuse yourself again, and I have no desire to get drawn into another of your bad faith bullshit debates, I won't be offering further responses to you.
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

Post by loomer »

The_Saint wrote: 2020-05-17 03:29am
Jub wrote: 2020-05-17 02:23am Should the camels also be culled aggressively as well?
...
God yes. Bloody plague they are. There's been a couple of surveys that suggest the numbers of wild camels here are greater than those in the middle east. (I'm not 100% certain on the 'middle east geographic area' suggested in the studies, it might just be Saudi Arabia).


I for one am all for culling the herds. It'd be sad to see all the brumbies removed from the Snowy Mountains but there's no reason for them to exist in anything like the numbers they do at the moment if at all. As a horse owner/enthusiast one question I always find lacking is what the current health of the horses is?? People care about the damage being done by the horses but rarely ask about damage to the horses health. Australian alpine grasses are pretty poor sustenance for horses and not much else up there (or named in the OP article) is edible.

20+ years ago when there were the big fights over removing horses from Fraser Island (and other islands I forget the names of) no one stopped to question why all the horses had short lives due to sand impaction [of the stomach] and even when some brumby lovers "rescued" some of the horses before the culls, many still had to be euthanased due to health problems (usually sand impaction of the gut and leg/hoof problems from walking on soft surfaces)
Yeah, that's one of the most grotesque elements of horse protection. It's protecting a romantic dream and not the actual wellbeing of the horses. The brumbies all have huge incidence rates of chronic laminitis and other problems. It's as though existing in an ecosystem that didn't evolve with you in it sucks for everyone involved, or something.
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

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Jub wrote: 2020-05-17 02:23am ...
Also, just as a broad question, at what point should be just let the ecosystem sort things out? The human-caused culling of biodiversity is only temporary and new species will rush in to fill any gaps we create. We don't objectively harm the ecosystem by our actions unless we damage it to the point where it cannot self-correct and the Earth becomes barren and by all estimates, we couldn't do that if we tried. So is 'fixing' our mistakes and trying to preserve ecosystems as they are something we should focus so much on, or should we accept that changes we cause are as valid as changes that occur 'naturally'?
To give this question it's due...

When the cattle were removed from the highlands one of the arguments being drummed up by the greens was that in one area there was some rare highland plant that was being trampled by the cattle.
After the cattle were removed a bushfire went through the same area and wiped out the endangered plant as the grasses had grown [without the cattle constantly mowing it, they didn't eat whatever plant this was] to a level that meant the bushfire was far more intensive on that landscape than it would have with less vegetation.

Did it turn out that the cattle were actually protecting that particular plant species rather than endanger it like was claimed: yes. Is looking at a single facet of the problem rather than the sum total of damage done by all causes a bad idea: also yes.

If we truly want something to be "wild" and untouched we have to limit ourselves to only that direct influence that undoes whatever indirect influence we create.
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

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loomer wrote: 2020-05-17 03:55amAs to your second? We let it sort things out when the system isn't being overtaken by a deliberately introduced species that is actively harmful to the dynamics and methods the ecosystem in question has evolved to reach long-period equilibrium and 'sort things out'. The situation you're suggesting will happen here is, bluntly, inapplicable. Brumbies are not filling a gap - they are erasing the entire field. They are not contributing to biodiversity, they are erasing it. They are not a part of the ecosystem, they are a foreign introduction that will remain outside of that system until such a time as it collapses and a new one emerges from the ruins.
You act as if there have never been non-human caused invasive species which have taken over ecological niches and forced change and that is entirely false. Look up rafting and you'll find tons of examples of species crossing entire oceans and settling in new and exciting places and greatly impacting them.
Further, all ecosystems are systems produced by human interactions with other species.
So there were no ecosystems before the evolution of the modern human?
There is no divide between natural and human in this respect, except insofar as humans have a rather dire propensity to introduce things that run rampant and eradicate the stability of systems over the long haul, while non-human processes tend to be somewhat slower in terms of species spread as horses have yet to develop sailboats.
Again, species have rafted places, swam shallow seas, and crosses sandbars and landbridges before. That all created sudden change creating the world we evolved in. We do it more often and faster than has happened before but there's nothing to suggest that evolution, both the rapid and long term sorts, won't settle into a new balance in the future.
Now, given that those mistakes are human-authored ones that interact with collaborative ecosystems authored by both humans and other species, they are the proper domain of human actions to correct, especially before they hit tipping points at which the new ecosystem is inevitably going to replace the old.
Why does the old ecosystem have any more value than the new one? Beyond human survival and biodiversity, which has always fluctuated throughout the eons, I see very little difference between two ecosystems. Both will ebb and flow and change, it's stupid to assume that we can act to freeze ecosystems in our own assumption of balance.
Also, your notion that because we cannot eradicate life completely we cannot 'objectively harm ecosystems' is complete tosh, and proof you are yet again talking shit about a subject you have no understanding of. There is a vast planetary ecosystem that will endure almost anything we can throw it at, yes - but this system is comprised of many regional and subregional systems, all of which are provably impacted by human actions.
Of course, we impact ecosystems, but so can non-intelligent algae, volcanos, and all manner of other things that happen for reasons entirely unrelated to humans. The planetary biosphere has survived all such events and will survive anything and everything we can possibly throw at it. Regional and subregional ecosystems are inherently transitory and will inevitably change, spread, collapse, hit bottlenecks, and become unrecognizable. Why should it bother us that this happens or that our actions cause this?
This impact can be provably negative over the short-to-medium terms (in geological terms) - for instance, the introduction of microplastics into the oceans.
Microplastics may or may not be a long term problem, there is some evidence to suggest that they can either sink to the ocean floor or breakdown faster than we expect them to. Regardless, how is the introduction of microplastics any worse than the massive algal blooms that happened after plants first made the leap to land and eroded rocks leading to which killed most complex life on the planet? Life survived that and plastic is not even close to that level of threat.
So to say 'hey, we don't need to try and be mindful of our actions and preserve biodiversity because we can't really damage anything' is utter nonsense. We actually can damage systems (protip: the systems that evolve to repair the damage must needs be different from the ones we damaged in the first place, so the evolution of new systems is not proof that the old were not damaged or harmed)
No shit. My point is that change is inevitable, so why not watch what happens rather than attempt to undo the consequences of our actions? That is, aside from taking action to ensure that we survive because the point of life is to be selfish and to continue the line for as long as possible.
Your proposal that any and all changes to vast multi-species systems authored by humans alone should be considered valid abdicates human responsibility for our actions and responsibility to the rest of the system and indeed, to ourselves, to act carefully with the tools at our disposal.
The worst we can do is cause our own extinction and if that happens what in the entire universe will care?
The_Saint wrote: 2020-05-17 06:45pmIf we truly want something to be "wild" and untouched we have to limit ourselves to only that direct influence that undoes whatever indirect influence we create.
What if one doesn't care about wild and untouched and only draws the line at human survival?
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

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Jub wrote: 2020-05-17 07:11pm
The_Saint wrote: 2020-05-17 06:45pmIf we truly want something to be "wild" and untouched we have to limit ourselves to only that direct influence that undoes whatever indirect influence we create.
What if one doesn't care about wild and untouched and only draws the line at human survival?
Then let's flatten the lot, concrete it over and get cracking on the hydroponics. If we're all about survival we don't need any art galleries and museums as well so there's some inner city real estate for vertical farming with short transportation requirements.
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

Post by Ziggy Stardust »

Dude, Jub, you do realize your argument is literally functionally equivalent to the dumb generic argument used by climate change deniers: "Climate change isn't a big deal! The climate has changed before"? It's stupid when they say it, and it's stupid when you say it.

If you want to make a nihilist point that none of it matters, that's fine (still stupid, but fine, it's your prerogative to be a nihilist). But don't try to couch this in ecological and evolutionary terms that you don't even remotely understand. There is absolutely NO biological, ecological, or evolutionary science basis for the statements you are making, and anyone with even a remote, basic education in those fields would disagree with your 19th-century level understanding of how science and biology operate.

You might as well say, "Well BIRDS migrate between continents just fine, so clearly any environment in any situation will be able to handle a sudden massive traumatic shock and come out just fine!"

You are picking cherries, mistaking them for apples, and then trying to compare them to oranges. It is almost impressive how significantly you have managed to be wrong at every stop of your "thought" process.
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

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The_Saint wrote: 2020-05-17 08:56pmThen let's flatten the lot, concrete it over and get cracking on the hydroponics. If we're all about survival we don't need any art galleries and museums as well so there's some inner city real estate for vertical farming with short transportation requirements.
We can start bulldozing the single-family detached homes - I propose we start with any nonfarming property on more than an acre - and putting up modular apartment complexes while we're at it. Then we put the hammer down on getting permanent colonies in space, and once we've got living in space down we can leave the Earth as a nature reservation until the sun burns out.
Ziggy Stardust wrote: 2020-05-18 09:46am Dude, Jub, you do realize your argument is literally functionally equivalent to the dumb generic argument used by climate change deniers: "Climate change isn't a big deal! The climate has changed before"? It's stupid when they say it, and it's stupid when you say it.
Human-caused climate change is only a big deal because it has the potential to cause humanity major issues. If it didn't risk our extinction, in a way plastics and invasive species likely can't, I doubt many of us would care.
If you want to make a nihilist point that none of it matters, that's fine (still stupid, but fine, it's your prerogative to be a nihilist). But don't try to couch this in ecological and evolutionary terms that you don't even remotely understand. There is absolutely NO biological, ecological, or evolutionary science basis for the statements you are making, and anyone with even a remote, basic education in those fields would disagree with your 19th-century level understanding of how science and biology operate.
My take is that we should focus on moving away from this rock and living among the solar system ASAP. If we don't do that sooner than later we'll eventually fall to something be that climate change, a supervolcano, solar flare, ocean-spanning algal bloom, etc. To that end, once we leave the planet will have the rest of its existence to recover from what we've done. If we don't do it we're likely to be extinct in another million years or so anyway.
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

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Aw, you pussied out and edited out your post that you're in favour of bulldozing the entire planet.
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

Post by LadyTevar »

loomer wrote: 2020-05-18 12:01pm Aw, you pussied out and edited out your post that you're in favour of bulldozing the entire planet.
Loomer, WTF?
I just went through Jub's posts, and NONE of them have been Edited. So, don't make accusations that aren't true.
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Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

Post by loomer »

LadyTevar wrote: 2020-05-19 11:34pm
loomer wrote: 2020-05-18 12:01pm Aw, you pussied out and edited out your post that you're in favour of bulldozing the entire planet.
Loomer, WTF?
I just went through Jub's posts, and NONE of them have been Edited. So, don't make accusations that aren't true.
Well, that's troubling, because I could swear to it. But it was also the night I wound up talking to invisible people to try and escape the pain, so I guess I was hallucinating more than just invisible people. Mea culpa, Jub.
"Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too—ready to understand heaven and earth. In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them. Nothing earthly succeeds by ignoring heaven, nothing heavenly by ignoring the earth." M.A.A.A
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Jub
Sith Marauder
Posts: 4396
Joined: 2012-08-06 07:58pm
Location: British Columbia, Canada

Re: All the pretty horses and all the damage done: Culling Brumbies?

Post by Jub »

loomer wrote: 2020-05-20 03:09amWell, that's troubling, because I could swear to it. But it was also the night I wound up talking to invisible people to try and escape the pain, so I guess I was hallucinating more than just invisible people. Mea culpa, Jub.
I won't pretend I've never misread something and typed word's I'd later regret based on my own misreading. Nor are you the type to go out of your way to lie about people. So your apology is accepted.

I only got a mod in because it saved a pointless argument.

Furthermore, even if we disagree on things, I'm certain you generally make your part of the world a better place so in spite of anything said in a debate I'm happy to see you posting here. You're the kind of poster who's well thought out posts about things they're an expert on can actually change minds. I wish we had a board full of posters who could do that.
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