Australia's feral horse population, called brumbies, are controversial animals whose management divides conservation and animal welfare communities.
Brumbies in aerial culling programs experience fear from helicopter pursuit and may receive non-lethal wounds when shots are not perfectly placed from moving aircraft. Trap-and-remove programs cause stress during capture and transport. The welfare tension between individual horses and the ecological communities they damage is genuine. High populations cause ecosystem degradation that harms native wildlife. Humane culling with best practice marksmanship causes less suffering than slow starvation from ecosystem collapse.