If we are spending nearly half a million dollars a year on protecting bird species in the area, but then allow their environment to be trashed, it’s like using a Band-Aid on an arterial bleed.

The second gold star for anti-conservational decisions goes to the heritage listing for the wild horses in the area around Mount Kosciuszko. Despite there being countless endangered species under threat from the trampling hooves, culling has been ruled out on the NSW side, making any active reductions on the Victoria and the ACT’s sides far less effective; horses take no notice of state borders.

It is staggering that governments still cannot agree and continue to ignore scientific advice. Just because the Alpine buttercup is small and easy to overlook, it doesn’t mean we should.

Two different scenarios, but the same impact. The trouble with history is that often the bad or thoughtless actions of those who have come first mean that later generations have to mitigate the damage. Tough and unpleasant decisions have to be made, but in these cases the decisions have to be made in favour of wildlife. And wild horses are not wildlife.

Banjo Paterson’s poem iconised what is essentially a weed. Brumbies were not here before white people arrived, but instead join the glorious list of introduced species who have thrived in the beautiful Australian wilderness. A wilderness that does not cope with hooved animals, either in the Kosciuszko Park or along our fragile coastal dunes near Warrnambool.

If horse trainers and The Man from Snowy River lovers jump up and down about access rights, we cannot just give in; too many of our Australian animals have already quietly disappeared to let this continue wilfully.

Sorry hooded plover, Alpine buttercup and orange-bellied parrot, you were beautiful and we pretended to care, but the horses have an actual human voice backed up by money. Horses 1, wildlife 0. Which is exactly the number that will be left in the not too distant future unless we make big changes, right now.

I like horses (especially in paddocks and gymkhana rings), but I like native animals more and I think they need to be given absolute priority in any decision-making process.

Rehousing the brumbies is ideal, but impractical as a sole method. Culling is never a pleasant idea, but it is a necessary part of managing populations of things that are living where they shouldn’t be.

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Few people baulk at spraying blackberries, shooting rabbits or baiting foxes, and brumbies fall into the same category of feral animals that live in the Kosciuszko Park. We owe it to the remaining wildlife to attempt to reverse the destruction we have unthinkingly released over the past 230 years.

Wild horses have been romanticised in our literature and film. Even the name brumbies sounds infinitely more marketable than hooded plover, shining cudweed or pygmy possum. Dammit, maybe we need to sex up the names of Australia’s wild things to engender a sense of marketability and national pride. That and we need Mr Patterson to rise from the dead and pen another poem - and this time maybe the word could get around that by favouring the colt from old Regret, it will lead to regrets on a far grander scale for the entire nation.

End note: On behalf of a very insistent Polish friend, I am compelled to advise that most of us mispronounce Kosciuszko (and probably would spell it incorrectly without spellchecker) - it is not koz-ee-os-co, but instead koz-OOOSH-koh.

Nicola Philp is a Fairfax Media columnist.