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'Cattle' romp through Melbourne's heritage icons

Tuesday, 22 March 2011

Media release

A herd of four life-sized cow puppets visited Melbourne's heritage icons today, including Parliament House and the Royal Exhibition Building, as environment groups ramped up calls for the Baillieu Government to abandon its six-year cattle grazing trial in the heritage-listed Alpine National Park.

"Federal environment minister Tony Burke's decision last Friday to use his powers to call-in the grazing trial shows that the Victorian Government is acting in defiance of national environmental laws," said the Wilderness Society's Victorian campaigns manager Luke Chamberlain today.

"The grazing trial has been shown to be scientifically flawed, politically motivated and potentially illegal under national environmental laws.

 

See photos from today's event, with cattle romping around Melbourne's heritage-listed icons.

'Cattle' grazed the streets of Melbourne today, visiting some of the city's best-known heritage sites. See all the action on our Facebook photo album.

"In just a couple of months the cattle have already trampled endangered alpine wetlands and damaged the habitat of rare plants and animals - they should never have been there in the first place."

The Victorian National Parks Association's executive director Matt Ruchel warned that unless the trials were completely abandoned cattle would be back in the Alpine National Park next summer.

"The cattle must be removed once and for all and the long-term trial in the national park abandoned completely, otherwise the cattle will be simply put back in next summer," he said.

Four hundred cattle were returned to the Alpine National Park in early January as the first stage in a six year study that has been widely criticised by the scientific community and compared to Japan's 'scientific whaling' program.

Environment groups also criticised the State Government for trying to dress up cattle grazing as a key fire prevention tool.

"The Black Saturday Bushfires Royal Commission did not recommend the return of grazing for fire management as one of its 10 research priorities," Mr Ruchel said.

"Alpine cattle grazing is taking effort and resources away from other more important bushfire research."

A public meeting on alpine cattle grazing will be held on 6 April, 7pm at the Box Hill Town Hall.

For comment

  • Matt Ruchel, VNPA Executive Director - 0418 357 813.
  • Luke Chamberlain, TWS Campaigns Manager - 0424 098 729.