So. Last week, we reported that Albertan researchers were tracking the feeding patterns of wolves, only to discover that they eat a substantial amount of cattle. Well, not to be outdone, their Victorian brethren on the other side of the globe decided to conduct a very similar research program, but from the other perspective: they were to track the cattle.
Everything was well and good. The government introduced the cattle to the Alpine National Park grazing trail, stating that they had been put into the park solely to test this technology. As it turns out, however, not a single one of the 400 cattle released into the park for this program had been outfitted with any tracking devices, let alone GPS tracking devices.
Oops.
The Victorian government, in lovely bureaucratic jargon, said that the decision not to put any GPS tracking devices on the cattle was part of its “adaptive management approach” to the study. However, others remain skeptical; after all, the entire purpose of putting the cattle in the field was to track them with GPS. Victorian Argonomist Harm van Rees believes that tracking cattle is crucial when it comes to understanding their impact on the environment, according to the Victorian Weekly Times.
If the GPS tracking study is ever performed, it will be to determine the effect of cattle on the environment, particularly in regards to the propensity of brush fires to start in regions. This is particularly relevant for the Australian province of Victoria, as it was recently hit by a strong series of brush fires.
What do you think? Why did the government drop the ball when outfitting the cattle with the GPS tracking devices? Was it really in order to take an “adaptive management approach”? Or, was that simply an excuse?
It was never about science, just politicaly motivated to please the cattlemen that payed almost 50,000 dollars to the local MP and campained to remove the independant MP, the state premier’s brother in law is part of the mountain cattlemens association and was employed by his brother in law to be an advisor to government, the victorian government has been found to bribe an Australian university with threats to withdraw funding, 150 of Australias top scientists have signed a document raising concerns about the integrity of the trial, only farmers with access to near free feed are for this, farmers that work hard to obey environmental laws and control the impacts to land and environment are against this backward land management practice, Australias peak research body (CSIRO)have conducted 50 years of reserch into fire mitigation though cattle grazing and have found no evidence that cattle grazing reduces the intensity of bush fires. In Australia we compare it to Japanese “scientific research” whaling, it a scary country to live in when you have government like this.