Population Control for Dartmoor Ponies

It is not often that one encounters a problem related to the need to control animal populations in the world today. It is more frequently reported that a certain species of animal is faced with extinction all on account of human activity or demand for products of that animal. Tracy McVeigh of the Guardian reports here that the Dartmoor ponies in the UK have been over breeding and the authorities have designed a mechanism for birth control among the female animals in order to control their numbers. This is an elaborate system driven by a solution based on biology to reduce fertility and maintain numbers. It would be interesting to see how it works over the period of its implementation.

No doubt this approach will have some effect but my concern is that the story does not mention whether this was considered the most cost effective means for the identified problem. As I stated in a blog post a while ago, Australia had the same problem with its camel population and chose to shoot them from the air.  In both cases, my concern was that a solution was predetermined and there is no information whether the alternatives were chosen on the basis of cost effectiveness or merely because these were the methods that were most attractive to the decision makers. The question remains whether there may have been better solutions that were not considered.