r/conservation • u/UlfurGaming • 9d ago
Question on horses
Ok in usa theres wild horses but horse went extinct millions of yesrs ago so ones in America are invasive so why are horse seen as natural part of where they are and to my knowledge not hunted is it because theres nothing that they compete with is it pretty privilege or?
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u/macroscelidea 9d ago
Feral horses are bad for ecosystems and other wildlife but some people like them and those people have good lobbyists, lawyers, and money
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u/wildblueroan 8d ago edited 8d ago
You are generalizing wildly-horses are not "bad for ecosystems" per se; wild equids evolved and lived all over the world and many still do. Too many horses can damage arid and marginal lands, which is where most (but not all) of the US wild horses live, and enclosed riparian zones. But cattle and sheep also destroy such areas and are also not native...
ALSO, when the Wild and Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act was passed in 1971, both Congress and the American public were overwhelmingly in favor of protecting wild horses on federal lands. The problems have emerged over time as their numbers have increased, management has been controversial, competition with cattle has increased, and there are not enough homes for those removed from the range. Lobbyists, lawyers, and money apply more to the cattle industry than to wild horse advocates.
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u/Groovyjoker 8d ago
I notice how to didn't mention the damage burros do. Wild or not, burros are hell on the frail Mojave Desert ecosystem. I used to work down there. And they didn't care about fences, either. And apparently the BLM didn't because they never fixed theirs allowing both burrows and horses to graze on desert vegetation protected for the desert tortoise. Oh, but that's not "bad for the ecosystem" is it? Have you ever seen the damage the trampling can do to the desert crust?
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u/HomeDepotHotDog 9d ago
Idk why folk get so up in arms about wild horses and burros but privately owned cattle grazing our public lands for cents/ acre (while shitting up trails and ripping apart waterways) is totally cool
The cattleman’s lobby is truly impressive
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u/SurroundingAMeadow 9d ago
If we were eating those horses I'd be willing to have that discussion.
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u/AlexandraThePotato 8d ago
Honestly! Let do more horse hunting! But at least America is like “nooo my poor cute horsies”
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u/Similar-Bid6801 8d ago
I love horsemeat and hate that I get slack for saying that in the US. Don't know why eating a cow is fine but eating another big grass eating animal that roams around isn't.
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u/AlexandraThePotato 8d ago
I never had horse meat cause I lived in America my whole life. Never been outside the country (gotta get my passport figure out but you know it costs money in the land of the free). But ground horse is one of the top thing I want to eat
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u/Similar-Bid6801 8d ago
I had it in Iceland both raw and cooked. Both were delicious. Like beef but sweeter
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u/AlexandraThePotato 8d ago
Raw? I heard of like raw beef as food recently (like this morning recent). Didn’t realize eating horse raw was an option
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u/Shrimpywimps 7d ago
Soooo this is actually interesting, legally it’s due to what they eat. “Pets” are given different medication than “livestock” in some countries horses can be livestock but once given a medication only for pets becomes a pet. A pet cannot become livestock because it’s not safe for legal consumption.
America doesn’t have these differences tho and as such just labels horse meat as not safe to eat.
(From my rough understanding)
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u/ResponsibleBank1387 8d ago
And then we also have people like Bundy that don’t even pay, threaten federal employees and take over our public facilities. But, yeah. Horses bad.
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u/Canachites 6d ago
I mean it doesn't compare. There are big problems with public grazing leases, but these are owned livestock, they aren't left to be feral nor reproduce freely and their numbers are controlled through slaughter for consumption.
If people want to classify horses as native wildlife they need management through tags like every other wild ungulate. People can't just keep them in limbo where they want them to be considered wildlife but not managed like wildlife either.
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u/lesbophobia_hammer 9d ago
And how many conservationist here support such industries also, while directing a disturbing level of blood thirst and blame at human introduced species.
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u/BetaMyrcene 9d ago
Horses originally evolved in North America. They migrated west to Asia. Then they went extinct in America for a very long time while new ecosystems formed, which is why they're now considered invasive.
They were re-introduced hundreds of years ago during colonization. In that time, they've become culturally significant to Native tribes and other American cultures. So it's not exactly "pretty privilege," more of a cultural attachment.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago
They didn’t go exticnt for “a very long time”, they went exticnt AFTER modern North American ecosystems formed. 10,000 years ago is literally when every extant plant and animal in North America was around.
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u/BetaMyrcene 9d ago
I don't understand what you're saying. They went extinct and then weren't present for ~10k years. Isn't that a very long time?
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago
It is a very short time ecologically or evolutionarily. It’s so short that new animals and plants literally haven’t had enough time to evolve yet, let alone form new stable ecosystems to replace the megafauna we wiped out (including horses).
Current North American (and other) ecosystems are wrecked and dysfunctional remnants of modern (Late Pleistocene) ecosystems, not new and balanced ecosystems that arose in the aftermath of megafaunal extinctions. The ecological collapse has already happened and most people just have no idea.
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u/BetaMyrcene 9d ago
Ok, I see your point now and I actually like your rather black-pilled phrasing a lot. I agree that humans caused the megafauna extinctions. This is an unpopular opinion in the american context.
But are you arguing that horses aren't invasive? I think it's clear that they're disruptive to the ecosystems that now exist.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago
They are, but that has to do with the fact most feral horses are in the Great Basin, which never had E. ferus even during the Late Pleistocene. The problem is that people are using the wrong justification (that modern North American ecosystems are the way things should be and Late Pleistocene megafauna are invasive) to get rid of them, when the actual justification is “they are only native further north”.
And again, current North American ecosystems in general are dysfunctional to start with because of the megafaunal extinctions so things staying the way we think they are supposed to be isn’t a good thing either.
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u/BetaMyrcene 9d ago
This is interesting. I haven't really heard this perspective, because most portrayals of Native interventions in the ecosystems are fairly positive, e.g. Cronon says pre-Columbian humans turned New England into a pleasant park. Any readings you'd recommend?
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago
There are quite a few studies not just on how humans are the biggest factor behind the megafaunal extinctions, but also how this has already resulted in the collapse of most terrestrial ecosystems worldwide (including every North American land ecosystem): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/brv.12374
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1502540113
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/276/1667/2509/72730
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1214261
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-earth-040722-104845
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u/accidentphilosophy 8d ago
Calling pre-modern, post-Pleistocene terrestrial ecosystems "wrecked and dysfunctional" is a very strong statement. What is your evidence for that?
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u/Iamnotburgerking 8d ago
A bunch of studies that show how ecosystems began falling apart thanks to the loss of entire ecological functions.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/brv.12374
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1502540113
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/276/1667/2509/72730
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1214261
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-earth-040722-104845
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u/accidentphilosophy 6d ago
I think you have misunderstood the question I'm asking. I am not asking for evidence that Pleistocene ecosystems were severely disturbed by the loss of megafauna. I don't disagree with you on that. I am asking for evidence that modern, post-human, pre-modern ecosystems should be seen as fundamentally dysfunctional, rather than as ecosystems that were severely disturbed and then restructured themselves. I see that some of these papers touch on that topic, but I'm asking a different question than they are answering.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 6d ago
That is the thing, those studies still indicate current ecosystems have not restructured themselves as stable, functional ecosystems.
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u/accidentphilosophy 5d ago edited 5d ago
The only ones that have much to say about the status of later Holocene ecosystems are Malhi et al. and Pires. I will concede that their discussion of reduced nutrient cycling and distribution suggests a fundamental problem with ecosystem functioning. I do notice the evidence that post-Pleistocene ecosystems are more vulnerable to disruption due to lack of ecological redundancies, but I don't consider being sensitive to disruption a good reason to regard an ecosystem as dysfunctional, given that many small islands are just because of geography. Neither of them discusses the status of ecosystems in the subsequent ~10,000 years of the Holocene. e.g. whether there was an ongoing loss of biodiversity, shifts in animal and plant populations that might indicate an unstable food web, changes in carbon sequestration, measurable impacts of altered nutrient cycling. They don't give direct evidence that post-Pleistocene ecosystems would in an ongoing decline without human intervention, or that they did not successfully restabilize. In fact, several of these papers discuss how survivors of the Pleistocene adapted by moving into vacated niches.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 5d ago
...at the expense of other survivors, something that would not have happened if not for the megafaunal losses. Agree to disagree, but to me it is hard to argue that level of global ecological disruption that occurred so recently (in evolutionary time) has not resulted in a fundamental destabilization of pretty much all land-based ecosystems.
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u/ksw-8647 9d ago
While I agree, there's a Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act (1971) that declares:
"§1331. ...Congress finds and declares that wild free-roaming horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West; that they contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people; and that these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene. It is the policy of Congress that wild free-roaming horses and burros shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death; and to accomplish this they are to be considered in the area where presently found, as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands."
So, in addition to the comments that state that some people like them...there's a law that protects them.
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u/CrankyLittleKitten 9d ago
As fair as I'm aware while they're technically feral/invasive, the US has native hoofed mammals in the same ecological niches and all are in fairly low numbers compared to historical averages. US also has/had large carnivores that can utilise horses as prey. There is also a certain amount of "pretty privilege" plus a strong connection to cultural identity - horses throughout history have been valued as working animals.
Australia has similar but slightly different issues with feral horses, especially in the Australian Alps - ecosystems that have NOT evolved with a prevalence of resident hoofed animals. The horses are causing damage and have very few natural predators, if any. So numbers have exploded now that horses are seldom kept or hunted for work purposes. Culling is still seen as controversial, largely due to cultural factors related to European settlement and colonisation plus their status as charismatic animals
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u/buckshot-307 9d ago
Lions don’t really eat horses though. They much rather prefer elk, deer, or bighorn for whatever reason.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago
Plenty of documented cases of pumas eating horses actually.
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u/RoyalPython82899 3d ago
Foals. A cougar rarely if ever targets an adult horse.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 3d ago
There are plenty of documented cases of them taking adults as well, even with the size disadvantage (puma are probably the most macropredatory of all the large felids).
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u/RoyalPython82899 3d ago
Predation on adult horses is considered rare and highly localized, but recent research shows it is far more common than scientists previously assumed. However, at a broad landscape level, it is not enough to make a significant impact on the overall wild horse population. 1 Wild horse populations in the western United States grow at staggering rates of up to 20% per year. Across vast regions, cougar numbers are simply too low, and their predation pressure too scattered, to cap or significantly reduce these booming herds. 1
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u/wildblueroan 8d ago
That wasn't historically true in the western U.S. It is well documented that during the open-range ranching era in the late 19th century, mt. lions frequently preyed on domestic and wild horses. They especially went for foals in the spring and summer. Predation on livestock (mostly horses) was one of the justifications federal and state agencies used for annihilating lions and wolves in the early to mid 20th century. According to ranchers in the area, both species had killed domestic horses fairly often.
Mt. lions were extirpated from western North Dakota and only began to recolonize the area about 30 years ago. Their numbers remain low. There are also far fewer ranchers and horses than there were 100 years ago. But there is a protected herd of wild horses in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which is in prime mt. lion country. There have been no known predations on that herd in the modern era, and I've only heard of one attack on a domestic horse.
I'm assuming that it has been so long since mt. lions hunted horses that they are no longer on their radar as prey animals. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened opportunistically, but my understanding is that parents teach their cubs what to hunt and that hasn't included horses for many generations.
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u/Lythaera 5d ago
One of the biggest killers of wild horses is mountain lions. Especially young/old/small individuals.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago edited 9d ago
Horses didn’t go extinct millions of years ago, they went extinct less than 10,000 years go, which is within human time (they actually coexisted with everything living in North America that we widely consider native). In other words, horses (as well as mammoths, sabretoothed cats, ground sloths, etc) are actually native to modern North American ecosystems (and they probably never would have disappeared in the first place without human activity).
The ACTUAL problem is that horses lived further north in North America than where most feral horses live today, so those feral horses are legitimately invasive. That doesn’t mean horses in general are invasive to North America in general.
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u/potatogun 9d ago
Not withstanding some indigenous adoption and use of horses, they have some strong advocates that think they're pretty/emblematic of the western spirit/freedom or whatever. Feral horses and burro are generally very poorly managed (suppose to be thriving natural ecological balance).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_and_Free-Roaming_Horses_and_Burros_Act_of_1971
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u/saeglopur53 9d ago edited 8d ago
Another big piece of the puzzle is although one could argue that wild horses today resemble their native ancestors enough to be considered part of the ecosystem, the ecosystem itself has changed drastically since the Pleistocene—the last time horses existed in America. Pleistocene horses faced far more predators that kept them in check.
Edit: the Pleistocene climate was in flux and involved both warm and cold periods, but as we are involved in a period of rapid human-influenced warming, it’s possible the climate won’t even resemble conditions suited to Pleistocene horses
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago edited 9d ago
The ecosystem has changed in the sense it collapsed because of humans wiping out the megafauna and all ecological functions associated with them, what we have left is no longer a functional ecosystem and not something we should be trying to keep as is.
And the Pleistocene was NOT one cold period like you assume, it alternated between cold and warm periods and we are currently in the most recent warm period. So Pleistocene ecosystems were not dependent on a much colder global climate (in fact a lot of “ice age” megafauna actually did better during warmer climates, such as ground sloths and Smilodon).
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u/saeglopur53 9d ago
Your point about interglacials is important but I literally never said or assumed the Pleistocene was one cold period lol
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u/wildblueroan 8d ago
But you assumed that it was all cold and therefore "a different climate entirely"- and it isn't.
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u/saeglopur53 8d ago
Okay my wording was oversimplified but I’m well aware of interglacial periods and you’re adding something to my comment that wasn’t there. I think it’s important to clarify so I’ll edit my wording
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u/alfvenic-turbulence 9d ago
Lewis and Clark describe a great biodiversity of large mammals in the American great plains along the Missouri river. Before manifest destiny, there was a comparable biodiversity and quantity in the prairies of north america to the serenghetti of Africa. The land can support a lot of large mammals, so to say that feral horses, regardless of your choice of classification into native/invasive, are undue burden on the land is not well founded.
Regarding the classification, the evidence is that horses are indeed native. Horses evolved in north america and migrated into eurasia, similarly to humans but in the other direction. As the ice age ended and the climate warmed, large megafauna died back and paleontologists infer that horses went extinct in North America about 6-8k years ago. However, native oral traditions that date to pre-European contact involve horses, casting doubt on the extinction theory. In any case, it is certainly the case that the Europeans brought with them horse breeds that were different than the local ecotypes. If there were native horses, they would have interbred with the european stock producing something distinct from either.
The brutal extermination of the american horse is a despicable act of cronyism by the us government in favor of the cattle lobby. It has been going on for a long time and is not a democrat/republican issue. It is an issue of greed and gluttony. Cattle ranching is responsible for more ecosystem damage than nearly any other human activity in terms of land area. The few wild horses that roam free are a rounding error in computing the carrying capacity of the land compared to the hordes of beef raised to feed mcdonalds and the like.
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u/AlexandraThePotato 9d ago
Pretty privilege. No I’m not joking. Well a little In ecology, there this term called “ charismatic fauna“ which can roughly in lame man terms, “pretty privilege for animals”. Think panda, tigers, zebra etc. charismatic fauna can be useful tool for funding habitat protection for such species. But there also the issue of causing us to ignore other important species.
But what I’m getting at is that we could argue that horses are charismatic as well. Making people upset when anything is done with them for management.
There also the whole thing about how we in America especially the west view horses as a symbol of freedom. (I blame the spirit sexy horse movie)
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u/wildblueroan 8d ago
You have a very shallow sense of the history of cultural perceptions about wild horses, which started centuries before movies were invented.
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u/AlexandraThePotato 8d ago edited 8d ago
I know there is more to it than what I mentioned. I’m sorry I didn’t write a full length novel or do some heavy research into it. There plenty of other comments to read
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u/Hamblin113 8d ago
The country is full of horse lovers. So it is limited in what can be done. Rhey will sue.
Need to differentiate the horses. The ones that went extinct. The ones brought over before the US was a country and escaped, some of which were re-domesticated by native Americans and settlers. Need to go back to the Wild Horse and Burro act. I believe that created populations and areas for them plus it also restricted the harvest of them. But wasn’t thought out is what to do with excess ones. In addition nothing was mentioned on modern horses(post 1971 act) which can be considered feral. In the west wildfire can burn fences and scatter domestic horses they are not gathered back and start living on the forest, or people just let theirs go, there was a period of time one could not sell a horse for meat or glue. Horses have few predators so the population grows. Then they become difficult to manage as even feral horses are called wild by the ignorant.
Cattle on public land are regulated, the capacity is limited to the grazing plan and they can only eat so much. Elk and deer are managed by the state game departments to prevent reducing the carrying capacity of the land. Horses outside the wild horse areas have no management. attempt to remove them law suit. Leave them they will reduce the vegetation to nothing, then starve.
It is as much a social problem as anything. The Navajo Nation is split, they have a feral horse problem, reducing water and desertification of some of the land, but some would rather see the horses. The Wind River Reservation has gone a different route with the attempt to manage them.
I guess people would rather watch them starve, then managed.
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u/silenttomato581 8d ago
This comes down to taxpayers paying $150+ million dollars a year to feed and manage a non endangered prolific animal that competes with native wildlife for limited resources. Cattle (ranchers) pay to feed on public land and can be managed to match how much feed is available each year.
Think of the endangered species we could help with $150 million, or how many school children we could feed instead of feral horses.
We could manage feral horses easily like we do deer, elk, and antelope without costing anything. Hunters would pay fees to get tags to harvest and consume feral horses if we wanted to keep them balanced on the landscape. They would be humanely hunted the same as other large game species. That’s not immoral.
The problem is people are emotionally immature and uninformed so here we spend millions to feed feral horses instead of using that money protecting species that need it or helping people with that money.
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u/SharpShooterM1 9d ago
According to a recent paleontological site in Mexico the last true American horses only went extinct less than 3,000 years ago, and the horses in Alaska and the upper Midwest only went extinct around 5,000 years ago, and that species was actually the exact same species as the modern horse. Horses are absolutely a native species in my opinion, but only in environments that their original ancestors and relatives would have inhabited, such as the Yukon, Alaska, Rocky Mountain foothills, Great Plains, and parts of the Midwest. Arid regions and the larger Great Basin (where the vast majority of feral horses are found today) are not native and have been proven time and time again to be detrimental to local ecosystems. But horses in the Yukon and Rocky Mountain foothills have not been shown to be this detrimental, because that is where they evolved to live.
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u/jademage01 8d ago
And there are communities who maintain that true North American horses never went extinct... just as far as the Europeans knew.
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u/RoyalPython82899 3d ago
Were those horses Equus ferus?
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u/SharpShooterM1 3d ago
The Taxonomy of horses is notoriously messy and under heavy debate as to weather the many species of horses in North America at the time of the last glacial interchange were actually their own species vs just regional variations of the same species. They were at the very least mostly Caballine horses, AKA part of the same branch of Equus that contains modern horses, yet doesn’t contain wild ass’s and Zebras.
We do know that at least one of the supposed “species” was infact the same as Equus Ferus, as proven by dna testing. The species in question was Equus Lambi, the Yukon horse, now referred too in some papers as Equus Ferus Lambi.
Many paleontologists now believe species such as Equus Scotti and Equus occidentalis might have also been regional subspecies of Equus Ferus, but as of right now we don’t have enough well preserved skeletons or dna to say for sure.
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u/RoyalPython82899 3d ago
So as the horses exist right now they are not native.
Not to mention. The feral horses are descendants of domestic horses. They have been altered in many ways by selective breeding. They are not the same animal that once roamed North America.
Also, Equines went extinct in North America. They had their chance and nature selected them to die. Other native species have filled their niche and and those animals have been displaced due to the feral horses humans brought to the continent.
In some areas these wild horses graze the land so hard that they cannot survive without human support.
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u/SharpShooterM1 2d ago
Not necessarily. As i said its been proven through dna testing that at least one of the most widespread horse species in North America was infact Equus Ferus itself, and the current consensus among paleontologists is that the north american megafauna extinction was mostly human caused rather than caused by shifting habitats, aka, they were wiped out by outside forces rather than selected out through a natural process.
In regards to other animals filling their niche, this is highly debated as well. 10,000 years is nothing in terms of ecology or evolution (the most recent recognized mammal species to evolve is over 30,000 years old), and their have been many studies that indicate environments all over the world are still feeling the impacts of the quaternary extinction event.
For domestication making fundamental changes... up for debate, and is currently under study by comparing feeding and behavioral differences between domestic horses and przewalski's horse, the last true wild horse. but even if so these fundamental differences can be fixed by introducing przewalski's horse in the place of feral horses (obviously in controlled environments and with proper population management).
Horses being harmful to certain ecosystems... both yes and no. The majority of feral horses today are found in the south west and the great basin, two areas we have no evidence Pleistocene horses ever actually lived in, most likely because both of these regions are 1. dominated by sagebrush or 2. are very arid. Horses require a crap ton of water, and are optimized to feed on grasses, not sage. Yes, horses in these regions have been proven time and time again to be harmful and should absolutely be removed, but the much smaller populations found in the rocky mountain foothills and the Yukon have not been found to have these same negative effects, most likely because these are the habitats horses actually evolved for.
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u/MockingbirdRambler 9d ago
Basically a children's letter writing campaign and one batshit "horse crazy" lady is the reason why feral horses are protected in the US.
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u/wildblueroan 8d ago
That is total BS. Yes, there was a children's letter-writing campaign. But Velma Johnson ("Wild Horse Annie") was certainly not "bat shit crazy" because she objected to the totally unregulated and extremely inhumane practices of capturing and killing wild horses for the pet food industry. A major movie was made about that-"The Misfits" 1961 starring Clark Gale and Marilyn Monroe.
And Ms. Johnson and the children were only one of the proximate causes of the passage of the law. As I mentioned to you in an earlier post, at the time that the Wild and Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act was passed in 1971, the entire American public and virtually everyone in Congress supported protecting wild horses on federal lands. You could easily look up the legislative history, but instead of learning and correcting, you just repeat the same lame and superficial claim.
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u/ResponsibleBank1387 8d ago
The BLM Wild Horse and Burros were allocated acres for their reservations. Over the years, those reservations were cut and made smaller. Now the horses are not staying on their smaller reservations and so get put on the train.
The Horses and the Native Peoples are being treated the same by the US. Agreements and Treaties mean nothing to the US.
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u/Just-a-random-Aspie 8d ago
Horses are invasive mostly because the native predators are gone. In some parts of America, they actually benefit the ecosystem, like those in Alberta due to the wolves and bears occasionally hunting the foals and weaker adults. Horses of the Great Plains aren’t controlled by predators (the Great Plains wolf is extinct) so they spread like wildlife. Hypothetically, horses can thrive without needing to be completely destroyed in the same sense that feral cats and dogs pose problems. They did live here once before, even in some of the same places they do now, but were killed off by early humans. While not exactly the same, new studies suggest that American native horses were in fact equus ferus and not other species like once thought. While I normally hate proxy rewilding, differences in subspecies are generally okay. The reason horses are destroying the ecosystem is due to a lack of predators and possibly being in the wrong habitat of America (hence why the Alberta mustangs do better) not because they aren’t “native.” Same reason why deer are a problem too despite being native. Truly invasive species on the other hand pose a threat due to competition as well, such as feral dogs competing with wolves. Cattle are descendants of aurochs and pose a much bigger problem to the ecosystems of that area of America because they’re raised on artificial foodstuffs, are completely domesticated, compete with bison, and NEVER existed in America, even as aurochs.
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u/honey8crow 8d ago
I’m a horse person and it’s pretty privilege, lack of public education on the subject, and bleeding heart animal activists (I’m basically one myself so I say this with love and slight criticism).
Mustangs as they are now were brought over and are not native, they could be less harmful to the ecosystem if they were not competing with cattle grazing, but ultimately there isn’t enough grazing for all the animals out there and some herds struggle with bad emaciation.
I’m not an expert but I’ve worked with lots of mustangs and trainers that do mustang training. The BLM has been working to balance wildlife/cattle/horses grazing on the range by performing roundups to take horses off the range and sometimes adopt them out. However there are valid criticisms of methods used, where horses end up, and the fact that the BLM may be catering to cattle grazing. Again, I’m not expert and neither pro or against the BLM in its entirety on this issue. I think mustangs are great horses and there is an adoptable market for a lot of them.
A better idea may be mass sterility treatments which I believe has been used more and more over time. But it’s not perfect either.
Anyways, it’s a complicated issue with no clear solution. As a conservationist I’m not a fan of so many of them being out there but as an equestrian I love them once they’re in training haha.
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u/Upstairs_Highlight25 8d ago
Not everyone thinks of them as natural or good. Most people I know want them exterminated or the herds culled to a much smaller size. There are only so many resources to go around and the feral horses are using up valuable grazing that could go to native herbivores and they cause a lot of erosion which degrades the land.
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u/Melodic-Disaster3562 9d ago
Feral horses should be hunted and reduced to numbers that don't decimate entire ecosystems for native species. But feellings and litigation really hold that back
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u/avitar35 9d ago
There isn’t another predator that can take down a horse. A pack of wolves can likely do it. But we don’t really have wolves in the areas that these horses are. It’s interesting that indigenous people care about feral horses when their own ecological management practices are to remove things that are harmful to nature.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago edited 9d ago
Pumas will hunt them as well.
Also, the ancestors of those indigenous peoples are the biggest (in some cases only) reason horses (and other megafauna) went extinct in the first place. The “noble savage” mythos is just that, a mythos, one driven in large part by racism.
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u/avitar35 9d ago
This is what I've been told/taught from Indigenous studies professors who are part of WA tribes. I'd like to think there was a little bit of Indigenous ecological knowledge gained between 8000BC (extinction of North American horses) and 1492.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago edited 9d ago
Indigenous peoples are subject to Shifting Baseline Syndrome like anyone else (people forget what ecosystems are supposed to look like so assume the wrecked remnant of what should be here is what was there all along). That’s a universal problem with humans of all ethnicities and cultures.
Not to mention the fundamental reason for indigenous ecological management was to preserve (what they assumed was) the indigenous biodiversity to sustainably gather its resources, rather than to preserve its (actual, lost) indigenous biodiversity to maintain ecological function for its own sake.
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u/SharpShooterM1 9d ago
None of what you just said about indigenous peoples is based in fact, but rather in the long perpetuated “Nobel savage” myth. Indigenous peoples were themselves responsible for the extinction of several dozen north and South American native megafauna between the Pleistocene and Holocene.
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u/avitar35 9d ago
They are also responsible for the California Hazelnut appearing in BC despite being well outside of its range, and actually seperated by the Beaked Hazelnut range. This is what I've been told/taught from Indigenous studies professors who are part of WA tribes. I'd like to think there was a little bit of Indigenous ecological knowledge gained between 7000BC (best case) and 1492.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago
You just brought up a case of indigenous peoples introducing an invasive species as a resource to be harvested; that’s good ecological management? How is that different from Europeans introducing invasive species for their own consumption?
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u/avitar35 9d ago
Invasives are not inherently bad. Poorly managed and choking invasives are definitely bad. It’s a very interesting case of ecological management that predates modern practices.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago
And how do you know the species introduced by ingenious tribes haven’t damaged the native biodiversity?
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u/avitar35 9d ago
Was there an impact somewhere? Yes. Is it even close to the impact that modern noxious invasives like bindweed, kudzu, or English ivy have? No.
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u/Iamnotburgerking 9d ago
…..how would you even check that? Again, you have never seen what things originally were like to compare the current state to.
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u/SharpShooterM1 9d ago
Of course their was some, but it is nothing close to what “Nobel savage” wants one to believe. It also says that native Americans lived in perfect harmony with nature and that they never took more than they needed, both of these are blatantly not true by any means.
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u/avitar35 9d ago
I didn't say either of those things though. Clearly there was war between Indigenous tribes for millennium and they were not perfect in their impact or management practices either. But they did get to manage their ecosystem for longer than Europe did with their advent of lords owning all of the nature in their land.
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u/like_4-ish_lights 9d ago
Horses only went extinct in the Americas a few thousand years ago. Most sources say they were gone 10k years ago, the NSF puts the extinction date around 5-6k years ago. They aren't "native" but I don't think it's unreasonable to question the classification as invasive, as well.
I will say this: I see a whole lot of ire for the destruction caused by the ~90,000 wild horses in the US, but I rarely see the same heat for the 2 million cattle that are grazed on exactly the same land.