Wild horses near Salt River to be removed by Forest Service
August 5, 2015 3:16 AM   Subscribe

 
It's nice that people "love animals" but it is sad that people are ecologically illiterate and only seem to love a handful of species, most of which are non-native. If the conservation community could harness just a fraction of this misguided energy it would be a huge boon to threatened animals and ecosystems.
posted by snofoam at 4:08 AM on August 5, 2015


The horses may not be native, but it seems that they are part of the heritage and livelihood of the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community, which manages them while they are on their land.

Now the US Forestry Service has decided to round them up and auction them off as soon as they cross into land under US Forestry Service jurisdiction - without input from the community.

Boiling this down into "it is sad that people are ecologicially illiterate" ignores the needs and rights of the community, which are important even though the US government has almost never considered them to be.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 4:37 AM on August 5, 2015 [16 favorites]


Where's Billy Jack when you need him?
posted by valkane at 5:01 AM on August 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


I wouldn't be quick to decide the ecological literacy here (side note: I can't be slow, either, because the two Arizona Republic links aren't working for me).

In my neck of the woods one of the big large-animal-management issues that gets everyone heated up is Bison Harassment. Tourists love them in Yellowstone Park, but ranchers hate them outside the park. The fear (accused of being overblown) is that they'll transmit brucellosis to cattle. So bison that leave Yellowstone boundaries get chased by mounted agents, helicopters, and all sorts to herd them back into the park. The Forest Service is only one part of that plan which is coordinated among a whole huge list of agencies among the feds and three states.

But the Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture, and while sometimes they're on the side of the eco-angels, other times they're the knights of transforming public nature into private money, whether for loggers or ranchers or whoever. Without more information there's no telling which way(s) this plan leans.
posted by traveler_ at 5:28 AM on August 5, 2015


Sure, there are multiple issues at play, but I don't think I need to respond to all of them in one comment. There's plenty of ecological ignorance on display in the articles, and the first begins by presenting one side as outraged animal lovers.

"How are they more of a danger than a rattlesnake or a coyote?" Murphy said. "Are we going to start rounding up the other animals, too?"
posted by snofoam at 5:31 AM on August 5, 2015


Horses are native to the New World. They evolved here and crossed back to Asia, if I'm recalling classes correctly. It was most likely humans that killed them off here in the first place. Whether they belong in the current ecosystem may be open to debate, but they were only missing from the Americas from about 12,000 BPE forward, a mere blip in time.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 5:38 AM on August 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


The "wild horses" thing is so incredibly mismanaged and screwed up that it is practically impossible to have a reasoned discussion about it. Thanks a ton, "Wild Horse" Annie.

This particular situation notwithstanding, the BLM has way more critters (feral equids -- horses and burros) on the rangeland, overall, than they claim the rangeland can support.

According to the BLM's quick facts page, they have a total of 58,000 critters on the range, land that can allegedly support 26,000 critters. (I am not interested in discussing how the BLM rents land to ranchers for pennies per acre for cows or in how the BLM otherwise does things wrong. I am talking about the feral horses / feral burros problem, here, not the overall sins of the BLM.)

The BLM ALSO has way more critters in off-range holding facilities (pens, pastures) awaiting adoption than will ever be adopted even if no more critters are added. (People adopt about 2,000 critters per year. There are around 45,000 critters in "off range" holding facilities at the current time. That's a 22-year supply of adoptable critters, right there. Horses typically live about 25 to 30 years.) The BLM spends around 43million a year on the holding pens and pastures for rounded-up crittters that will probably never be "adopted".

The market for adopted mustangs just isn't there, success stories and Mustang Makeover publicity notwithstanding. Nobody is arguing that these are bad horses or that they can't do competition-level work, but when registered 9 year old Quarter Horses that are broke and sound and have actual job skills are going for under a thousand dollars at auction, there's not a lot of buyer interest in a "some assembly required" BLM mustang. (While a BLM horse itself is $125, you are required to own the animal for a full year before you have title to it in order to resell it. It does not take a year to put basic job skills on an adult horse and in that year's time, the horse will eat more than his profit margin. Therefore, you cannot make a living wage flipping BLM mustangs. You're also limited to adopting four a year.)

People who have the job skills to take a horse from "does not lead/ride/handle" to "leads, rides, handles" are fewer in number than they have ever been. Further, if you are such a person and you would like to acquire a horse for cheap, the world is your damn oyster. There are absolutely thousands of decently-built, registered horses out there that are unbroke or under-broke and can be acquired for a small fraction of what they will be worth with training and exposure.

For example, let's say you want to be an eventer. You might try an OTTB of which there are thousands upon thousands. They're not horribly expensive if you get ones with no skills that are fresh off the track. Look at the basic bone structure and personality/temper -- those don't change much. If you can spot the diamond in the rough, you can win big, like the horse in the linked article.
posted by which_chick at 5:40 AM on August 5, 2015 [13 favorites]


Ugh. I didn't even get to the last link, which is just gross. The Arizona Republic is an insult to my intelligence and an assault on my browser:

The horses are beloved and far more attractive than many of the people you see in bathing suits along Arizona waterways.

I bet it's because some of the people are fat!

In other words, they act like wild animals. Using that logic, one could argue for rounding up Bambi and the fawns. Those deer can become darn bold. Scorpions and bobcats are at large in the national forest, too.

No.

Managing this herd makes sense. Eliminating it doesn’t. These horses have the power to inspire nostalgic longing in the hearts of urban Arizonans and out-of-state visitors. That makes them a recreational amenity worth keeping.

There you have it, advice from an editorial board made of complete morons. "Even the Arizona Republic is against this decision?" I have a hunch are also against everything ever proposed by the Federal Government and any of its agencies.
posted by snofoam at 5:41 AM on August 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


The other weird part of this kind of ecological defense is that North America was home to millions and millions of large mammals. At worst these horses are a partial and very small replacement for ungulates that used to exist.

So the question is how far back do you want to Ctrl-Z?
posted by srboisvert at 5:42 AM on August 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


Whether there is a place for horses in contemporary North American ecosystems has nothing to do with my main point, which is that ecology has nothing to do with the opposition to this. The people against this don't have an alternate view on how to recreate native ecosystems, they are morons who think horses are pretty and remind them of cowboys. Globally, this same form of attachment—focused on a handful of cute and cuddly domesticated species—is one of the greatest threats to native ecosystems.
posted by snofoam at 5:51 AM on August 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Sorry, they can also be smart people with an emotional attachment to horses that is so strong they don't actually use their smarts when looking at this issue. Crazy people who feed stray dogs in the street so they can suffer and breed more suffering can also be smart in other areas.
posted by snofoam at 5:53 AM on August 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


The Forest Service typically does a not-great job at the impossible task of balancing completely contradictory mandates, such as forest health, logging, and recreation. But on top of that wild horses bring out emotional reactions that aren't there for less photogenic species, as has been brought out in previous discussions here on the topic.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:00 AM on August 5, 2015


Also Gram Parsons never wrote a song about scorpions.
posted by thelonius at 6:06 AM on August 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


The other weird part of this kind of ecological defense is that North America was home to millions and millions of large mammals. At worst these horses are a partial and very small replacement for ungulates that used to exist.

So the question is how far back do you want to Ctrl-Z?


Mammoths.

PLEISTOCENE REWILDING NOW
posted by zamboni at 6:08 AM on August 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


The Arizona Republic details a plan to remove free-living horses that the Forest Service doesn't consider to be "wild" from land in Arizona as a safety measure.

OK, but the question is, what environmentally friendly plan do they have to drag the wild horses away? Will they hook them up to some kind of heavy, moving object from the local environment, like, I don't know, a rolling stone of some kind?
posted by The Bellman at 6:08 AM on August 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


The people against this don't have an alternate view on how to recreate native ecosystems, they are morons

Which people against this? Because although you briefly acknowledged my comment about how it seems the native community that manages these horses views them as a piece of their heritage, you seem to be ignoring them again. Or are they the morons that you're talking about?

They seem to have been completely sidelined, including in this thread.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:20 AM on August 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


From looking through what I can read here, there's no sign ecological considerations are any part of the Forest Service's decision. Which_chick's BLM page says the entire state of Arizona has only 303 wild horses out of an appropriate management level of 1676. (Burros get added into the same pot for some reason so the state's total number is 5163, but still, horses are not the problem here.) But it seems the whole problem is that the BLM isn't managing these horses, because the Forest Service considers them livestock wandering off the reservation and into public land, essentially trespassing on public grazing rights.

But the SRPMIC Indians have been treating them as wild horses and managing them under that status when on reservation land. So the core issue is that two jurisdictions are classifying these horses in contradictory ways—"wild" versus "livestock"—but the horses are free to wander to and fro between these two jurisdictions. And one of them, the Forest Service, is about to get heavy-handed.

The way I see it the ecological question is a red herring, and this is a question of Native versus Federal laws and rights.
posted by traveler_ at 6:32 AM on August 5, 2015 [8 favorites]


These horses may have been introduced in historic times - but they are still part of the heritage of the region: the historic heritage. They are also part of the cultural heritage of the local First Nations (a good reminder that Native culture wasn't frozen in 1491 but has evolved and changed and grown like all other cultures).
posted by jb at 6:33 AM on August 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


The horses are beloved and far more attractive than many of the people you see in bathing suits along Arizona waterways.

I bet it's because some of the people are fat!


Not that I am any fan of the AZ Republic, but it probably has more to do with the behavior of said people. People are disrespectful of waterways everywhere, trashing the areas and acting like jerks, but in Arizona there's something about a body of water that really brings out the yahoos. In a land where water is so important, its a shame to see how badly peoe treat the rivers and lakes.
posted by azpenguin at 6:48 AM on August 5, 2015


A couple of things. The BLM and Forest Service are different agencies with different policies, guidelines, directives and laws.

I live near a wild horse range. The managment issue is a big one. The land can only support so many, and there isn't a lot of predation, so populations tend to grow without bound. This is bad.

The other issue is that culling the herd is politically unpopular. Also expensive. More active management (vaccinations, etc) is even more expensive.

The Forest Service is pinched for funds. They've been closing areas off because they haven't the funds to manage them. You'll note that the AZ Republic article doesn't go so far as to say "increase taxes to pay for this". No, the current Conservative strategy of Decry, Denounce, Defund has led us to this point where the USDA and BLM don't have the funds necessary to do what we would be ideal, and instead must do what is practical.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 7:38 AM on August 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Trade them for the free-range camels the Army introduced?

On a more serious note, the ponies in Assateague and Chincoteague are managed herds, but their region has an ocean and a bay and plenty of human interaction which results in bites, car damage, and our family not bringing food to the beach because of mooching and damage.

I adore them as wild horses, but I've got my feet on the ground.
posted by childofTethys at 7:38 AM on August 5, 2015


The Bellman: "The Arizona Republic details a plan to remove free-living horses that the Forest Service doesn't consider to be "wild" from land in Arizona as a safety measure.

OK, but the question is, what environmentally friendly plan do they have to drag the wild horses away? Will they hook them up to some kind of heavy, moving object from the local environment, like, I don't know, a rolling stone of some kind?
"

These mustangs should never be a beast of burden! You could ply them with brown sugar, or you could try to break them to get them under your thumb, but time is not on your side, and the second you get them near your garden you'll have nothing but dead flowers.
posted by Reverend John at 8:05 AM on August 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


Wasn't there a thread a while back about how there aren't even facilities to slaughter horses for food in the US anymore and they have to be shipped to Canada if you want to use the carcass? Yet the article mentions selling horses for food as an option (one that isn't being applied in this case).
posted by srboisvert at 9:28 AM on August 5, 2015


Man... The cost of destroying a wild creature is less than just leaving them alone.

What a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World we live in.
posted by Blue_Villain at 11:12 AM on August 5, 2015


Curiously, the Arizona Republic is adamantly opposed to the government's program to re-introduce wolves to help manage the wild horse population. I'm guessing, although both are lovably furry, the horses have bigger brown eyes.
posted by JackFlash at 11:42 AM on August 5, 2015


Or more likely, as mentioned above, the Arizona Republic simply opposes any federal government program.
posted by JackFlash at 11:45 AM on August 5, 2015


they have a total of 58,000 critters on the range, land that can allegedly support 26,000 critters.

Reintroduce predators. Or open a horsehunting season.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:17 PM on August 5, 2015


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