Roam free or die

is the wild horse spirit

We have a new buddy on the pasture. Joaquin is a sorrel stallion the ranch bought at a wild horse auction. I feel for him. We’re trying to accommodate him as much as we can. We want to make him feel welcome. The poor stallion has lost everything: his herd, his mare and his land. Why are people being so cruel to him?

Joaquin is doing fine now in our ranch. Picture by Vedran Miletic, pexels.com

It turns out that this practice is unfortunately commonplace and I also observe an upsetting uptick in advocacy for it. I admire our wild buddies. They are very resilient. They can survive from next to nothing. Wild herds have thriven on almost every continent. Excluding Antarctica, that is. They have co-existed with humans and cattle for a long time. So why then, all of a sudden, do we see drastic changes in management practices to manage a problem that isn’t really one to begin with?

Here are a few examples. The Australian National Park Service has started to “cull” the herd of “feral” horses in Kosciusko National park at gunpoint. Some of the animals were shot up to fifteen times until they died. We read the following motivation : “Authorities say the horses damage endangered species and ecosystems in the park” and find that this practice is sold by the authorities as “the most important thing we can do to look after the park”. They intend to reduce the herd from 22500 to 3000 by 2027. While some locals doubt that the population truly equals 22500, even at those numbers, I can only observe the following: having a surface of 2664 square miles, the park does have quite a bit of land to accommodate for the horses. Also, if shooting horses is “the most important thing to do”, then maybe it is time to reduce the number of government administrators, because it implies that they have absolutely nothing of importance on their plate.

In the North Dakota Badlands, Theodore Roosevelt National Park has been famous for its wild horse population. President Theodore Roosevelt did not only praise the exceptional character of the badlands, but also its wild horse population. Yet the park has recently proposed a “livestock management” protocol, in which it labels wild horses as “livestock” with three paths forward to be picked from, one of which proposes removing the horses altogether. Fortunately, this proposal presently faces some pushback from the Congress.

Wild horses in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Do you want the unreasonable administrators to remove them? Picture by Rennett Stowe, CC-BY-2.0.

More such initiatives can be found. For instance, there is a proposal to reduce the McCullough Peaks herd in Wyoming. However, what I wonder is where the sudden push for such actions is coming from? Here is one possibility.

The Sierra Club is a non-profit with prolific influence on environmental matters. Their report, published synchronously with the above initiatives, discusses wild horse management. While the report is not unbalanced, it does contain a few remarkable statements. At first, it lists some “harmful” effects of wild horse herds, such as “tearing up high-desert vegetation, degrading riparian areas, and trampling fragile native plants”. It then advocates for “healthy horses on healthy landscapes,” which somehow assumes that horses are harmful to the landscape?

At this point, I can only observe that we often see the same eco-activists claim that horses “trample vegetation”, while they also advocate for the return of the wild bison herds from pre-Columbian times. Right now, estimates put the wild horse herds in the United States at around 225,000. In contrast, it is estimated that as many as 60 million American bison roamed the grasslands and plains of North America, as late as in the nineteenth century. I can only imagine how much “riparian trampling” we would see, if we were to resuscitate those bison herds … But then on the contrary, while the buffalo roamed North American plains as recently as a century ago, I do not see much evidence of unwatchable, torn up landscapes. Reality is, landscapes change and the impact of hooves on them is diminishingly small.

Beyond listing the landscape effect, the Sierra Club report makes a few more remarkable statements. At first, it suggests we abandon the term “wild horses”, which embodies the free spirit of the West (too much ?): “Some people prefer another term: feral horses, a way of communicating that the animals aren't native to the American landscape and that, in many places, they have become something of a pest.” It even goes as far as to ask “the complicated question of whether wild horses belong in the United States at all?”

I don’t see how this question can be “complicated”. Today’s herds descend from Spanish settlers, who populated North America before the United States became a country, and well before the families who founded the Sierra Club settled there. If they don’t belong in the United States at all, then the Sierra Club does not belong in the United States at all either. Maybe we should consider to remove that pest? Moreover, today’s herds merely remark a reintroduction of the horse onto the North American continent. Fossils of horse skeletons have been found that go back to the last ice age. Therefore, horses have as much of a claim to the land as Native Americans do. The question if wild horses belong in North America is not “complicated”. Its answer is a resounding “yes”.

Rather than an attempt at resolving any sort of issues, what I see here, is above all an attack on the character of the wild horse. Wild horses symbolize a free spirit, maybe better than anything else. Wild horses stand for hardiness, strength, emotional intelligence, herd cohesion and a strong and independent spirit, both in Oceania and America. There are ongoing vicious attacks on all of these character traits in humans. To avoid that people adopt the wild horse spirit, elites are waging a war on the horses. Not unlike what appear to be other elite agenda topics, this attack is based on completely duplicitous argumentation.

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The arguments against wild horses somehow seem to align with the discussion around “rewilding”. Many countries in the West have in one way or another committed to having certain percentage of their land “rewilded”. Notably, China does not seem to need to do so, even though it pollutes at equal or greater levels. “Rewilding” means that the land cannot be used for certain purposes that are deemed “tame”, whereas it can be used for other purposes that are deemed “wild”. Under this logic, for instance, Florida citrus groves can be ripped out and “rewilded” into a plot of pongamia trees. The company that implements this conversion can rake in “carbon credits”, no matter that citrus trees sequester at least the same amount of carbon dioxide as pongamia trees do. No matter either that a pongamia grove is not native to Florida and that the trees, all in straight lines, by no means look “wild”. In contrast to pongamia trees, wild horses are seen as a by-product of conquest and agriculture. So the dialectic then becomes that they “have to go” to “rewild” the land. Of course, because they are “feral”, not wild. Pongamia trees are “wild”, though.

Pongamia tree in Oahu, Hawai’i. Picture by Forest and Kim Starr, CC-BY-3.0.

Rewilding is not necessary. But even if it were, why are we starting out in places like the Western United states, where large swaths of land are already in a pretty natural condition? Let me suggest a better place to start out from. Martha’s Vineyard is a coastal barrier island that is home to delicate dunes and littoral vegetation. With its highest elevation at just 311 feet, and most of the land closer to sea level, it is at high risk from rising sea levels and from storms of increased intensity, caused by climate change. One would expect that no politician who is concerned about climate change would want to live there. Yet the opposite seems to be true. The Obamas purchased a “perfect oceanfront home” on the Vineyard just as recently as in 2020, for “only” 11.75 million dollars. Isn’t it appalling to see that their “perfect home” is situated in a fragile littoral area and that the Obamas keep trampling the dune vegetation with their heels? And then we are not even accounting for the massive carbon dioxide emissions they cause when flying there in their small jet.

Martha’s Vineyard is a great place to start rewilding. We can perfectly revert it into its natural state. Here is the icing on the cake: let’s introduce wild horses. Judging by the Asseteague and Outer Banks herds, they will do just fine there. And the landscape will look a lot better with them in it!

I am not a wild horse, but still a horse. Our spirit will never be broken. We will prevail!