Don’t Slaughter America’s Wild Horses: Let Them Help Improve Land Instead
By Jane Blume, New West Unfiltered 12-22-08
Recent media coverage of the wild horse-slaughtering controversy - including at least one newspaper article in USA TODAY - quoted the Bureau of Land Management’s Celia Boddington as saying that with current drought conditions, the BLM cannot allow the horse herds to grow unchecked because “That would be an environmental disaster.”
Since drought is already a problem, there is an alternative that the BLM may not have considered: grazing the horses under controlled conditions to help improve the land’s resilience when drought strikes.”
Over more than two decades, our organization (Holistic Management International, www.holisticmanagement.org) has accumulated considerable evidence that managed grazing produces dramatic results on the land.
When animals move around, their hooves work the soil and their urine and dung are quickly absorbed. When you increase the soil’s organic matter, it gets fertilized, plants grow, the soil becomes healthier, and is resilient in all types of weather – even during drought
If the BLM were willing to invest some resources to let wild horses graze on the land under controlled conditions, we would discover that - in addition to a dramatic improvement in habitat health –
1. The horses and other wildlife could live solely on the plants that grow there.
2. The BLM won’t have to spend so much money ($21 million in 2007) feeding the horses, which means that we wouldn’t have to slaughter them.
3 The plant roots will absorb carbon that might otherwise go into the atmosphere, which helps combat global warming.
4. The areas that are receiving less rainfall will be able to make better use of that rainfall by absorbing more water.
5. Wildlife will be able to rely on replenished rivers, streams and ponds for their watering needs.
Wild horses can provide a real cost effective and productive solution to drought. I urge the BLM to consider using them.
Peter Holter, Executive Director, Holistic Management International, www.holisticmanagement.org [End of article]
Jane, I also advocate holistic management. I support grazing and I own horses and mules. Unfortunatly, holistic mangement cannot solve a drought problem. Don't let emotions dictate management needs. The best way to assure long term viability is to ensure those horses are an economic asset not a liability. Manage the herds, cull the excess, and generate a profit to run the progrom. If we don't cull them, mother nature will.
Comment By Frank Mancuso, 12-22-08Scott is so smart, what business dose mother nature have managing horses. Nature has no feelings. Only people can stick a knife into a horses withers reguardless of breeding, confirmation, age. People know best how to cull. Survival of the fittest is for heartless mother nature.
Comment By Steve Bell, 12-23-08There are 3 million cattle on those same BLM lands. Why can't the land support 30,000 horses if the BLM has determined that it can support 3 million cattle?
Comment By JJohns, 12-24-08This won't work on a variety of levels: 1- Horses are recreational grazers which means they will eat and eat and even when not hungry...eat. They will crop plants close to the soil and very quickly stress marginal rangeland to the point of collapse. 2-Putting this burden on drought-stressed range is just plain stupid for one and ignorant of rangeland dynamics for another... These are feral livestock. They aren't "Hidalgo" fantasy ponies, they aren't Flicka or Black Beauty; they eat what native wildlife need and compete for resources agressively. They have no natural predators but the occasional bold lion, parasites and starvation. I applaud the BLM for finally taking steps to remove these imports and deal with the drain on the finite taxpayer's patience. These Holistic managment drones sound like theyv'e never owned a horse or toured western horse range in their entire existence.
Comment By Bob, 12-31-08Free roaming horses and burros are not intruders. But they are being sacrificed at the altar of the sacred cow. Because cows=$ for anyone willing to look the other way at what the public must pay to maintain an extractive industry like it.
It is comic to suggest that cattle are indigenous. They are native only to heavily subsidized "ranching" operations. And beltway lobbyists.
A romanticized vision would be the gritty, independent rancher valiantly struggling to maintain a proud tradition in the face of well meaning but ignorant (fill in the pejorative blank here, tree huggers etc.) interlopers.
Genetic evidence is proof positive horses originated in the Americas. All subsequent arguments are apologist and revisionist. I'm strongly reminded of the squads of Nazi "geneology" experts who appeared in the late '30's and '40's with "scientific" evidence to support political horrors.
If culling is an issue on the table and eugenics are waiting in the wings, then is divine entitlement, mandate by trumped-up "tradition" and "western culture" far behind?
Tired old arguments are not going to work this time.