Regarding Ms. Sellers’ response to my letter, she states, ”Modern wild horses fill that old ecological niche,” but neglects to point out that the horses that roamed North America 10,000 years ago competed with other large herbivores and had to avoid large predators.
“In addition to horses, the Miocene mammal faunas of North America were dominated by rhinos, such as Teleoceras, a large variety of camels, extinct relatives of elephants called gomphotheres, ‘bone-crushing’ borophagine dogs, and cat-like saber-toothed predators known as nimravids.”
—American Museum of Natural History. Miocene Mammals
Modern mountain lions will prey on horses where their habitats overlap, but horse populations have so far not been controlled sufficiently by natural predation.
“…wild horse population growing 18 percent annually, any forage on additional acreage would be quickly consumed.”—PERC. You Can’t Drag Them Away
Another statement in the rebuttal is that a single horse eats about 5.5 tons of forage per year. I can agree with this number, but the idea that this amount of forage, not to mention the 5-15 gallons of water per day, can be consumed by horses (70,000-plus horses on Bureau of Land Management lands alone—i.e., public land owned by all of us) without impacting native animal (elk, deer, bighorn sheep, pronghorn, etc.) populations seems implausible, at best.
I do not purport to be a wildlife expert, but the experts have been discussing this topic for decades, and the consensus is that there are too many horses on our public land and their populations and range must be controlled (i.e., reduced), not expanded, if we want to have healthy populations of highly desirable native animals.
”One theme that was repeated over and over again was the sense of urgency and responsibility … If the current management policies continue, the impacts to fragile western rangelands, wild horses and burros, wildlife and their habitats, and humans will intensify, resulting in irreversible consequences.”—Terry Messmer, TWS member and director of the Berryman Institute at Utah State University The Wildlife Society
Nathan Kettner
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