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| Photo from www.equitrekking.com |
Domestic cattle graze on the same lands as Mustangs. Some cattle ranchers are small-timers fighting for their livelihood. It's easy to understand why they would want the public land and grass rented from the Bureau of Land Management for their cattle. It means money for them and their families. Towns also build their infrastructure around cattle ranching.
But it isn't the small-timers who have the power to lobby congress. It's the big time corporation ranching industry.
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| Image copyright Tony Bonanno |
Mustangs are descendants of the horses that made America what it is today. They carried the pioneers, cowboys, natives, missionaries, and tied a nation together with the Pony Express. These small, scruffy horses are true survivors living on land most 'manmade' breeds would find insufficient. Mustang herds were once enormous. Today, their numbers have been regulated so low that they are forced to inbreed, destroying the historical breed, not to mention its future appearance and usefulness, and their population is dropping so quickly that they may soon become extinct in the wild. Pro-Mustang groups feel that Mustangs ought to run free in some areas as a rememberance of that history, even if only in a few small herds.
The Legal Battles:
There are two types of legal battles in progress.
1. The battle to stop the roundups as illegal violation of the original mandate and that the BLM roundups are inhumane.
Horse lovers have no problem with maintaining a reasonable herd management size, they just want it to be based on science, not greed. Alternatives to the roundups include proper use of fertility control (anti pregnancy) drugs (such as PZP) on mares and special wild horse sanctuaries such as the Madelein Pickens plan. (Proper use means at the appropriate time of year and dosage so as to be effective.)
2. The right to witness the roundups.
There have been so many witnesses and videos filmed of horrific injuries and reports of animal cruelty performed by the BLM that the BLM has blocked the public access to witness their roundups. They continued this even after a federal judge ordered them to allow the witnesses. Sometimes they move the roundup grounds to private land to claim that the land owner has "forbidden" the witnesses.
Other Debates:
1. The debate over whether or not the cattle that share land with Mustangs are needed to provide for the American public. Cattle that share land with Mustangs contribute only 3% to the beef and leather that Americans use. The rest is thrown away and wasted. Ranchers and towns have built their lives around the beef industry, even if the meat is wasted, so the debate is growing over if a livelihood based on waste is healthy for America in the long term, and/or if it can be sustained ecologically.
2. The debate over whether Mustangs, as a "non-native" species (which is debatable due to recent discoveries of Equus lambei), should be allowed to roam free on public lands, national parks, etc.
Although single-toed horses originated in North America (Equus lambei), humans have changed the landscape and as such, a reintroduced animal such as Equus will have the potential to cause environmental damage to native wildlife and habitats. Anti-Mustang groups argue that Mustangs are responsible for habitat degradation on public lands and national parks. Pro-Mustang groups argue that other, unnatural actions taken by humans, such as cattle ranching, are responsible for the majority of degradation of public lands and national parks.
3. The debate over how invasive Mustangs are (if they are invasive) and if Mustangs are the biggest invasive problem.
Wild horses should not be used as scapegoats for range degradation that is in fact primarily caused by private livestock: for instance, environmentalists have determined that in Nevada, home of the vast majority of America's remaining wild horses, the herds have little impact on the ecosystem compared with the hundreds of thousands of cattle that also roam the Nevada range. The Western Watersheds Project acknowledges that "the main cause of degradation of public lands in the arid west is livestock use and not wild horses."
In order to remove Mustangs from public lands to make way for cattle and oil drilling, and to fund the few families who are contracted millions to round up the horses, the BLM has made claims that wild horses are destroying natural habitats, competing for grazing lands, and overpopulating. But reports by the General Accounting Office and the National Academy of Sciences dispute such claims: BLM has never presented any evidence that horses destroy habitat, and the NAS in particular delivered a scathing critique of the BLM's outdated methods of determining wild horse populations. In fact, reducing horse populations in a given area has had negligible effect on range conditions: after massive wild horse roundups, herd areas show little or no improvement, especially in instances when cattle numbers remain the same (or increase). This means that wild horses are not the cause of habitat damage.
In stark contrast with BLM’s assertions, scientific studies have shown that Mustangs actually benefit the North American environment in numerous ways; vegetation seems to thrive in some areas inhabited by horses, which may be one reason the Great Plains were once a "sea of grass." Since that time, Mustangs have had their population reduced by about 98%. Generally, range conditions in steep hilly areas favored by horses are much better than in lower areas frequented by cattle. In addition, the horse’s digestive system does not thoroughly degrade the vegetation it eats. As a result, it tends to “replant” its own forage with the diverse seeds that pass through its system. This unique digestive system greatly aids in the building up of the absorptive, nutrient-rich humus component of soils. This, in turn, helps the soil absorb and retain water upon which many diverse plants and animals depend. In this way, Mustangs are also of great value in reducing dry inflammable vegetation in fire-prone areas, such as the invasive plant species cheatgrass. Back in the 1950s, it was primarily out of concern over brush fires that Storey County, Nevada, passed the first wild horse protection law in the nation.
Horses have proven useful to other species they share the range with. In winter months, they break through even deep crusted snow where the grass cannot be seen. They also open up frozen springs and ponds, making it possible for smaller animals to drink. During the historic blizzard of 1886, hundreds of thousands of cattle were lost on the Plains. Those that survived followed herds of mustangs and grazed in the areas they opened up.
Another positive effect of wild horses on biodiversity was documented in the case of the Coyote Canyon horses in the Anza Borrega National Park (California). After wild horses were all removed from the park to increase bighorn sheep population, bighorn sheep mortality actuality skyrocketed: mountain lions, formerly wild horse predators, compensated the loss of one of their prey species by increasing their predation on the other available species: bighorn. Ironically, anti-Mustang groups claim that Mustangs are causing a drop in bighorn and pronghorn populations, due to the fact that both bighorns and pronghorns have been observed waiting for horses to finish drinking before they drink. The problem with the “drinking hole wild horses causing mass sheep and antelope extinction” argument is that, first of all, bighorn sheep and pronghorn are not threatened in the least bit. They're listed as "least concern: population stable." Horses aren't causing them any trouble. The sierra bighorn (Ovis canadensis sierrae), which is a subspecies of the bighorn sheep species (Ovis canadensis), is endangered, but due to hunting and habitat loss, not from waiting a few minutes at a watering hole. Also, waiting a few minutes for a herd of horses to finish drinking is not causing any sort of die-off among bighorn and pronghorn. Unlike cattle, which will stand in a watering hole all day long, wild horses are constantly on the move. They generally do not stay in an open, vulnerable place like a watering hole for longer than half an hour, if that. Most leave after a five-minute drink. It's also well-known that horses will wait for other large herbivores to finish drinking as well. That's how wild animals interact.
In the past, both bighorn sheep and pronghorn were threatened, both due to hunting and human encroachment. Bighorn sheep were victims of hunting, mostly, whereas pronghorn were prevented from reaching their migration routes because of (you guessed it) cattle. Cattle ranches erect barbed wire fences around their land, and pronghorn couldn't get through. But thanks to kindly ranchers making "wildlife-friendly" fences that have a smooth wire along the bottom rather than a barbed one, pronghorn can now slip under and get where they need to go. Things aren't perfect for either of these species, but they're much better off than they were a few years ago, and wild horses had nothing to do with the problems or the solutions.
The main cause of habitat degradation to North America is cattle and sheep, not Mustangs. Cows graze within a mile of water, often standing in it until the water is so soiled it’s unusable for some time, while wild horses are highly mobile, grazing from five to ten miles from water, at higher elevations, on steeper slopes, and in more rugged terrain. Cows have no upper front teeth, only a thick pad: they graze by wrapping their long tongues around grass and pulling on it. If the ground is wet or loose (such as if they have been walking over it for days), they will pull out the grass by the roots, preventing it from growing back. Horses have both upper and lower incisors and graze by "clipping the grass," similar to a lawn mower, allowing the grass to easily grow back. Horses and burros also have solid hooves which don’t tear apart the earth nearly as much as a cow’s cloven hoof. A congressionally-mandated study by the National Academy of Sciences found that wild horse forage use remains a small fraction of cattle forage use on public ranges.
The fact that horses wander much farther from water sources than many ruminant grazers adds to their efficacy as a fire preventer. Their tendency to range widely throughout both steep, hilly terrain and lower, more level areas, while cattle concentrate solely on lower elevations, also explains why horses have a lesser impact on their environment than livestock: when one looks at a boundary fence where horses range on one side and cattle range on the other, the horses’ side typically reveals about 30% more native grasses. Their nomadic grazing habits cause horses to nibble and then move to the next bunch of grass, so as to not overgraze. This is why horse range is seldom sparse unless the horses' natural grazing patterns are disrupted by human interference, mostly in the form of fencing.
In 2001, a team of Russian scientists, part of a cooperative venture with the United States, came to study the effects of grazing animals on riparian areas in Nevada. They tested streams for nutrients and examined the desert and Sierra to learn techniques to improve the environment of their homeland. The scientists found that cows, which tend to camp around water sources, cause more damage to the stream banks than wild horses, which tend to drink and move on: "When we saw horses drinking from creeks, we didn't see much impact except for hoof prints. The water looked clean, had good overhanging branches and there was no sign of erosion on the banks. There was an abundance of insects and animals, including frogs and dragonflies and water-striders." Areas extensively used by cattle had fewer nutrients in the water and showed signs of bank erosion and other damage, their study concluded.
The fact that horses wander much farther from water sources than many ruminant grazers adds to their efficacy as a fire preventer. Their tendency to range widely throughout both steep, hilly terrain and lower, more level areas, while cattle concentrate solely on lower elevations, also explains why horses have a lesser impact on their environment than livestock: when one looks at a boundary fence where horses range on one side and cattle range on the other, the horses’ side typically reveals about 30% more native grasses. Their nomadic grazing habits cause horses to nibble and then move to the next bunch of grass, so as to not overgraze. This is why horse range is seldom sparse unless the horses' natural grazing patterns are disrupted by human interference, mostly in the form of fencing.
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