Speaker 1: This is a me eater podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything, be honest. I um ordered, but
Speaker 1: have not received a little kitty compound bow m for
Speaker 1: my eight year old and I can't decide. I didn't
Speaker 1: have one of those when I was eight. I can't
Speaker 1: decide Carl would be interested. Get your perspective on this.
Speaker 1: I can't decide if it's like, um right, should he
Speaker 1: be shooting like a stickbow to learn or should he
Speaker 1: just like jump in because this is how it works
Speaker 1: with a site pin in a comp um like are
Speaker 1: you are you wasting time messing around learning fundamentals with
Speaker 1: a traditional bow? Like? Are you just like messing around
Speaker 1: in order to get to the real thing? Or is
Speaker 1: it better just to be like, this is where it's leaded,
Speaker 1: this is where it's heading, So just do this now,
Speaker 1: learn how to shoot a compound and a pin and
Speaker 1: eight years of age? I got. I got one major issue.
Speaker 1: You said, I'm taking for granted the fact that this
Speaker 1: is where it's headed. I feel that that's where it's headed. Okay,
Speaker 1: well you could you could line up archery and hunting
Speaker 1: in general, just me like, no, we're not on the
Speaker 1: same page that like a compound with a pianist where
Speaker 1: it's headed. Yeah, I just mean that when like in
Speaker 1: four years, five years, when he's ready to hunt with
Speaker 1: his bow, I just feel like we'll have landed at
Speaker 1: a compound with pins and we will not have landed
Speaker 1: at a traditional bow. Just basing it on, like who
Speaker 1: is what is old man shoots to be weird that
Speaker 1: he would be a purest like that he would develop
Speaker 1: a purest sensibility in defiance of his old man right
Speaker 1: at the age of twelve. So I'm just jumping him
Speaker 1: into I just bought him a You're like bank fishing
Speaker 1: with nightcrawlers, and he's casting upstream to rising fish only
Speaker 1: with the in fact, doesn't like his father, but at
Speaker 1: twelve he's still gonna like me not. I think you could.
Speaker 1: You could also, I'm sure secure the right equipment for
Speaker 1: him to be dabbling with a variety of different options.
Speaker 1: It's almost like a good analogy would be the dad
Speaker 1: who's helping his son or daughter learned to bat from
Speaker 1: either side of the plate from an early age. What's
Speaker 1: your take on it? Do protel his kids are still
Speaker 1: shooting m but was made out of PBC. But trad
Speaker 1: bow is made out of traad ball out of PBC.
Speaker 1: Is that oxymoronic? Uh? No? Um? I think, yeah, give
Speaker 1: him both and then let him choose, you know, let
Speaker 1: him play with dabbling both and you know, if he's like, man,
Speaker 1: this one's more fun than you know, let him shoot archery,
Speaker 1: because I don't think that really the important thing is
Speaker 1: that he really needs to be developing archery skills, you know,
Speaker 1: at the age from eight to twelve. But more important
Speaker 1: things that hopefully at twelve he still likes to shoot
Speaker 1: a bow. Oh see, how yelled at him already? You
Speaker 1: yell at him? How like? What? What like his stance?
Speaker 1: Why yelled him? When I catch him shooting from a
Speaker 1: seated position, I take all the fun out of it
Speaker 1: except for my little girl. And I'm like, oh, s heart,
Speaker 1: whatever you want classic. I know it's really bad, but
Speaker 1: he seems to be receptive to it is from what
Speaker 1: I see. Yeah's to like about it, like, you know,
Speaker 1: but even when you're like kind of hammering on him
Speaker 1: about technique, he's not. He's not like but it was
Speaker 1: the boat away and it's like mildly dangerous and definitely destructive,
Speaker 1: and so it's like they love it. So you're sending
Speaker 1: a thing going really fast across the yard and it
Speaker 1: can like break something. Was not like we just had
Speaker 1: the I think I was telling you this. That was
Speaker 1: my oldest who's six now. She just had and I
Speaker 1: wasn't even there to witness it, but my wife was
Speaker 1: saying that. She just picked up the boat. And up
Speaker 1: until now, it's still been like left hand hold the boat,
Speaker 1: the string towards you, right hand, you know, put the
Speaker 1: arrow on that, you know, kind of explain everything every
Speaker 1: single shot, and for the first time, she just they
Speaker 1: just pulled their bows down and she's out there all
Speaker 1: on her own final, you know, flinging them. But they
Speaker 1: still have way more enjoyment than both the six year
Speaker 1: old and the four yield together. They get more enjoyment
Speaker 1: out of they eat shoot once or twice, and it's
Speaker 1: long as there's an arrow sticking in the target, whether
Speaker 1: it's the turkey that's there or the deer or whatever.
Speaker 1: The bulls go down and then they have this like
Speaker 1: this big imaginary play of you know, sneaking up to
Speaker 1: it and talking about who killed it and how it
Speaker 1: died and what they're gonna do with it, And that
Speaker 1: goes on for fifteen minutes and they finally loop back
Speaker 1: around to taking another shot. They like that part of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just that the playtime around. You know, what happens after
Speaker 1: there's an arrow stuck in that thing? Ye know, I'd
Speaker 1: be like, oh, gut shot. I'm gonna lay out a
Speaker 1: little bit about what we're going to be talking about
Speaker 1: here and just give a kind of brief overview of
Speaker 1: the deep history of the feral horse wild horse issue
Speaker 1: here in the US. And this story, like, this story
Speaker 1: can go back as deep as you want, because horses,
Speaker 1: you know, evolved here on our continent many any millions
Speaker 1: of years ago. So the funny thing about it is
Speaker 1: like if you look at continental drift, like at that time,
Speaker 1: our continent wasn't even where it is now on Earth.
Speaker 1: So it gets to be this sort of like really
Speaker 1: weird question of where it happened. But so like this
Speaker 1: land mass that we now know was configured differently and
Speaker 1: in a different position at one point in time, and
Speaker 1: at that point in time, we had horses, right, and
Speaker 1: and horses seemed developed here and spread into Eurasia and
Speaker 1: then the horses were around here for a long time.
Speaker 1: They used to be like a four toad horse, and
Speaker 1: it became a one toad horse. And at the time
Speaker 1: that human beings first arrived in the New World, you know,
Speaker 1: fourteen fifteen, perhaps twenty thousand years ago, they would have
Speaker 1: come here and found a type of horse, along with
Speaker 1: all sorts of other places scene megafauna that went extinct
Speaker 1: around the time of the end of the last Ice Age.
Speaker 1: And so starting around thirteen and years ago, there's no
Speaker 1: horses here in North America. They're gone. No horses in
Speaker 1: South America. No horses in North America. We'll get into
Speaker 1: later like what might have happened to them, but they
Speaker 1: just weren't here. And then we enter into this long period,
Speaker 1: this you know, basically thirteen thousand year period where we
Speaker 1: have a horseless continent. Then we get into the early
Speaker 1: hundreds and the Spanish you know, start coming over into
Speaker 1: the New World messing around on in Mexico, and they
Speaker 1: bring horses with them. They bring a domesticated form of
Speaker 1: the horse with them. And it's around the late fifteen
Speaker 1: forties that the Spanish start bringing some horses up into
Speaker 1: what's now the US. Up into the real Grand region,
Speaker 1: you know, around Santa Fe, New Mexico, up around Taos,
Speaker 1: New Mexico. They show up with horses. And there's this
Speaker 1: like long period of time where you have domestic horses
Speaker 1: owned by the Spaniards and sort of managed by Pueblo
Speaker 1: tribes and Native American groups for the Spanish who are
Speaker 1: like living among and working with the Spanish, up until
Speaker 1: this thing that happens called the Pueblo Revolt. And we'll
Speaker 1: talk about the Pueblo Revolt in a minute, but you
Speaker 1: gotta understand, like how how much time passes between the
Speaker 1: arrival of the Spanish with horses and the later distribution
Speaker 1: of those horses up into the central parts of the
Speaker 1: continent through trade paths developed by Native American tribes from
Speaker 1: the date when the Spanish showed up up until the
Speaker 1: Pueblo Revolt, when horses really started to move north. Um,
Speaker 1: that time span is about as long is what separates
Speaker 1: us now from Custer's death at the Battle of the
Speaker 1: Little Big Horn. So horses for a long long time
Speaker 1: we're confined down to the American Southwest. But during the
Speaker 1: Pueblo Revolt, a lot of the Pueblo Indians rose up
Speaker 1: and in a very you know, violent outbreak and retaliation
Speaker 1: for even worse violent outbreaks committed against them, drove the
Speaker 1: Spanish back out of the US, and they made off
Speaker 1: with hundreds of horses. And the Spanish had always had
Speaker 1: these prohibitions like Indians weren't allowed to ride horses. Indians
Speaker 1: weren't allowed to own horses, but they had learned how
Speaker 1: to breed and handle them. And once they booted the
Speaker 1: Spanish out and stilled all these hundreds of horses, it
Speaker 1: was like, you know, you took the cap off the bottle, right,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, these horses started getting traded
Speaker 1: in in various northward directions. They were traded up the
Speaker 1: west side of the Rockies, they were traded up through
Speaker 1: the Great Plains. Uh. And it happened fast man. So
Speaker 1: the Pueblo Revolt is eighty. By the seventeen thirties, horses
Speaker 1: were up in the hands of Plains tribes up along
Speaker 1: the Missouri River. By the seventeen seventies, tribes up in
Speaker 1: the Canadian Plains had horses the principle like forms of distribution.
Speaker 1: It seems that the Comanche Indians were very involved in
Speaker 1: moving horses and in fact, once the horse came into
Speaker 1: into being here, it really changed the way a lot
Speaker 1: of the tribes functioned. So the Comanche, Lakota, the Cheyenne,
Speaker 1: they all left their traditional homelands and moved onto the
Speaker 1: plains to become nomadic bison hunters. Because of the introduction
Speaker 1: of the horse, it changed everything. You could move more
Speaker 1: material on a horse, you could keep a bigger lodge,
Speaker 1: you could follow the herds through a buffalo herds throughout
Speaker 1: the year, and it really changed everything. And it causes
Speaker 1: major power division where these one these groups that had
Speaker 1: once been kind of small, weak tribes became very powerful,
Speaker 1: dominant tribes through the horse trade. And it said that
Speaker 1: perhaps the Comanches through it, like through distribution channels that
Speaker 1: they created, that they had funneled horses through their network
Speaker 1: and and subsequent tribes along the trading path all the
Speaker 1: way to French settlements east of the Mississippi. So horses
Speaker 1: were just exploding out there and going everywhere. And it's
Speaker 1: interesting to think, like, how how narrow this time window was.
Speaker 1: Right that when Lewis and Clark show up on their transcontinental,
Speaker 1: you know, journey out to the American West, they're encountering
Speaker 1: groups of Indians that it only had horses for for
Speaker 1: less than fifty years. We now look and we think
Speaker 1: that this idea of the equestrian Native American bison hunter, right,
Speaker 1: so so that an Indian mounted on a horse out
Speaker 1: chasing buffalo across the Great Plains. We tend to think
Speaker 1: of that as this thing that had just occurred for
Speaker 1: a long time. There's like the static thing that had
Speaker 1: all always happened, and then it was interrupted by the
Speaker 1: arrival of Europeans. But in fact there was a narrow blip,
Speaker 1: you know, like that those cultures lasted about a hundred
Speaker 1: years from the introduction of the horse up until the
Speaker 1: military conquest of those tribes in the beginning of the
Speaker 1: reservation systems. But it's just sort of like indelible images
Speaker 1: burned into our cultural mind that these people were interacting
Speaker 1: and using horses in their daily life for time immemorial,
Speaker 1: when in fact it wasn't that long. But horses just
Speaker 1: exploded across the American West in these years. And there's
Speaker 1: this estimate that even between the Arkansas River and the
Speaker 1: Rio Grand at one time, you know, around the time
Speaker 1: of when we were doing early European settlements on the
Speaker 1: Great Plains that there was maybe two million horses wild
Speaker 1: horses existing between those rivers. As you got more north right,
Speaker 1: the more severe winters, much harder for him, and far fewer.
Speaker 1: But on the southern plains there were probably so many
Speaker 1: wild horses that it was probably like displacing native wildlife
Speaker 1: even back then, even in the late seventeen in early
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds. What happened from there is that, you know,
Speaker 1: over the course of Western settlement, those horseherds were just
Speaker 1: reduced and reduced into reduced, like they weren't protected. People
Speaker 1: could go out and round them up to sell them,
Speaker 1: they could round them up and use them for their
Speaker 1: own personal use, and many, many, many of them were
Speaker 1: rounded up by dudes called mustangers, who would go out
Speaker 1: and just round a bunch up and put them in
Speaker 1: a trailer and haul them off to a slaughter facility
Speaker 1: and get some money for him, and they would go
Speaker 1: into sausage and dog food and export markets. And that
Speaker 1: line of work continued until it started to seem like
Speaker 1: the wild horse was gonna vanish from the American landscape.
Speaker 1: At the time we got down perhaps as few there's
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand wild horses in the American West. And
Speaker 1: then Congress came in and made what I regard as
Speaker 1: a pretty big mistake where they came in and do
Speaker 1: the Wild Horse, Burrow, Wild Horse and Borrow Protection Act,
Speaker 1: which gives wild horses like a level of protection that's
Speaker 1: greater than what we give things when we put them
Speaker 1: on the Endangered Species Act. Because when things go on
Speaker 1: the Endangered Species Act, imperiled species go on. There there's
Speaker 1: a mechanism by which they come off once they recovered.
Speaker 1: But the Wild Horse and Borrow Protection Act doesn't do that.
Speaker 1: It just says hands off, um, no, you know, not
Speaker 1: doing lethal control on these, and it just it was
Speaker 1: a mess. It created a mess. Even like in two
Speaker 1: thousand seven there were twenty eight maybe an estimated point
Speaker 1: five thousand wild horses in the American West. A decade later,
Speaker 1: eighty three thousand, there is now far and away more
Speaker 1: wild horses living in the American West. Then then we
Speaker 1: can sustain um, it's having devastating impacts, devastating ecological impacts,
Speaker 1: devastating impacts a native wildlife. Where we're taking this feral
Speaker 1: creature right, this feral horse, it was a domesticated animal
Speaker 1: cut loose out in the landscape and it's wreaking havoc
Speaker 1: on our native wildlife. Um So we're losing native wildlife
Speaker 1: in the advancement of the interests of an introduced feral species.
Speaker 1: It's a mess. And since there's not lethal control right now,
Speaker 1: people take some of these excess animals, not nearly all
Speaker 1: of them and moving to these off range holding facilities
Speaker 1: where you you lease private land and more lush grasslands
Speaker 1: to the east. And they got forty four thousand of
Speaker 1: these horses there living out their lives um at the
Speaker 1: expense of American taxpayers and at the expense of a
Speaker 1: minim will budget for managing wild horses in general, to
Speaker 1: the point that half of the money designated for wild
Speaker 1: horse work is being sucked up. And these off range
Speaker 1: holding facilities total mess. So much of what I just
Speaker 1: told you, you know, a lot of that's like has
Speaker 1: a serious bit of personal spin thrown on it. And
Speaker 1: you know that there's I'm revealing my opinion about the issue,
Speaker 1: But we're gonna talk to people who know a hell
Speaker 1: of a lot more about it than I do, and
Speaker 1: they might prove some places or show some places where
Speaker 1: I was wrong or mistaken, but I wanted you have
Speaker 1: that a little bit of background. And we're joined here
Speaker 1: by a frequent guest on this show, Dr Carl Malcolm
Speaker 1: and also Dr Tilani Francisco. So how how did you come, um,
Speaker 1: how did you come to get involved in the feral
Speaker 1: horse issue? Yeah? I want to get answer that. Then
Speaker 1: I want to talk about what term we're going to
Speaker 1: use during this conversation. Yeah, I'm glad because is um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's a lot of discussion. It does, it
Speaker 1: really does. You're probably checking out that I said barr
Speaker 1: barrel horses. Yes, we'll go ahead with the first question.
Speaker 1: How did you get involved in this? How did I
Speaker 1: get involved in it? Well? And path? Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: knew from the outset that I wanted to be a veterinarian.
Speaker 1: I mean from I think somewhere in junior high. I
Speaker 1: mean I grew up around animals, grew up around horses,
Speaker 1: and so I've always had a desire to do that. Um,
Speaker 1: my family owned lots of horses. Of course, we were
Speaker 1: cattle people, So I grew up riding a horse. I
Speaker 1: think I first got on a horse when I was
Speaker 1: two weeks old. My dad said, so Yeah, I've had
Speaker 1: a lifelong history of working horses and and life on
Speaker 1: the rez, you know, free horse, free ranging horses on
Speaker 1: the rez. When you needed a horse, you went out,
Speaker 1: you rounded horses up, you put them in a corral,
Speaker 1: and then you proceeded to tame them. And you know,
Speaker 1: so around I grew up around. I grew up around
Speaker 1: you know, untamed horses, taming them and then riding them
Speaker 1: out on the rez, and you know, and using them
Speaker 1: for transportation. So I knew at an early age I
Speaker 1: wanted to do something to help horses. So what right now, like,
Speaker 1: what is your what is your role right now and
Speaker 1: working with wild horses horses? Yeah, we have to we
Speaker 1: have to talk about what we're going to call them.
Speaker 1: So my position right now is I'm with the for
Speaker 1: US for Service because they are part there are two
Speaker 1: agencies that are entrusted with the the management of wild
Speaker 1: horses and burrows as per the nineteen one Act, and
Speaker 1: so the US Force Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
Speaker 1: I specifically work for the Southwestern region of the U.
Speaker 1: S Force Service, which is Arizona, New Mexico, and our
Speaker 1: grasslands in Texas and Oklahoma. And my primary duty My
Speaker 1: actual job is the wild Horse and Borough coordinator, So
Speaker 1: I am not employed as a veterinary medical officer, which
Speaker 1: is a federal job, which I was before I came
Speaker 1: to the Force Service. And you so you're working on
Speaker 1: the horse issue on federal lands, just on for services,
Speaker 1: just on for service lands. So when you say coordinators,
Speaker 1: coordinator of activities across for a service lands. Yes, But
Speaker 1: what's interesting to me is that I want to like
Speaker 1: take them and back up in a second, is to
Speaker 1: walk through kind of what we're talking about, but really quickly, Uh,
Speaker 1: right now, what is the esset right now of how
Speaker 1: many wild horses or feral horses live in the American West. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I really wish we had a good solid
Speaker 1: number there. There are people that will say we're ninety thousand.
Speaker 1: Some people have said no, We're closer to a million.
Speaker 1: Some people yeah, and I'm like, I don't believe that.
Speaker 1: I know that in stretch well, and I think where
Speaker 1: they get confused is that owned horses. So you go
Speaker 1: back to the latest count by the World Animal Health Organization,
Speaker 1: they reported that North America, well United States, in two
Speaker 1: thousand sixteen, the US had one point five million owned horses,
Speaker 1: and so a million and a half horses in in
Speaker 1: the United States, and some component of that could be
Speaker 1: some of these wild or feral or unowned horses that
Speaker 1: are free ranging. Because the reason I asked that it's
Speaker 1: so because you've lived on the Navajo Nation and they
Speaker 1: afford Apache, the White Mountain, Apache Reservation, the Mississippi Band
Speaker 1: of Choctaws. The but I've read that that perhaps thirty
Speaker 1: thousand wild horses are on the Navajo Nations. There's in
Speaker 1: the American West, do they does it really have that
Speaker 1: like that, that percentage of animals are found on that
Speaker 1: land mass. That's what they say, In fact that their
Speaker 1: latest one that I read was thirty eight thousand, and
Speaker 1: then they gather between thirty yeah, yeah, and the Yakima,
Speaker 1: the Yakima Nation up in Washington. They think they may
Speaker 1: have somewhere in the same, you know, like thousand. So
Speaker 1: I mean, really, we don't know, to be honest with you,
Speaker 1: we don't know. I mean, you'll see all kinds of numbers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll see all kinds of numbers thrown out out there,
Speaker 1: and when it really comes down to it, we don't know.
Speaker 1: We don't know. We just know there's an awful lot. Okay,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about why that's a problem or
Speaker 1: is it a problem? Well, it's an issue? What Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an issue. Okay, So I want to talk about
Speaker 1: why that's a problem slash issue. Um. But the next
Speaker 1: thing I wanted to get into is breakdown for me
Speaker 1: what people are signaling when they say feral horses and
Speaker 1: what people are signaling when they say wild horses. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I'm glad you asked that because a lot of
Speaker 1: people throw the term wild horse out and they just
Speaker 1: take it as a horse that's untamed that's come off
Speaker 1: of the landscape, so and Mustang's wild horses. People will
Speaker 1: use that term and not realize that the true wild
Speaker 1: horse is a legal definition based on the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: one Act, and so a true wild horse is a
Speaker 1: horse that is associated with either one of the US
Speaker 1: Force Service wild Horse and Borough Territories that Congress established
Speaker 1: in nineteen one, or it's a horse that has come
Speaker 1: off of a Bureau of Land Management herd management area
Speaker 1: that was established in nineteen seventy one. So it's a
Speaker 1: legal term that is a horse that is associated with
Speaker 1: one of those two types of properties. This is the
Speaker 1: answer I expected. Yes, that's that's a that's a wild horse.
Speaker 1: It has to be legally associated with a territory or
Speaker 1: a herd management area, like an area where someone came
Speaker 1: in and specified this is a place for wild horses
Speaker 1: exist and can't exist. Yes, okay, so what is so
Speaker 1: then talk about the feral horses. So a feral horse
Speaker 1: is any horse that has once been in domestication, regardless
Speaker 1: of how long back in time it was once domesticated.
Speaker 1: So it was once managed by two leggeds a particular horse,
Speaker 1: and not like a population any any whether it's a
Speaker 1: population of horses, whether it's a single horse, so regardless, yes,
Speaker 1: so regardless of how long ago it was that that
Speaker 1: animal or that group of animals was once in domestication,
Speaker 1: so it was once managed by two leggeds. So we
Speaker 1: look like feral pigs, you know, and we know the
Speaker 1: southeastern United States and all through like Texas and Florida
Speaker 1: and Georgia and all the tons of feral pigs. Well
Speaker 1: we know that we call them feral pigs because they
Speaker 1: were not in the United States or they were not
Speaker 1: native here. They were brought in by whomever. However, they
Speaker 1: were left free and but but they had been brought
Speaker 1: here as domesticated swine. Now they're free, they're roaming back
Speaker 1: and and you know, some people say, well, yeah, they
Speaker 1: look like Eurasian boors, and you know, and and so
Speaker 1: they're they're obviously you know, I think that just shows
Speaker 1: that they adapt back to their environment. In the case
Speaker 1: of pigs, oh there are pigs. There are, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to call them all feral pigs, but there are
Speaker 1: pigs that were brought here that hadn't gone through a
Speaker 1: domestication process, and that they were the ancestral wild pig.
Speaker 1: M because if you look at the domestic animals we
Speaker 1: now know, like you take like a cow, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: the wild ancestral one is gone. The orcs doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 1: Or now people argue that the wild ancestral horse of
Speaker 1: the Eurasian step no longer exists. We only have domesticated varieties.
Speaker 1: But pigs are unusual because there still are the ancestral
Speaker 1: wild version of Sus scraffa is still running around out
Speaker 1: there on his native range, and people have at times
Speaker 1: captured them, not domesticated them, and brought those specific animals
Speaker 1: in and cut them loose here where they promptly go
Speaker 1: and find feral farm version running around in the wild
Speaker 1: and and inner breed. But I think that that little
Speaker 1: difference causes a lot of head scratching among wild pig enthusiasts,
Speaker 1: of which I kind of count myself. But I think that, like,
Speaker 1: because they're not native here, and they all are here
Speaker 1: from the result of some form of human introduction, we
Speaker 1: tend to refer to them as like when you're getting technical,
Speaker 1: refer like feral picks, because they're all just dumped out.
Speaker 1: When I was talking about calling like the debate between
Speaker 1: feral horses and wild horses, I didn't know that it
Speaker 1: had I didn't know that there was a legal Can
Speaker 1: I tell what I thought it was. I thought it
Speaker 1: was a sort of statement of one's acceptance of this
Speaker 1: animal as wildlife, no meaning. But but I do, okay,
Speaker 1: But I do want to walk through. I want to
Speaker 1: touch on the couple of things to bring people up speed,
Speaker 1: and you can jump in where you want. But um,
Speaker 1: in this horse debate, there's some things that people love
Speaker 1: to point out, right. They love to point out that
Speaker 1: it seemed that the horse evolved here million years ago,
Speaker 1: right on we were we weren't here because of continental drift,
Speaker 1: but on this like moving hunk of land and how
Speaker 1: its orientation has changed dramatically. But on this sort of
Speaker 1: moving hunk of land which now happens to sit where
Speaker 1: it currently sits today, horses came about and emanated from
Speaker 1: here and spread to Europe and or what is now Eurasia,
Speaker 1: and in that process they became a solo ped because
Speaker 1: the first ones were bipeds, had like four that's like
Speaker 1: four toes, there's a one toe. And then then then
Speaker 1: they existed here in a recognizable form up until the
Speaker 1: place to see hola scene transition. So they existed here
Speaker 1: in some kind of recognizable form up until around thirteen
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. And it's it's reasonable to assume that
Speaker 1: human hunters once hunted the native North American horse, that
Speaker 1: that there was a overlap of horses existence here in
Speaker 1: human existence here. But then for twelve thousand years thousand
Speaker 1: years roughly, there were no horses here. Are you? Are
Speaker 1: you cool with everything I'm saying so far? Yea, no
Speaker 1: horses here. The Spanish show up and they bring with
Speaker 1: them some horses. Yeah, because the Vikings probably didn't probably
Speaker 1: didn't care. Yeah, they probably didn't carry their horses, and
Speaker 1: the Spanish introduce a different form of horse here, and
Speaker 1: these horses um were established in the American Southwest and
Speaker 1: in Mexico, co. And eventually they were through trade networks
Speaker 1: spread northward and by around I think by around the
Speaker 1: seventeen seventies, horses had spread all the way up into
Speaker 1: the Canadian planes. And so some people choose to look
Speaker 1: at this as being a continuum and that horses and
Speaker 1: some by some definition, horses could count as wildlife that
Speaker 1: just happened to be gone for twelve thousand years, but
Speaker 1: now they're back on there in their rightful home. Some
Speaker 1: people look at horses the same way to look at
Speaker 1: wild pigs, and they say, nope, not from here. It's
Speaker 1: a different kind. They were brought here by humans and
Speaker 1: their feral livestock. When I say feral horse, I am
Speaker 1: signifying my belief. I feel that all I am signifying
Speaker 1: I believe that they should be treated like feral livestock. Well,
Speaker 1: I think people say a wild horse, they're sort of
Speaker 1: signifying a belief that it's wildlife. That was what I
Speaker 1: thought up until the moment that you just told me
Speaker 1: that there's an actual definition of a wild horse. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: the the wild horse. Like I said, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a legal definition. And those are the animals that are
Speaker 1: associated with those territories or him as herd management areas.
Speaker 1: Is it fair to say right now that we have
Speaker 1: vastly well, let's not put that word there. Is it
Speaker 1: fair to say right now that we have let's say,
Speaker 1: way or just too many, too many wild horses, feral
Speaker 1: horses there and the Yeah, there are there are people
Speaker 1: that would say, yes, we have too many horses. And
Speaker 1: then there will people there will be people that say,
Speaker 1: we don't have too many horses. We have too many
Speaker 1: people with livestock, sheep and goats and cattle that are
Speaker 1: using the same area. So so and that, you know,
Speaker 1: and that's where the disagreement comes in. Um, we have
Speaker 1: groups that are on either side, you know that say,
Speaker 1: and then there's people that say, you know what, we
Speaker 1: can all co exist and and really what we deal
Speaker 1: with in the Forest Service and in the Bureau of
Speaker 1: Land Management are just those managed territories that we by
Speaker 1: mandate Congress told us thou shalt you will manage these
Speaker 1: territories so that we can have thriving ecological balance that
Speaker 1: horses can be on the landscape with the lives of
Speaker 1: the wildlife. And in those areas where we have a
Speaker 1: lot you know, permitted lands, a lot of land allotments
Speaker 1: where people can come in for certain periods of time
Speaker 1: throughout the year, um and and graze their livestock, because
Speaker 1: that is part of America West as well, you know
Speaker 1: land um, people raising their cattle and their sheep. UM.
Speaker 1: So we have to allow for all of that, and
Speaker 1: one doesn't take precedence over the other. And on those
Speaker 1: specified lands, we can't say that the horses are more
Speaker 1: important than the cattle. If there is a you know,
Speaker 1: a part of allotment that is there, what it says
Speaker 1: is you first and foremost have to manage that piece
Speaker 1: of land so that it can grow enough forage and
Speaker 1: brows and everything to allow four horses, for cattle, for
Speaker 1: wildlife and for everybody to be there. Okay, but where
Speaker 1: in this equation, um, you mentioned the conflicts between livestock
Speaker 1: grazers and feral horses. But when you rank all that out,
Speaker 1: where does the needs of native wildlife fit in? It's cool,
Speaker 1: they're they're yes, they all have to be there on
Speaker 1: those particular lands. On those lands, yes, on the wild
Speaker 1: horse territories and on the h M A S. How
Speaker 1: do you what is the difference if you talk about
Speaker 1: the legal difference between a legally designated wild horse an
Speaker 1: illegally regarded feral horse. You know, let me ask this first.
Speaker 1: That doesn't make it won't make sense yet. Can you
Speaker 1: explain what happened when the Wild Horse and Borough Protection
Speaker 1: Act came in in the seventies. Can you explain like
Speaker 1: what was going on prior, like how did we manage
Speaker 1: and control wild horse numbers before that? And what happened
Speaker 1: after that happened? Well, I think the biggest thing that
Speaker 1: happened was, um, people, you know, horses were just out
Speaker 1: on the landscape. Like I mentioned on my reservation, if
Speaker 1: we needed a horse, you would go out. You you
Speaker 1: knew that there were areas, you know, on these vast
Speaker 1: landscape where horse bands were at and so you knew, hey,
Speaker 1: we're going to round up horses and we're going to
Speaker 1: see which ones we can use, which ones maybe are
Speaker 1: not usable, and we would tame those horses. We would
Speaker 1: you know, in quote domesticate them, um, when in reality
Speaker 1: they probably somewhere like I said, some ancestor of that
Speaker 1: horse had been domesticated. But so I mean indisputably right. So, um,
Speaker 1: if you had if you had to trace it back
Speaker 1: however long ago it was, it was in domestication. So
Speaker 1: what had happened really was that throughout like the thirties, forties,
Speaker 1: fifties and and really I guess it was really like
Speaker 1: in the fifties and sixties. So you know when you
Speaker 1: have the dust bowl back in the thirties and stuff, Um,
Speaker 1: animals were starving, you know. It was we'd go through
Speaker 1: these droughts like we have this year where you just
Speaker 1: have you know, massive die offs and stuff, and people
Speaker 1: will say, well, that's mother nature and all of that.
Speaker 1: Well what would happen is ranchers people that we're making
Speaker 1: money or whatever. Um, they would go up and they
Speaker 1: would round up horses, sometimes by not all that humane methods,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean I've seen pictures I've never seen
Speaker 1: it personally where people would, um, you know, very inhumanely
Speaker 1: rope these horses and drag them and um, I mean
Speaker 1: it was pretty barbaric the way some of the methods
Speaker 1: that people used for what purpose? While were they rounding
Speaker 1: them up, then there mustangers, right, they were mustangers, and
Speaker 1: they would take them to dogfood plants, you know, and
Speaker 1: and so the methods, and you have to remember that
Speaker 1: back in that time, the mentality or the paradigm was
Speaker 1: animals don't have feelings, animals don't understand pain, so it
Speaker 1: doesn't really matter. So very different paradigm than where we
Speaker 1: are at today, where we recognize that, you know, humane
Speaker 1: methods are necessary, low stress. Stress has a huge effect
Speaker 1: on animals. But you know, to to I guess a
Speaker 1: little bit to that defense people didn't know any better.
Speaker 1: I know you weren't there to. I know you weren't
Speaker 1: like there to witness all parts of this like personally.
Speaker 1: But was it perceived that horses were handling the way
Speaker 1: that one wouldn't handle cattle, Like would would a mustang
Speaker 1: er be more aggressive, more cruel, if you will, with
Speaker 1: when rounding up wild horses, that would be standard handling
Speaker 1: practice for cattle. No, I think they handled them all
Speaker 1: the same. I think that you know, and and being
Speaker 1: around cattle and stuff. I think I think people just
Speaker 1: look at horses. I mean, let's face it, you look
Speaker 1: at a horse and you just kind of oh, you know,
Speaker 1: and you want to think that every horse is like Secretariat,
Speaker 1: you know, and they're gentle and and every horse is
Speaker 1: black beauty, and you know, and I grew up, I mean,
Speaker 1: I you know, justin Morgan had a horse, and I
Speaker 1: read all of my friend Flicka, and so we all
Speaker 1: want to believe that those horses are like that, that
Speaker 1: every horse is gentle, and every horse is you know,
Speaker 1: just wonderful. And and you see them out on the
Speaker 1: landscape and I'll tell you, I'm I'm you know the
Speaker 1: same way. You see them running and you're like, God,
Speaker 1: they're just beautiful. And yeah, I mean I agree, they're
Speaker 1: they're gorgeous, they're majestic, they're they're just beautiful animals. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Buddy Mines suggests that eye size and eyelash length have
Speaker 1: a lot to do with how we perceive animals. And
Speaker 1: they score very high in that way that tail and
Speaker 1: you know, in a flowing Maine and and in the
Speaker 1: summertime when they're slick, you know, and and and you
Speaker 1: see them if you've got grass and stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: they are they're a beautiful, just majestic animal. And and
Speaker 1: we equate that too, you know, looking at animals going
Speaker 1: back then to you know, Kentucky where you've got race
Speaker 1: horses and and stuff, and and yeah, I mean there
Speaker 1: is a there's a romantic nature about them. And and
Speaker 1: then you look at UM. Well, you know how the
Speaker 1: West would not have been one were it not for horses.
Speaker 1: You know. So coming from a native background where I
Speaker 1: came from, the horse was huge for us. That was
Speaker 1: our means of transportation. And I mean we're poeblos. We
Speaker 1: were not horsemen like the Plains tribes you know that
Speaker 1: were very accomplished horse people. We had horses, but they
Speaker 1: were you know, they were they were pretty much, you know,
Speaker 1: beast of burden they were. They were transporting, they were
Speaker 1: helping with you know, farming and stuff like that. They
Speaker 1: That's a really interesting perspective about UM thinking about our
Speaker 1: association of planes, tribes, the plane of the nomadic planes, tribes,
Speaker 1: and the horse. It's interesting me look at what a
Speaker 1: narrow window of time that was where when Lewis and
Speaker 1: Clark we're doing there transcontinental journey, they were encountering tribes
Speaker 1: along in the Missouri that had probably had the horse
Speaker 1: for only fifty years. And then that window and then
Speaker 1: with the beginning of the reservation system in the final
Speaker 1: like bloody conquest of the nomadic planes tribes. That window
Speaker 1: was year window of the equestrian right. The equestrian Native
Speaker 1: American bison hunter was this finite thing. But it's like
Speaker 1: it's when people it's when people from like my culture,
Speaker 1: it's when we caught it and saw it, and so
Speaker 1: we hold in our heads. Is this like constant thing,
Speaker 1: this idea of the mounted right, you know, when you
Speaker 1: had perhaps tens of thousands of years of human history
Speaker 1: absent the horse, but it seemed to just have this
Speaker 1: like it just seems it just still today like really
Speaker 1: captures you don't see that image, you know, the person
Speaker 1: with the bow and the flowing head dress on a horse.
Speaker 1: You don't see that image would be like, well that
Speaker 1: was just like this little thing that happened all of
Speaker 1: a sudden for a short period of time. It really
Speaker 1: it just it like seems to captivate people. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: idea of it. And I don't know if this is true,
Speaker 1: but I've even heard that there are that there are
Speaker 1: Native American creation myths that account for the horse as
Speaker 1: though it always existed. I don't know if that's true
Speaker 1: or not, but I've heard people say that, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you have horse societies, and in different tribes, you know,
Speaker 1: they have you know, horse societies. I've heard um different
Speaker 1: My my tribe doesn't have a horse society at the
Speaker 1: Pueblo of Laguna, but I've heard other tribes that talk
Speaker 1: about they have, you know, a horse society or or
Speaker 1: a clan or something like that that goes back um
Speaker 1: that they believe the horse. Yeah, was very important that
Speaker 1: when Creator made all creations, he made he made horse.
Speaker 1: Now they don't specify what type of horse Creator made,
Speaker 1: but Creator made horse just as he made us. That's
Speaker 1: one thing I've heard people reference when people are talking,
Speaker 1: when when people are trying to express their opinion that
Speaker 1: the wild horse has a sort of legitimate claim as
Speaker 1: wildlife in this country, that they would sight oral legend
Speaker 1: from indigenous people's about deep relationships to the animals. So
Speaker 1: during this era, the round up era, when people could,
Speaker 1: like you said, like when you grew up, you catch
Speaker 1: a horse if you wanted it, or you could go
Speaker 1: out and make it. Couldn't have been a ton of money,
Speaker 1: but some money rounding up horses and selling them into slaughter.
Speaker 1: That the animals were actually pushed to a point where
Speaker 1: people felt that they might vanish from the landscape, which
Speaker 1: is hard to believe when you see that. Some people
Speaker 1: estimate that, like around the time, you know, of the
Speaker 1: late ear, that there were maybe two million horses. I've
Speaker 1: heard between like the Arkansas and real Grand Rivers, So
Speaker 1: there were that many. But then there was a fear
Speaker 1: that we were gonna that people thought that the mustangers,
Speaker 1: the individuals out collecting up horses for their own purposes,
Speaker 1: would eradicate the animal. Yeah, does that seem like something
Speaker 1: that we could have plausibly pulled off? I mean, did
Speaker 1: it seem like that, like that the resources that finite,
Speaker 1: you know, as two leggeds. I think we always think
Speaker 1: that we're the apex predator on the planet, and so
Speaker 1: I think that people probably thought, yeah, you know what
Speaker 1: we could potentially if if everybody went out there, which
Speaker 1: is why we have the Threatened Endangered Species Act, right,
Speaker 1: because we tend to look at one thing and you know,
Speaker 1: and and a lot of people will say whether it's evolution,
Speaker 1: you know that things are changing and species die off
Speaker 1: and new species come in. Whatever. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know how that that whole you know, theory goes with.
Speaker 1: And everybody's got their own opinion of it, and it's
Speaker 1: some of it is very scientifically based and some of
Speaker 1: it is just opinion based. But um to think that
Speaker 1: that we would eradicate all horses. And that's where I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people lose track in in saying
Speaker 1: that the wild horse is a species within itself, you know,
Speaker 1: gena species, even though it's equis calibus. But and then
Speaker 1: you look at you know, Thoroughbreds and standard Breds and
Speaker 1: Tennessee walkers, and you know the American Pinto and all
Speaker 1: the different known breeds of horses, that they are different
Speaker 1: than the wild horse. So I think that's where a
Speaker 1: lot of people get mixed up is because they think
Speaker 1: that that the wild horses they like to call them,
Speaker 1: and now you might know that that's not correct, but
Speaker 1: that a feral horse or a free roaming horse, because
Speaker 1: the Act does does call them wild free ranging or
Speaker 1: wild free roaming horses and burrows, so it indicated that
Speaker 1: they were wild because they were associated to that territory.
Speaker 1: They were free roaming, meaning that they were not held
Speaker 1: in the confines of any fencing or they were not
Speaker 1: restricted just to that territory, but they should be associated
Speaker 1: with that territory and as long as they were on
Speaker 1: that territory, they must thrive. There must be ecological balance,
Speaker 1: there must be genetic diversity, all of that. Well, the
Speaker 1: states in the America West, which states have what are
Speaker 1: legally recognized as wild horses. So we have wild horse
Speaker 1: and borough territories in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona. I'm just
Speaker 1: going up basically up the west. Um Utah, Nevada they
Speaker 1: probably have the most. Utah, Nevada by far have the most.
Speaker 1: California and Oregon they all have it, and then Wyoming
Speaker 1: and the prior mountains in Montana. So in those places,
Speaker 1: it's around these designated areas. Those are the places where
Speaker 1: horses have some level of federal protection. So if you're
Speaker 1: not in one of those states. Let's say you're in
Speaker 1: Kansas and you and there's a horse running around and
Speaker 1: no one really knows who owns it, it's running around
Speaker 1: out in the woods or running around out on the plains,
Speaker 1: that horse would not be legally regarded as a wild horse.
Speaker 1: It would not be protected by the Wild Horse and
Speaker 1: Borrow Act. That would depend because we have the Bureau
Speaker 1: Plant Management has some long term holding pastures in the
Speaker 1: Midwest where there's abundant grass, so in uh Kansas, Missouri, Nevada,
Speaker 1: I mean not Nevada, Missouri, and um Nebraska, and some
Speaker 1: I think there's some in South Dakota, even where they
Speaker 1: pay ranchers or farm you know, landowners that have big
Speaker 1: plots of land that have abundant grass because it's prairie
Speaker 1: grass where those animals are taken and they live there
Speaker 1: the rest of their lives. Those animals are still protected
Speaker 1: because they're wild horses and burrows because they have been
Speaker 1: removed from a designated territory or h m A, which
Speaker 1: kind of points of the real mess right where we
Speaker 1: have what many would argue is a great overabundance of
Speaker 1: wild horses that have like exceeded carrying capacity of certain landscapes.
Speaker 1: But we can't do lethal control on the wild horses
Speaker 1: because of the Wild Horse and Borrel Protection Act, So
Speaker 1: they need to be gathered up and sent to other
Speaker 1: places where the government leases grazing lands from private individuals
Speaker 1: to allow those horses to live out their life. And
Speaker 1: we paid I think we've paid about a billion dollars
Speaker 1: to feed these horses, and it's projected that will probably
Speaker 1: pushing at some point into three billion dollars. Yeah, right now,
Speaker 1: right now, the latest UM that we're looking at is
Speaker 1: it on average in long term holding five to seven
Speaker 1: dollars per horse. So yeah, for the lifetime of their
Speaker 1: it gets pretty expensive. Yeah, there's an estimate from the
Speaker 1: BLM that one unadopted horse can run about forty eight
Speaker 1: thousand dollars to remain in a corral over its lifetime.
Speaker 1: To the American taxpayer forty eight thousand dollars per horse
Speaker 1: for its lifetime in captivity. That's a little horresponsive costing.
Speaker 1: That's where the horse has the potential to wind up costing.
Speaker 1: And to your point about the proportion of the budget UM,
Speaker 1: we're at a point now where the investment in these
Speaker 1: kind of holding holding facilities and paying for pasture well
Speaker 1: exceeds almost two thirds of the budget for the total,
Speaker 1: while horse and burrow program goes to off range care.
Speaker 1: So I've got some numbers from the BLM that talked
Speaker 1: about umto wild horses and burrows in off range corrals
Speaker 1: and pastures to the tune of forty nine million dollars
Speaker 1: UM for the twenty sixteen data. Looks like, did you
Speaker 1: follow what went on this past February when the Navajo
Speaker 1: Nation proposed that they were going to do a horse hunt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we were having uh an All Voices Summit at New
Speaker 1: Mexico State University and that week that they put that out, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, we we were having this summit and it
Speaker 1: was we wanted everybody there. We wanted advocate groups, we
Speaker 1: wanted the pro slaughter groups, we wanted the ranchers, we
Speaker 1: wanted everybody there. And we got a lot of tribal
Speaker 1: because New Mexico has so many tribal nations. But the
Speaker 1: horse that they proposed is going to happen in Arizona, right,
Speaker 1: But Navajo Nation, you know, goes into Utah, Arizona, New
Speaker 1: Mexico and so on. Window Rock. Their headquarters is right
Speaker 1: on the state line Arizona, New Mexico state line. So
Speaker 1: we we had a lot of um Navajo Nation representatives
Speaker 1: that are All Voices summit, and that was one thing
Speaker 1: we wanted them to talk about because we got there
Speaker 1: on Monday and they you know, they were talking about
Speaker 1: we're going to have this horse hunt. It was only
Speaker 1: for sixty animals, it was in a very remote area
Speaker 1: and they only wanted to to sell to tribal members.
Speaker 1: It was five dollars and um ahead, yeah, ten the tag. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're allowed a non branded, a non branded animal
Speaker 1: in this one specific location in a very small area
Speaker 1: of the Navajo Nation. And it was in response to
Speaker 1: a drought, correct, Like they figured that hard times are coming.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, and they knew and they knew that um
Speaker 1: years years before, they've had a hard time with their
Speaker 1: mule deer population in that area. And so they said,
Speaker 1: you know, we need to really look at this. And
Speaker 1: and when you look at a lot of tribal groups,
Speaker 1: they are I mean, we're very connected to the wildlife,
Speaker 1: to all the creature, you know, all the creatures that
Speaker 1: Creator made. And so they said, yeah, we need we
Speaker 1: need to really protect those deer. And so they were
Speaker 1: really working hard to try and increase the you know,
Speaker 1: the brows for for the deer. And so they said,
Speaker 1: we need to get we need to knock some of
Speaker 1: these horse numbers back. And so they've been fighting over it,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of you know, I know, it's it's
Speaker 1: a very difficult decision. And so I was surprised when
Speaker 1: I saw that come out, and I said, oh wow,
Speaker 1: I mean that's bold, that's really bold people right away.
Speaker 1: I can't tell how many people sent me a link
Speaker 1: two like links to the the basically the fish and
Speaker 1: game site for tribal agency, yeah for for for Navajo
Speaker 1: Game and fish. And they were like, the link didn't
Speaker 1: last long. It did not like I think it lasted
Speaker 1: over the weekend. But someone pointed out, some pointed out
Speaker 1: that the the you know, we have maybe forty thousand
Speaker 1: upwards horses on our reservation. They eat about thirty two
Speaker 1: pounds of grass a day, ten gallons of water to day,
Speaker 1: and we just don't have the grass and water. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: anybody who's driven through southern Utah, northern Arizona, western New Mexico,
Speaker 1: you will see there is not a lot of vegetation.
Speaker 1: And then you throw in this drought that we've had.
Speaker 1: We've had what two rains last October? So what were
Speaker 1: the primary things that what were the primary pushbacks that
Speaker 1: caused them to cancel the hunt? Was it internal or external?
Speaker 1: What I was told was that it was to twofold,
Speaker 1: So they did have some um, some external um involvement
Speaker 1: um from non natives that you know. Of course, you
Speaker 1: came up and talked to the tribal council and presented
Speaker 1: their anti you can't do this, you can't do this.
Speaker 1: And then I've also been told um that that internally
Speaker 1: within the tribal um people, they said, Hey, the tribal
Speaker 1: council never never voted on this. This was not something
Speaker 1: that was taken to the tribal people and the people
Speaker 1: were allowed to vote on this. This was just something
Speaker 1: that was done arbitrarily. And so rather than having lawsuits,
Speaker 1: you know, for arbitrary and capricious decisions made by the
Speaker 1: Department of Natural Resources, Game and Fish, they just ceased it.
Speaker 1: They said, you know what, we're not We're not going
Speaker 1: to go there. And then in May, horses on the
Speaker 1: Navijole Reservation turn up dead around a dried up water hole. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very unfortunate up at Green Mountain. And that's we've it's
Speaker 1: and it's something that we fight with those of us
Speaker 1: that are out here where you have um dirt tanks
Speaker 1: like that, you know, natural catchments, whether they were man
Speaker 1: made or not. When when the water starts drying up,
Speaker 1: especially if you've had a lot of silk in that
Speaker 1: in that dirt tank, um, you know, kind of becomes
Speaker 1: kind of a bog. And we have you guys have
Speaker 1: probably heard about it. You know, we have quick sand
Speaker 1: out here, a lot of it, and and so expandable
Speaker 1: clays and stuff, and and so whether that was part
Speaker 1: of it or it was just these animals get in
Speaker 1: there and you get stuck down in that mud where
Speaker 1: that silt is at and and they're already you know,
Speaker 1: their health is already compromised because they're very skinny to
Speaker 1: go in there in the first place. They there's nothing
Speaker 1: out there for them to eat, there's nothing for them
Speaker 1: to drink, and they find this little tiny bit and
Speaker 1: you know, nearly two animals getting in there, they're all
Speaker 1: competing for that little bit of moisture. They get stuck
Speaker 1: in the mire and it was a horrific scene. The
Speaker 1: pictures I saw it just how tragic, how tragic. So,
Speaker 1: so how are people balancing out? Like if you if
Speaker 1: you were looking at a similar situation with rabbits, a
Speaker 1: situation with feral pigs, a situation with white tailed deer,
Speaker 1: people will be like, sure, this seems like this seems
Speaker 1: like a The reasonable thing here is that if there's demand,
Speaker 1: we would allow some hunting to occur. Yeah, and how
Speaker 1: did it be that they wounded up being that it's
Speaker 1: this like exceptional animal that we would rather watch die
Speaker 1: of thirst than feed some human desire. You know, I
Speaker 1: think it goes back to like I said, you know,
Speaker 1: we have this romantic notion of horses and everybody you
Speaker 1: think of horse when you say horse, and what's the
Speaker 1: first thing that pops in your man your mind. It's
Speaker 1: like the black beauty stallion. It's something like that when
Speaker 1: you especially when you look at are largely urban masses
Speaker 1: that we have. So I think you get a very
Speaker 1: different opinion when you have people that are in rural communities,
Speaker 1: that are that are not associated with urbanization, and you
Speaker 1: get this expanding urban um, you know, population, and they
Speaker 1: they don't know the difference. They don't know where their
Speaker 1: food comes from. They don't know that, you know, their shoes,
Speaker 1: their leather and stuff was once a leaving, living, breathing animal.
Speaker 1: And so they're very very much separated from where origins
Speaker 1: of their food and their fiber and everything they have.
Speaker 1: They're very separated from that. And so you know the
Speaker 1: thought of oh my gosh, this hamburger I'm eating was
Speaker 1: once that really pretty cow over there, Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: you know, or that people actually raise animals and and
Speaker 1: every fall sell their steers off so that you can
Speaker 1: eat your steak and your prime rib and you know
Speaker 1: whatnot I think people are very separated from that, and
Speaker 1: so likewise, I think that's where we get this issue
Speaker 1: of managing horses. They're very separated from that because they
Speaker 1: look at horses and to them, every horse is you know, secretariat,
Speaker 1: it's black beauty, it's it's this majestic animal. And yet
Speaker 1: they don't realize that those animals do consume a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of food, they do consume a lot
Speaker 1: of water. They don't they don't necessarily put those two
Speaker 1: things together are in that there is a huge responsibility
Speaker 1: in keeping those animals healthy and at a level where
Speaker 1: they're not damaging the landscape. Carl, when you look at
Speaker 1: it from the wildlife angle, what is the how does
Speaker 1: native wildlife get like? How is native wild they've affected
Speaker 1: by wild horses? Well, there's a how our native wildlife
Speaker 1: species affected by wild horses. Yeah, there's a number of
Speaker 1: answers to that question. My mind, to be honest, is
Speaker 1: still on on what you asked to Lanny, and I
Speaker 1: think she's making some good points about you know, the
Speaker 1: perception of the different perceptions of people with respect animals,
Speaker 1: and a lack of awareness around where food and leather
Speaker 1: come from, et cetera. But I would say, with respect
Speaker 1: to horses, before I go to your question about wildlife,
Speaker 1: just thinking about how how cultural this issue really is,
Speaker 1: because you know, I think you could put it to
Speaker 1: a room full of hunters, Um, how comfortable are they
Speaker 1: with shooting, eating um and elk, a deer, slaughtering beef
Speaker 1: cattle versus horses? Are they? Do they put all those
Speaker 1: in the same category or not? Because I think here
Speaker 1: in America, um, even in a rural landscape, horses are
Speaker 1: not typically a species that we we think of as food.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not part of our menu. No, they're
Speaker 1: in the group with cats and labs and and in
Speaker 1: in this country. But that's very different than what you
Speaker 1: might get overseas. Right, there's plenty of cultures where consuming
Speaker 1: horse meat is totally normal. And if you were to
Speaker 1: ask somebody, you know, what's the first thing they think
Speaker 1: of when they think of a horse, they there are
Speaker 1: plenty of people who would say food. You know, Having
Speaker 1: had a chance to spend some time in Northwest China,
Speaker 1: where there's a very strong um community of Um, a
Speaker 1: Muslim group called the Weakers up in Shin John Province
Speaker 1: in the northwest near the border with Mongolia. We were
Speaker 1: teamly had horse um served to us at meals when
Speaker 1: we were doing field work there for some of my research.
Speaker 1: So this is such an interesting cultural issue, and I
Speaker 1: would say you could think about it from the same
Speaker 1: standpoint of if you were to ask a Hindu what
Speaker 1: they think of when they think of a cow, how
Speaker 1: different that is from what an American would say when
Speaker 1: they think of a cow. There's just so much steeped
Speaker 1: in culture here. You know, where in Hindu culture, Hindu religion,
Speaker 1: the animals venerated. It's it's considered sinful too, even toy
Speaker 1: with the idea of slaughtering a cow, compared to here
Speaker 1: in America. So none of that is rooted in ecology
Speaker 1: at all. Right to your point, all of these animals
Speaker 1: are capable of of reproducing. UM historically would have had
Speaker 1: predator prey dynamics controlling horses. UM. We had a cast,
Speaker 1: a whole whole host of p editors historically that would
Speaker 1: have been eating horses during the place to scene that
Speaker 1: are gone now. UM. But with respect to your question
Speaker 1: about some of the implications, I guess for starters, it's
Speaker 1: just you could look at the impact that horses have
Speaker 1: on the landscape in terms of soil compaction, in terms
Speaker 1: of the amount of forage that they consume. We've touched
Speaker 1: on that a little bit UM. But then there are
Speaker 1: a couple of other interesting, UM a little bit more
Speaker 1: complex interactions. So one would be, you know, we're talking
Speaker 1: about um landscapes. You know, given the list of states
Speaker 1: we've touched on Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah,
Speaker 1: relatively dry places. Water is oftentimes a limiting factor. Horses
Speaker 1: are very effective at capitalizing on a water resource and
Speaker 1: excluding native wildlife from being able to access that water supply.
Speaker 1: So you'll have horses that will drive away the indigenous wildlife.
Speaker 1: So typically we be talking about prong horn, big horn,
Speaker 1: mule deer, even elk in some cases can be displaced
Speaker 1: by wild slash feral horses UM. And then another really
Speaker 1: interesting consideration here is what horses represent in terms of
Speaker 1: a prey base that has the potential two elevate the
Speaker 1: density of predators on the landscape, which has the potential
Speaker 1: to have implications for other native prey species. So, for example,
Speaker 1: if you think about a landscape where you've got I
Speaker 1: need to have it, I'll spill it out for you
Speaker 1: before before I do, I want to I want to
Speaker 1: point out I had a chance, you know, recently, to
Speaker 1: talk about this issue with the Big Horn biologists from
Speaker 1: the state of New Mexico, guy named Eric Rominger, and
Speaker 1: he pointed me to a couple of papers because we
Speaker 1: were we were brainstorming about a recent New York Times
Speaker 1: article that we both had read that had us both
Speaker 1: kind of steaming a little bit. And this issue of
Speaker 1: apparent competition is something that was totally overlooked in that article.
Speaker 1: And the reason this, this pattern that arises in ecology
Speaker 1: is called apparent competition is because on its surface, it
Speaker 1: looks like two species might be competing with one another,
Speaker 1: but in fact, the dynamics that are being observed are
Speaker 1: mediated by a predator. Okay, so I'll spell this out
Speaker 1: so it makes a little bit more sense. Imagine a system,
Speaker 1: a very simple system, where all you have for predator
Speaker 1: prey interactions are mule deer and mountain lions. The mountain
Speaker 1: lion population is going to depend on the availability of prey,
Speaker 1: which in this case is exclusively mule dear. So if
Speaker 1: the mountain lion population manages to drive the mule deer
Speaker 1: numbers down, ultimately the mule deer here it's going to
Speaker 1: be able to support fewer mountain lions. It's the mountain
Speaker 1: lion number they're going to decline. Yielder numbers would then
Speaker 1: potentially rebound. This is where you get those classic predator
Speaker 1: praise cycles. Links and snowshoe hair is being like classic
Speaker 1: famous like seven years, the seven year, the seven year
Speaker 1: yep excurring cycle of elevated snowshoe hair is followed by
Speaker 1: elevated links. Claps rise, claps rise, exactly. So, now imagine
Speaker 1: adding another praise species into the equation, and imagine that
Speaker 1: that second praise species is relatively superior at evading predation
Speaker 1: compared to the mule deer. Would you mind if we talk?
Speaker 1: Can we talk about the New York Times article we're
Speaker 1: talking about. I would love to talk about the New
Speaker 1: York Times because you are talking about right, Like, don't
Speaker 1: you think you should talk about it before we talk
Speaker 1: about it? Yeah? Yeah, we can talk about a little bit.
Speaker 1: And Tilanni and i um offered up offered up a
Speaker 1: you know, to to provide a rebuttal let me say
Speaker 1: what he says, though, go ahead, because this is the guy.
Speaker 1: Like in all fairness, we tried to get the writer,
Speaker 1: the gentleman by the name of Dave Phillips. We tried
Speaker 1: to get the writer to come on the podcast to
Speaker 1: talk about his book about wild horses called wild Horse Country. Um.
Speaker 1: And I read the book and its entirety, and it
Speaker 1: he's of the mindset that that the that the twelve
Speaker 1: thousand year absence of horses and the fact that they
Speaker 1: were reintroduced by humans is sort of a little bit
Speaker 1: putting words his mouth, but it proves to be kind
Speaker 1: of inconsequential, and that we should regard wild horses as
Speaker 1: an as a sort of native wildlife or they kind
Speaker 1: of like have an established a sort of honorary status
Speaker 1: as native wildlife. And he goes on to say how
Speaker 1: we have way too many of them now on the
Speaker 1: landscape and that it's untenable that they would be put
Speaker 1: to human use. Um, it's untenable that they will be
Speaker 1: rounded up and sent to slaughter or used for human
Speaker 1: food or used for dog food. That's just that's not
Speaker 1: a good it's not a realistic solution. And he goes
Speaker 1: on to say that what ought to be going on
Speaker 1: is we need a bunch more mountain lions to kill
Speaker 1: wild horses. And if we allowed this to play out
Speaker 1: and no one hunted mountain lions anymore, that we would
Speaker 1: uh not entirely take care of the problem. We would
Speaker 1: lick a good bunch of it if we just had
Speaker 1: more mountain lions. And this, when I read it was like, um,
Speaker 1: almost maddening, And that's why I wanted to have him
Speaker 1: on to discuss his perspective and my perspective on it.
Speaker 1: But I felt that it overlooked a handful of things. Um,
Speaker 1: he throws out how many mountain lions are killed in
Speaker 1: the American West and if they each killed three horses,
Speaker 1: but he doesn't give any acknowledgement towards the fact that
Speaker 1: the distribute and of those lions is not overlapped over
Speaker 1: the distribution of horses, and a handful of other things.
Speaker 1: I'll let you take it from there, but I just
Speaker 1: wanted to establish, like, what the um, what the argument was.
Speaker 1: I mean, the title, the title of the article is
Speaker 1: let mountain lions eat horses, And there's a few quotable
Speaker 1: quotes that I think would kind of further cement in
Speaker 1: the listener's mind what we're talking about. So direct quote
Speaker 1: from the often just as a listener knows he agreed
Speaker 1: to do the podcast with us but couldn't make it.
Speaker 1: We couldn't like come and do it in person. Still
Speaker 1: stands Yeah, like I still love to have would Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be a good conversation. So one of the
Speaker 1: things says it isn't that there are too many horses,
Speaker 1: is that there aren't enough mountain lions. That is one
Speaker 1: thing he says. He also says because the Bureau Bureau
Speaker 1: of Land Management has always seen the horses as livestock,
Speaker 1: not wildlife. It has never tried understand the mustang's place
Speaker 1: in the western ecosystem or tried to take advantage of
Speaker 1: the ancient relationship between the horse and its main predator,
Speaker 1: the mountain lion. Okay. And one of the reasons I
Speaker 1: have a problem with that is because if you look
Speaker 1: at the time period when the horses that we all
Speaker 1: could agree were absolutely wild, native indigenous horses towards the
Speaker 1: end of the place to scene, when they were still
Speaker 1: here being hunted by humans. They're also being hunted by
Speaker 1: a cast of other species that were far better equipped
Speaker 1: to take down a horse than the mountain lion. The
Speaker 1: mountain lion would have been like the tenth baddest predator
Speaker 1: in the place to see landscape. So you're talking about
Speaker 1: the American lion, mountain lion, laned lion, like the African lion,
Speaker 1: except give it another twenty five percent body weight. It's
Speaker 1: estimated the American lion waged somewhere between ninety fifty pounds.
Speaker 1: You're talking about variety of saber tooth cats being on
Speaker 1: the landscape significantly larger in the six nine hundred pound range.
Speaker 1: Talking about short faced bears, notorious for their their long legs.
Speaker 1: It's thought that they had potentially a gait that would
Speaker 1: have equipped them to run down horses. Talking about dire wolves, which,
Speaker 1: based on their jaw anatomy, had crushing power that far
Speaker 1: exceeds the wolves of the modern era. So you're talking
Speaker 1: about a whole list of species. American cheetah. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: can keep going, man, but you know this quote, and
Speaker 1: your horse was not the size of horse that we
Speaker 1: have today. It was a much smaller animal. It was
Speaker 1: probably five to six hundred, maybe seven hundred pounds, so
Speaker 1: it was a much smaller animal. So to refer to
Speaker 1: the main predator, the main the main predator in this
Speaker 1: ancient relationship to be the mountain lion is just factually inaccurate.
Speaker 1: It And you know, we could go on, but I
Speaker 1: want to get back to this topic of apparent competition. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna bring you back to the system where
Speaker 1: you have mule deer mountain lions, and then let's let's
Speaker 1: add in horses to the equation. One thing that the
Speaker 1: author of this piece got absolutely right is that mountain
Speaker 1: lions will kill horses. That is well documented. Mountain lions
Speaker 1: will potentially kill enough horses to boost their own numbers,
Speaker 1: which has the potential then to drive other indigenous prey
Speaker 1: species potentially the point of extirpation or extinction through this
Speaker 1: process of a parent competition. And again it's called apparent
Speaker 1: competition because it looks like in this case the horses
Speaker 1: and the mule deer are competing with each other. You
Speaker 1: see horses show up, mule deer numbers go down. But
Speaker 1: in fact it's not competition for resources between those species.
Speaker 1: It's this predator mediated apparent competition where the collection of
Speaker 1: all that prey supports a higher abundance of mountain lions
Speaker 1: in the system, which then disproportionately targets the mule deer,
Speaker 1: in this case, driving them down in numbers, potentially to extinction.
Speaker 1: Because the apparent competition would be just a competition for resources. Well,
Speaker 1: so competition would be the term for that would be
Speaker 1: competition whether there's a limitation and safe forage or a
Speaker 1: limitation in water. And of course i've already I've already
Speaker 1: talked about the the ability of horses to exclude other
Speaker 1: species from accessing water. So none of these patterns exists
Speaker 1: in a vacuum. But one of the pieces of this
Speaker 1: this article UM the author talks about um this kind
Speaker 1: of predator prey balance being a boon not just for
Speaker 1: the wild horse program, but for the entire western ecosystem.
Speaker 1: He says, if herds have exhausted the land, everything else suffers.
Speaker 1: Native wildflowers and lizards, stage grass, and butterflies, as well
Speaker 1: as ranchers who rely on the same range and hunters
Speaker 1: who want to see thriving populations of deer and bighorn sheep.
Speaker 1: So if we would just stop killing mountain lions, those
Speaker 1: mountain lions would take care of the horses, and we
Speaker 1: would have quote thriving populations of deer and bighorn sheep.
Speaker 1: The reality is, if we would stop hunting mountain lions,
Speaker 1: and if we had numbers of feral horses wild horses
Speaker 1: on the landscape that supported an increased abundance of mountain lions,
Speaker 1: that would not be a boon for big horn sheep,
Speaker 1: mule deer, pronghorn because it would likely support a larger
Speaker 1: population those predators. A couple of other drawbacks of the argument.
Speaker 1: We have somewhere around thirty thousand mountain lions in the
Speaker 1: Western United States today. Every year somewhere between thousand of
Speaker 1: those are shot. Let's say you leave those ones in
Speaker 1: the system, you then have let's say thirty two thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred, or thirty three thousand mountain lions instead of
Speaker 1: thirty thousand. We're talking about a situation where, based on
Speaker 1: the BLMS most recent estimates, where it's seventy three thousand horses,
Speaker 1: which is about three times the appropriate management level that
Speaker 1: the BLM has estimated for its lands. And if you're
Speaker 1: thinking about a territorial predator whose distributionists you've already pointed
Speaker 1: out Steve does not entirely overlap with where the horses are.
Speaker 1: The landscape of the West does not even have the
Speaker 1: ability to support a number of mountain lions that could
Speaker 1: begin to take a bite, so to speak, out of
Speaker 1: the horse population. Furthermore, we have examples of places on
Speaker 1: the landscape where there is no lion hunting, including a
Speaker 1: lot of our tribal lands, many of our reservations. Many
Speaker 1: of those tribes have no history in their culture of
Speaker 1: hunting mountain lions, and they have a ton of horses,
Speaker 1: and they have robust numbers of mountain lions killing a
Speaker 1: fair number of horses in those situations. We've got some
Speaker 1: examples in New Mexico where there are mountain lions specializing
Speaker 1: on killing horses. And again Eric Romiger, the Big Horn
Speaker 1: biologists for Game and Fish, pointed this out, Um, in
Speaker 1: those situations, you still have horses eating themselves out of
Speaker 1: house at home. The lions are there killing them, but
Speaker 1: by no means are they sufficient source of predation to
Speaker 1: maintain a healthy balance in the ecosystem. I just want
Speaker 1: to point to California in particular, because can you tell
Speaker 1: me about mountain lion hunting in California real quick. They
Speaker 1: banned it years ago. Yeah, I'll tell you exactly when
Speaker 1: they banned it was Ronald Reagan actually in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: two when he was the governor, he issued a moratorium
Speaker 1: on all mountain lion hunting. And then it took and
Speaker 1: they kill about took eighteen years until California passed a
Speaker 1: band formally Proposition one seventeen and Reagan, Yeah, Reagan Night
Speaker 1: seventy two moratorium. If contemporary politicians would all still compare
Speaker 1: themselves to Reagan, if that's a good question. Um. And
Speaker 1: so now they kill right around a hundred per year
Speaker 1: through depredation permits if their mountain lions causing trouble, which
Speaker 1: by the way, is about four times the number of
Speaker 1: depredation permits they issued prior to the moratorium. But about
Speaker 1: a hundred lions killed a year in California, and these
Speaker 1: are lions that are incompatible with people. Arguably they're the
Speaker 1: ones that are causing a problem for the most part.
Speaker 1: And that's out of a population of somewhere between four
Speaker 1: and six thousand mountain lions in California. So we could
Speaker 1: take California as an example of a state where there
Speaker 1: is relatively low mountain lion hunting occurring. For US. They
Speaker 1: got four to six thousand mountain lions. Those hundred, those
Speaker 1: hundred to get killed are the ones that are killing livestyle. Yes,
Speaker 1: a depredation permit is issued by the state to remove
Speaker 1: an offending into djuwal lion state of California. So my
Speaker 1: question for the author of this article, Dave Phillips, taking
Speaker 1: California as a case study, I expect you to tell
Speaker 1: me now that wild horse numbers in California are plummeting
Speaker 1: because of all the lions. Maximum a mL maximum Appropriate
Speaker 1: management level for the state of California horses and burrows
Speaker 1: combined total estimated population for twenty seventeen ten thousand, approximately
Speaker 1: fivefold the max a m L in a state where
Speaker 1: it is illegal to hunt mountain lions, just driving that
Speaker 1: nail deeper deeper. And this this pattern of apparent competition.
Speaker 1: We're going to post a few pretty cool papers that
Speaker 1: spelled this out, but some examples I can give you.
Speaker 1: One is the woodland caribou Southern British Columbia, northern Idaho.
Speaker 1: Diminishing numbers of woodland cariboo like like two well, not
Speaker 1: quite that not well, maybe on the U S side,
Speaker 1: but yeah, so's southern BC, Northern Idaho UM very imperiled
Speaker 1: populations of woodland Cariboo. A couple of things that are
Speaker 1: happening in that landscape. One is you have quite a
Speaker 1: bit of of timber harvest occurring, which is boosting early
Speaker 1: successional vegetation availability, which is forage for moose and white
Speaker 1: tailed deer. It also um reduces the amount of lichen available,
Speaker 1: which is the primary food source for the woodland Cariboo.
Speaker 1: So you're changing the habitat such that it benefits an
Speaker 1: expansion of moose and white tailed deer into woodland Cariboo habitat,
Speaker 1: which in turn boosts the numbers of wolves because they're
Speaker 1: eating the moose and the white tailed deer, but they're
Speaker 1: also eating the woodland cariboo. So you talk about a
Speaker 1: system which historically was a few wolves and some woodland cariboo.
Speaker 1: Now it's woodland Cariboo, moose, white tailed deer, and a
Speaker 1: bunch of wolves wolves killing a ton more woodland cariboo.
Speaker 1: So there's a great paper where, through a very controlled study,
Speaker 1: these researchers went in and rather than doing the standard thing,
Speaker 1: which is to kill the wolves, a lot of which
Speaker 1: has happened in in the interest of protecting woodland cariboo,
Speaker 1: they issued very generous numbers of moose tags and reduced
Speaker 1: the moose population dramatically, and the wolves followed that decline,
Speaker 1: and the vital rates like survivorship of adult females in
Speaker 1: the woodland caribou went up because you reduced the main
Speaker 1: thing that the wolves are going in there to kill.
Speaker 1: Predator mediated apparent competition is the term. So this is
Speaker 1: like pretty complex stuff, and it's really relevant to the
Speaker 1: discussion about the implications of having another prey species on
Speaker 1: the landscape, especially pray species that's not being subjected to
Speaker 1: um sufficient sources of mortality, that it's numbers are being
Speaker 1: kept at a level that is um sustainable for the
Speaker 1: habitat over the long term, I think is a pretty
Speaker 1: objective thing to say, but it's just totally glossed over.
Speaker 1: And this idea of just leaving the mountain lions alone
Speaker 1: and you're going to have you know, it's going to
Speaker 1: be a boon for everybody who loves deer and big
Speaker 1: horn sheep is absurd and one of the most ironic things.
Speaker 1: As I was doing some research into This was one
Speaker 1: of the papers that the author of this piece points to.
Speaker 1: Um talks about a system where you had heavy predation
Speaker 1: by mountain lions on horse heard that was being studied
Speaker 1: and towards the end of the study, and we'll post
Speaker 1: this paper as well. Towards the end of the study,
Speaker 1: the researchers and I want to I want to turn
Speaker 1: to the page here so I can give you the
Speaker 1: the great quote. This is in the discussion section of
Speaker 1: this paper. They say, at the end, we do not
Speaker 1: know why numbers of lions declined towards the end of
Speaker 1: our study, after the lions had been eating all these horses.
Speaker 1: We do not know why numbers of lions declined towards
Speaker 1: the end of our study. Hunting pressure was low to
Speaker 1: non existent. The migrant mule deer population which winters in
Speaker 1: the study area, decreased by over the course of our study,
Speaker 1: from an estimated five animals to less than three, and
Speaker 1: they just kind of leave it at that. So you
Speaker 1: certainly cannot point to causation here, But that kind of
Speaker 1: a pattern suggests the possibility. In one of the papers
Speaker 1: that this guy point points to in his op ed
Speaker 1: in The New York Times, that the horses may have
Speaker 1: been supporting a more robust predator base that was driving
Speaker 1: down the mule deer herd right before their eyes. And
Speaker 1: they didn't connect that in this paper. But there's evidence
Speaker 1: here to suggest that even in one of the papers
Speaker 1: he's talking about, you witnessed a decline from five hundred
Speaker 1: mule deer to three hundred mule deer in ten years,
Speaker 1: and this migratory herd, and it's possible that the horses
Speaker 1: were a causal factor for that mule deer decline. So
Speaker 1: it's pretty easy too, you know, throw out ideas like, man,
Speaker 1: if we would just stop punting mountain lions, it would
Speaker 1: take care of the wild slash feral horse issue. But
Speaker 1: without really digging into the science, you're doing a disservice.
Speaker 1: And I have to say, I mean, I I generally
Speaker 1: admire the work of The New York Times as a
Speaker 1: a periodical. You know, I have read it and admired
Speaker 1: that publication for my entire adult life. They have correspondence
Speaker 1: around the world, reporting from some of the most dangerous
Speaker 1: I mean, among many other services, reporting from some of
Speaker 1: the most dangerous hotspots and bringing news to people that
Speaker 1: you would otherwise not be able to get me. And
Speaker 1: I admire and appreciate that there's a there's a tremendous
Speaker 1: service being provided through the American people. Yes, and I
Speaker 1: absolutely I mean I'm critiquing this piece because this is
Speaker 1: an area where you know, I and my colleagues, our
Speaker 1: minds and our hearts are in this kind of work
Speaker 1: and these kind of conversations dan and day out, and
Speaker 1: to try to make an inch of gain around these concepts,
Speaker 1: you know, it's such a politically sensitive and divisive issue
Speaker 1: as managing wild slash feral special status equines. We haven't
Speaker 1: thrown that term out yet, we have not, but I
Speaker 1: feel like something like this article being published and read
Speaker 1: by however many millions of readers around the country, it
Speaker 1: does a disservice to the really complex, difficult work, and
Speaker 1: it feels like steps in the wrong direction. So it's
Speaker 1: not very often that the New York Times or or
Speaker 1: nationally syndicated media are talking about these concepts, and then
Speaker 1: to have them published something that feels like, um, a
Speaker 1: step in the wrong direction is is pretty frustrating. There's
Speaker 1: another thing that I would want to ask the writer about,
Speaker 1: and that's this idea that if we didn't kill X
Speaker 1: number of mountain lions, that you would just automatically mean
Speaker 1: that you'd have that many more. Meaning if Wisconsin, who
Speaker 1: kills some years fifty thousand turkeys in the year, you'd say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: so it was sconsin didn't have a turkey hunt, we
Speaker 1: would have fifty thousand more turkeys in Wisconsin, when in fact,
Speaker 1: you'd probably wind up having somewhere around how many you
Speaker 1: have even despite the fact that you killed that that
Speaker 1: is very likely to be a product of competition, and
Speaker 1: that would be intrust species competition, competition among individuals. We
Speaker 1: all know mountain lions are very territorial um not tolerant
Speaker 1: of other individuals intruding into their territory. They are very
Speaker 1: capable of killing one another and maintaining a density on
Speaker 1: the landscape on their own through that direct competition interest
Speaker 1: specific competition. So yeah, you're not just gonna stop hunting them,
Speaker 1: and have you know mountain lions suddenly deciding that their
Speaker 1: home range can overlap with five other con specifics, They're
Speaker 1: going to kill the weaker competitors in their landscape. So,
Speaker 1: for a variety of reasons, it's a flawed argument. When
Speaker 1: the Navajo do you say, Navajo Navajo? Navajo Navajo. The
Speaker 1: horses that the Navajo were proposing to hunt are not
Speaker 1: federally recognized wild horses, or are they? They're not protected
Speaker 1: sovereign nation, right, any any tribal group of free ranging
Speaker 1: horses are not protected unless they are within a certain area.
Speaker 1: And we do have some areas on our on our
Speaker 1: national forest where we have an adjacent wild horse in
Speaker 1: boro territory to tribal lands, so we have we have
Speaker 1: a few of those, but not very many, but not
Speaker 1: on that certainly not on the Navajo reservation. So even
Speaker 1: in a situation where you have a a not fairly protected,
Speaker 1: not federally protected population of wild horses, free ranging horses, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're free ranging horses in that case. They're free ranging
Speaker 1: horses in that case, but not not federally recognized wild horses.
Speaker 1: And you have land managers who feel like they should
Speaker 1: do some kind of coal or reduce the numbers mechanically
Speaker 1: mm hmm in service of while they've habitat and grazing habitat,
Speaker 1: and they're not able to execute on that wish because
Speaker 1: of public sentiment and in the federally recognized areas we're
Speaker 1: not able to do any kind of lethal coaling unless
Speaker 1: we do how we can do lethal only if and
Speaker 1: it's in the act, if it is a horse that
Speaker 1: is disease, is lame, is sick. You know there um
Speaker 1: has a wound that would that cannot be repaired so
Speaker 1: that it's too the to to maintain the the health
Speaker 1: of that animal. So if that animal, its quality of
Speaker 1: life is so bad, then we can use lethal methods
Speaker 1: to humanely destroy that animal. And that is in the Act.
Speaker 1: But that's not going to solve for the bigger problem.
Speaker 1: And if we take all of the excess horses and
Speaker 1: send them to live somewhere else on private grazing lands
Speaker 1: and pay those landowners money in order to allow the
Speaker 1: excess horses like and everyone regards that as being not
Speaker 1: sustainable because of budgetary constraints, what in the end winds
Speaker 1: up happening, Well, right now, what a lot of what's
Speaker 1: happening to unwanted horses. So regardless in private ownership, if
Speaker 1: someone has an unwanted horse, unfortunately, a lot of times
Speaker 1: um because there is no there's no means for disposal
Speaker 1: other than euthanasia, humane euthanasia, which is generally done with
Speaker 1: a barbiturate overdose then renders that carc is unusable. Um.
Speaker 1: Private owners will sell this horse and it goes into
Speaker 1: slaughter channels and it either goes to Canada or Mexico.
Speaker 1: And so they go down to Mexico and there are
Speaker 1: there are laws for transporting in the United States. But
Speaker 1: once it hits the border, you know, everything changes because
Speaker 1: they closed all the slaughter facilities in the US. In
Speaker 1: the US, yes, um, you in Texas and one in Illinois, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were up until night are two thousand six and
Speaker 1: officially closed two thousand seven. So so those people private
Speaker 1: ownership horses, UM, some go in that channel. Probably a
Speaker 1: lot of them just get turned out on the lands
Speaker 1: escape and because tribal lands are massive and there's not
Speaker 1: a lot of patrolling, um, they get turned out. And
Speaker 1: so it's it's plausible to think that that's where a
Speaker 1: large number of these free ranging horses on tribal lands.
Speaker 1: That's why those numbers are increasing. And so tribal land
Speaker 1: managers are really looking at this and they're trying to
Speaker 1: decide what can we do, what can we as tribal
Speaker 1: land managers, knowing that in a lot of times it's
Speaker 1: not something that's very palatable to the public because the
Speaker 1: public doesn't necessarily understand what the tribal land managers are
Speaker 1: trying to do. And yeah, what they're up against, you know,
Speaker 1: not only I mean, they're you know, on any reservation.
Speaker 1: We're fighting massive poverty. We're fighting alcoholism and drug abuse
Speaker 1: and and missing parents and a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: just abuse in general. We have rising dog and cat populations,
Speaker 1: and so you look at all of this and then
Speaker 1: you say, well, you know, leave the horses alone. And
Speaker 1: a lot of the tribe land managers are like, look,
Speaker 1: it's it's just another symptom of what's going on in
Speaker 1: tribal communities, and we have got to stop something somewhere.
Speaker 1: And so you know, you look at, okay, let more
Speaker 1: mountain lions, um, you know, let more mountain lions live.
Speaker 1: And and I know Carl and I said this, and
Speaker 1: I go, well, you know what I mean. Unfortunately, I
Speaker 1: think we look at threshold levels and we say, okay,
Speaker 1: so are what is our threshold level for numbers of
Speaker 1: species and whatnot. And the minute any animal, regardless of
Speaker 1: what it is, but the minute any animal does negative
Speaker 1: has a negative impact to the two leggeds, and I'm
Speaker 1: always telling people that I talk in two legged and
Speaker 1: four legged terms. So if there is a negative impact
Speaker 1: on a two legged to the point that it is death,
Speaker 1: that's your threshold. Then people start saying, oh, you've got
Speaker 1: to do something about this. That's most people's tipping point.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, their threshold is when there, right. But but
Speaker 1: the masses in general, and especially when you look at
Speaker 1: urban communities, that's that's their tipping point. Is Okay, Now
Speaker 1: we have negative effect on humans because it's it's causing
Speaker 1: you know, a human a human death, or our pets. Right. Yeah. Also,
Speaker 1: the mountain lions are in the back y already eating
Speaker 1: the dogs, right right. So if you're out hiking, you're
Speaker 1: out enjoying nature, quote unquote enjoying nature, and a mountain
Speaker 1: lion comes and takes your two year old, that's your threshold.
Speaker 1: You want all the mountain lions taken care of because
Speaker 1: it took your two year old. And the depletion of
Speaker 1: wildlife habitat and the depletion of like commercially viable grazing
Speaker 1: landscapes does not match most people's threshold. There's also it
Speaker 1: seems to me an element when you look at the
Speaker 1: article we keep talking about that argues that if we
Speaker 1: weren't um, that if we didn't hunt mountain lions, we'd
Speaker 1: be licking part of the horse problem. It demonstrates the
Speaker 1: type of self loathing, like a type of human self
Speaker 1: loathing that I see from people now and then, which
Speaker 1: is this idea that it's untenable that we would eat horses,
Speaker 1: but it's acceptable that a lion would do so, as
Speaker 1: though the horse, in his moment of death is thinking
Speaker 1: to himself, thank god, Um, I wasn't just shot by
Speaker 1: a rifle. I'm so much happier that I happen to
Speaker 1: have this thing gnawing on, gnawing me to death, as
Speaker 1: though the horse would find some level of of satisfaction
Speaker 1: or good feelings about that cause of death. Because why
Speaker 1: else would it be acceptable for someone to say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's not something we can do. Yeah, that's awful, but
Speaker 1: we should allow the lions to go do it for us,
Speaker 1: because people think that's natural. But the problem you run
Speaker 1: into here is you even lose that argument. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of a nice piece because it's like a helpful
Speaker 1: piece because it demonstrates the trouble that we humans find
Speaker 1: ourselves in right um in situations when it comes to
Speaker 1: wildlife or in this case, not quite wildlife, and balancing
Speaker 1: out how are we going to be good people and
Speaker 1: at what expense when in reality we're all trying to
Speaker 1: do the same thing. We're all trying to take care
Speaker 1: of our mother, the earth that we live on. And
Speaker 1: we talk about that and whether it's excessive pollution, you know, trash,
Speaker 1: what there, it's too many animals, whether it's too many
Speaker 1: two leggeds, whether it's you know, junked cars, whether you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's getting our ecosystems, you know, our marine uh
Speaker 1: areas you know, full of garbage and stuff. We all
Speaker 1: talk about trying to take care of our mother and
Speaker 1: how we're going to do this in this one area,
Speaker 1: and we failed to see the big picture that it's
Speaker 1: all interconnected. And so yeah, there there might be you
Speaker 1: know some well like right now in California they've got
Speaker 1: you know, a chicken disease and a poultry disease going
Speaker 1: on in in uh in animals, and so they're having
Speaker 1: to take out this is the U s D a
Speaker 1: Animal Plant Health Inspection service, to prevent it from coming
Speaker 1: in and really devastating our avian species. So they're taking
Speaker 1: out domestic domestic poultry down in southern California. If we
Speaker 1: had something like that that happened with horses, oh my goodness,
Speaker 1: I mean, that would be terrible. People would be like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, how how could we have? You know,
Speaker 1: African horse sickness or Venezuelan equine and cephalitis that will
Speaker 1: kill horses and they're dying on the landscape. And guess
Speaker 1: what those are both? I mean, especially Venezuelan equine andcephalitis.
Speaker 1: That's a human health problem because it's spread through mosquitoes.
Speaker 1: So you know, mosquito bites, an infected horse that comes
Speaker 1: over bites a human. Guess what now, the humans got
Speaker 1: it high high death rates. There would be something very
Speaker 1: very different if we had something like that going on.
Speaker 1: But we don't tend to see that all of these
Speaker 1: things are interconnected. That the trash we have on the
Speaker 1: landscape is also decreasing the forage for the animals that
Speaker 1: want to want to live there, whether they're they're deer
Speaker 1: or elk or cattle. Um. I don't know how many
Speaker 1: times I've I've worked on cattle that have hardwater, are
Speaker 1: hardware disease because they're eating wire, and they're eating cans,
Speaker 1: and they pick up garbage because they're flouraging. Hardware disease.
Speaker 1: Hardware disease because what they do is they swallow the
Speaker 1: wire or the nail or whatever this piece of metal
Speaker 1: is because they're eating on it. It goes down and
Speaker 1: it punctures the room and and then it spreads and
Speaker 1: you get this massive infection and a paracarditis or endocarditis
Speaker 1: or you know wherever it's punctured. And so what we
Speaker 1: do a lot of times with livestock is we will,
Speaker 1: especially in dairy cattle, is will go ahead and put
Speaker 1: magnets into them, into their room and to try and
Speaker 1: attract that metal to keep it from migrating out. Hardware disease,
Speaker 1: hardware disease, it's just a common term in veterinary medicine,
Speaker 1: in large animal of that medicine. So you look at that,
Speaker 1: and you look at horses and I don't know how
Speaker 1: many times I've looked at horses that have stepped on glass,
Speaker 1: that has stepped on nails, and um, their foot becomes
Speaker 1: infected and there's no way to do anything with them
Speaker 1: because now this infection has gone all the way up
Speaker 1: into their tendon sheaths, and the most humane thing to
Speaker 1: do is to put them down because they've got this
Speaker 1: spreading infection because they stepped on something that a human
Speaker 1: left out there. Yeah, and that happens with you know,
Speaker 1: with the free ranging horses. So I think people forget
Speaker 1: that we as two leggeds, we're as just just as
Speaker 1: much a component of this, and we have to be
Speaker 1: responsible about the whole thing. So whether you hunt or fish,
Speaker 1: or whether you're you know, not a proponent of it,
Speaker 1: or you are that realized that it's it's all interconnected.
Speaker 1: And I think a lot of people lose that that sense.
Speaker 1: They live in their little vacuum in the in their
Speaker 1: little suburban house, and they watch Netflix and whatnot, and
Speaker 1: they're completely separated from all of that that the hamburger
Speaker 1: that they got at McDonald's or in an out burger
Speaker 1: was actually once a living, breathing bovine animal that had
Speaker 1: a life, that had a spirit that you know, its
Speaker 1: heart was beating, But now they're eating it in an
Speaker 1: out burger, and people have lost that connection writing in
Speaker 1: simultaneously writing in letters about saving the horses among wildlife managers,
Speaker 1: is there any serious talk that that the wild Horse
Speaker 1: and Borough Protection Act was a mistake and that we
Speaker 1: ought to revisit it and repeal it because it's ultimately damaging,
Speaker 1: because it's it's proven to be quite damaging too wild
Speaker 1: horses and wild horse habitat. No, I've not heard anything
Speaker 1: about repealing it, but I've I have heard discussions about
Speaker 1: how we need to really clarify more of what we
Speaker 1: what we are to do. We talk about in in
Speaker 1: the Act, it talks about appropriate management levels and so on.
Speaker 1: That appropriate management level or a mL for those territories
Speaker 1: is determined. It's a very scientific method of deter rmining
Speaker 1: how many animals can reside. It's it's far more than
Speaker 1: carrying capacity, because we we throw that term around a well,
Speaker 1: carrying capacity of this plot of land or this this
Speaker 1: area of land is x y z well, so it's
Speaker 1: far more than that because it does look at the entirety,
Speaker 1: the the whole usage of that area. Yeah, not just
Speaker 1: like how many horses can you cram on it, but
Speaker 1: how many horses can you put on it and still
Speaker 1: have room for you know, for everything, for the fin,
Speaker 1: the feather, the you know, the the animals that are
Speaker 1: being brought in by the permitees, whether they're cattle or sheep. Um,
Speaker 1: certainly all of the you know, the native wildlife, the fish,
Speaker 1: I mean almost hesitate to say this, but you know
Speaker 1: a little mouse, you know that in about that little
Speaker 1: mouse that. Yeah, and so all of those they all
Speaker 1: have a right to live there, they all need to
Speaker 1: exist there. And so we've got to look at Okay,
Speaker 1: what do we do so that we can have that.
Speaker 1: And some people talk about, well, all the different tools
Speaker 1: that are in the toolbox, and and a lot of
Speaker 1: people will say, well, you know we can't have this tool. Well,
Speaker 1: we can't use that tool. Whether it's immuno contraception, whether
Speaker 1: it's the big s, whether it's you know something, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the contraceptive thing. Legitimate. Yes, it really does work
Speaker 1: in populations where you can already have them under control,
Speaker 1: where you've already got manageable population levels. Immuno contraception, I'm
Speaker 1: certified in it, I believe in it. Whether it's I
Speaker 1: love going to conduct actually stops ovulation where p ZP
Speaker 1: depending on the different levels. And that's the other thing
Speaker 1: in science, Um, you look at people, you know, say, well,
Speaker 1: PCPs the way to go and and hs US, you know,
Speaker 1: has the patent on the hundred microgram um dosage of
Speaker 1: p z P. But then you look at different adge
Speaker 1: events and I mean, there's there's so many different things
Speaker 1: that I explain it to people. I said, p z
Speaker 1: P is not just p z P. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like an apple is not just an apple. You've got
Speaker 1: all these different varieties of apples. And that's kind of
Speaker 1: what we're dealing with with p ZP right now, is
Speaker 1: that we have different varieties of it. And so it's
Speaker 1: usage and the response and and what you see in
Speaker 1: literature varies because you've got different concentrations and different adjuvants
Speaker 1: being used. So what is the animal rights perspective on
Speaker 1: on using contraceptives on horses? Because you'd be like, if
Speaker 1: you imagine if someone proposed that we would go and
Speaker 1: inject without consent forcibly inject humans with contraceptives, people would
Speaker 1: be I R. So if you have this idea that
Speaker 1: this is this untouchable thing that should be allowed to
Speaker 1: live its life, and then we have no right to
Speaker 1: come in and manipulate it, Yet we're gonna come in
Speaker 1: and take away its sexual viability without asking it or
Speaker 1: consulting it. Um. I would think that some people would
Speaker 1: recognize that as a pretty offensive idea, but it seems
Speaker 1: to be embraced by people who resist the big gas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hs US owns the patent on the hundred microgram p
Speaker 1: z P. I mean Society, United States. Yes, yeah, and
Speaker 1: so and and they, you know, they have had great
Speaker 1: success in certain areas the Spring Spring Mountain or Spring
Speaker 1: Basin m h m A up in Colorado. Um, they're
Speaker 1: you know, they're having great success there. But it's much smaller.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's sixty eight animals, so it's and you've
Speaker 1: got somebody who lives in amongst them. The animals have
Speaker 1: become acclimated to that that person, so, you know, very
Speaker 1: special circumstances. It's a very different circumstance the prior mountain horses.
Speaker 1: There again, you've got more acclamation to the humans and
Speaker 1: people that are going in and doing the darting. So
Speaker 1: in situations like that, it's very successful and I'm I'm
Speaker 1: very much in supportive those kinds of things. But you
Speaker 1: look at larger, larger landscapes, larger populations, it may not
Speaker 1: be that easy. You've got some i mean, the average
Speaker 1: i'd say, and and this is certainly not scientifically proven,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people will you know, um, and
Speaker 1: I can't pull the papers that Carl's got, But you
Speaker 1: look at like the flight zone of these free ranging horses,
Speaker 1: and it far is much farther than the darting range
Speaker 1: of a dart of a you know, once you see dart.
Speaker 1: So you're looking at courses that when they see a
Speaker 1: human at a quarter mile, they're like, hell, no, I'm gone.
Speaker 1: There's kind of some irony here that, like, the horses
Speaker 1: that are actually treatable are less wild than the horses
Speaker 1: that are untreatable. Right, this flight distance being the distance
Speaker 1: at which they're gonna flee from your presence. So this
Speaker 1: example in Colorado, you know that we're talking wild the
Speaker 1: legal definition, but in terms of wildness like flightiness, if
Speaker 1: they're kind of tame wild horses, then there's the chance
Speaker 1: of applying a contraceptive program that's more effective than if
Speaker 1: they're wilder wild horses. So it's almost like the more
Speaker 1: their wildness is compromised, the more that's a viable option,
Speaker 1: which strikes me as ironic. Wild horses, it's like an
Speaker 1: irony rich it is not iron rich, but irony rich environment. Yes,
Speaker 1: another piece of it that we haven't touched on in
Speaker 1: terms of workable solutions. I'm glad. I'm glad that the
Speaker 1: contraception topic came up. Could you talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about adoptions. I don't think we've spent any time on
Speaker 1: that yet. So a lot of people want, you know,
Speaker 1: any of these horses that are removed, they want them
Speaker 1: to be adopted out. And as per the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: one Act, it said that any horse that was over
Speaker 1: ten years of age was considered probably not adoptable. So
Speaker 1: you can sell those horses because the older horse gets,
Speaker 1: just like a human, the harder it is to change
Speaker 1: their behavior. So so horses that are that are taken
Speaker 1: off the ranges or that that are no longer free
Speaker 1: ranging horses and they're over ten years of age, they're sold. Now.
Speaker 1: Anybody that's under and especially the younger animals, they go
Speaker 1: into adoption, and so adoption is a hundred dollars. Sorry,
Speaker 1: the over ten year olds, they're taken off the range,
Speaker 1: they go to where we pay to have them graze
Speaker 1: on private land. They can go that way, or they
Speaker 1: can be sold outright, and we cannot sell knowingly to
Speaker 1: a slaughter buyer, because they those people do exist, you know,
Speaker 1: because they make their living by taking horses to either Canada.
Speaker 1: Max Yeah, Dave phillips Um, the guy that a wild
Speaker 1: horse country. He spends quite a bit of time talking
Speaker 1: about the illegal trade, right of at times or people
Speaker 1: have said like, oh, no, I have an interest and
Speaker 1: I'll find a place for them, when in fact they're
Speaker 1: getting them and selling them into slaughter, right. And so
Speaker 1: part of what the Act does to um to protect
Speaker 1: those animals is that we are not able to sell
Speaker 1: more than four horses to any one individual, and that
Speaker 1: kind of helps decreased you know, because people realize, you know,
Speaker 1: if somebody's coming in saying, yeah, I want to buy
Speaker 1: six animals, that's a that's a big flag. We go, yeah,
Speaker 1: probably not going to sell to those that person, because
Speaker 1: we we pretty much know. So we do have, at
Speaker 1: least on the Carson National Forest in New Mexico, we
Speaker 1: have a very successful adoption program um for the horses
Speaker 1: that we take off of two of our wild horse
Speaker 1: and borrow territories on the Carson National Forest, and we've
Speaker 1: been very successful in finding forever homes with those animals.
Speaker 1: When you adopt, there is a mandatory one year inspection
Speaker 1: before you can get your bill of sale for that horse,
Speaker 1: Before that horse truly belongs to you, we have to
Speaker 1: go back out and do an inspection, make sure that
Speaker 1: you are instill that you still own the horse, that
Speaker 1: you still are in possession of that horse, and that
Speaker 1: its quality of life is good, that it hasn't gotten
Speaker 1: a pin a key body score of like a two
Speaker 1: or a one, and and that it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: being treated humanely and everything. Because we have that responsibility
Speaker 1: um as for the ACT and the BLM does the
Speaker 1: same thing. So it's a hundred dollars. So how many
Speaker 1: like off the cars in National Force, how many horses
Speaker 1: have come off there and gone into adoption since two
Speaker 1: thousand four? Um, we've had five hundred. Shoot, Sean just
Speaker 1: gave me this number. I think it was five seven animals.
Speaker 1: And right now we're still way. We're about five or
Speaker 1: six times over our a m L five or six times.
Speaker 1: And that's so what does that number for the AM
Speaker 1: for the and the a m L. Is that that
Speaker 1: portion of carson asma for us right for for um
Speaker 1: for one of the territories. Um, we're looking at about
Speaker 1: five hundred seventy one, or it was almost five hundred animals,
Speaker 1: right around five animals, and you feel like you should
Speaker 1: have about a hundred. I was reading that into like,
Speaker 1: that's the high range of the A m L. Because
Speaker 1: A m L s are given in a range so
Speaker 1: that it allows for fluctuations based on drought and forage availability,
Speaker 1: and so you'll always have a lower range in the
Speaker 1: A m L and then a higher upper range. And
Speaker 1: we are at exceeding our higher upper range five or
Speaker 1: six times. I was reading about the ways that wild
Speaker 1: horse numbers can explode when conditions are good, that in
Speaker 1: two thousand seven there was an estimated twenty eight point
Speaker 1: five thousand, while the horses in the American West ten
Speaker 1: years later in an estimated eighty three thousand. Right, because
Speaker 1: it's given that in any given year, we we say
Speaker 1: that our reproductive rate is and so you look at
Speaker 1: in five years that population is a greater than it
Speaker 1: was five years previous. So if you just take the
Speaker 1: Carson National Forest part of it, is there enough demand?
Speaker 1: Are people waiting in line to adopt one of these horses? No? No,
Speaker 1: I mean we don't have four hundred people saying like
Speaker 1: go get Me one, and the BLM actually had some
Speaker 1: numbers published from their databases UM looking back to the
Speaker 1: number of adoptions UM, so they had nine thousand, seven
Speaker 1: hundred adoptions nationally. Ten years later in two thousand five
Speaker 1: it was down from d to fifty seven hundred. Then
Speaker 1: from two thousand five to twenty six teen it went
Speaker 1: down from to and twelve. So I've heard talking maybe
Speaker 1: you could confirm it to Lonni. But the idea of
Speaker 1: the adoption market being saturated over time, like the people
Speaker 1: who wanted to adopt a horse have adopted a horse,
Speaker 1: and so the ratio of them that during these round
Speaker 1: ups when they go out and capture to try to
Speaker 1: reduce the population on the landscape closer to a m
Speaker 1: L rather than those being adopted, they're going more and
Speaker 1: more and more to the holding facilities. So a downward
Speaker 1: trend in adoption. Meanwhile an upward trend in the population
Speaker 1: both in in holding facilities and on the landscape, to
Speaker 1: the point where there's forty four thousand and holding facilities
Speaker 1: forty six thousand as of two thousand seventeen. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and to your point about the population growth again, looking
Speaker 1: at the BLM, numbers which are readily available online. Between
Speaker 1: eighteen there was at increase on range, so not including
Speaker 1: the ones that are being held at the facilities, and
Speaker 1: that bumping population was from an estimated seventy two thousand,
Speaker 1: six hundred seventy four up to fifty one and the
Speaker 1: a m L the max a m L is twenty
Speaker 1: six thousand, six ninety so the max mL is basically
Speaker 1: being exceeded by about in order of three man. It
Speaker 1: seems like an insurmountable problem. Have you heard the argument,
Speaker 1: You're you're shaking your head, have you heard the argument?
Speaker 1: Years ago, I was working on a story about magazine
Speaker 1: story about livestock theft and and that led me into
Speaker 1: some other conversations with people in the livestock world and
Speaker 1: a in a in a stock detective guy who investigates
Speaker 1: livestock theft. I was talking about the un the unanticipated
Speaker 1: consequences of when we closed the horse slaughter facilities in
Speaker 1: the US, where when you had horror slaughter facilities in
Speaker 1: the US and people could sell unwanted horses to slaughter facilities,
Speaker 1: it created an outlet for unwanted horses. And he felt
Speaker 1: that once you remove that outlet, even though you could
Speaker 1: still sell into Canada Mexico, which was much less convenient
Speaker 1: and far more expensive and less profitable for operators that
Speaker 1: without that outlet, he saw he and his colleagues saw
Speaker 1: a dramatic increase in horse abuse and neglect, and a
Speaker 1: dramatic increase in feral horses on the landscape, because suddenly
Speaker 1: it used to be that all horses had some monetary value,
Speaker 1: and it went to being that most horses. Now there
Speaker 1: was no value for unwanted horses. And he felt it
Speaker 1: was like one of these great like I said, unanticipated
Speaker 1: or unforeseen consequences of an action, where supposedly, in an
Speaker 1: act to eliminate horse suffering, you open the floodgates of
Speaker 1: horse suffering by creating a problem. He said, we used
Speaker 1: to get phone calls because someone's horse had been stolen.
Speaker 1: Now we get phone calls because someone has a horse
Speaker 1: in their yard and they don't know where it came from.
Speaker 1: And he sites that shift in particular, and he talked
Speaker 1: about in California that shift and leading to new populations
Speaker 1: of wild horses and places where they didn't previously exist
Speaker 1: because people would simply load a stock trailer with unwanted
Speaker 1: horses and drive it out and open the gate. And
Speaker 1: that's that's where I was saying on especially on tribal lands.
Speaker 1: That's one of the theories that tribal land managers have
Speaker 1: of why we have so many free ranging horses on
Speaker 1: tribal lands is because in in the urban populations that
Speaker 1: are close to tribal lands, people will get a horse
Speaker 1: or a pony, you know, and they're, oh, I want
Speaker 1: to buy this from my daughter. She really wants this
Speaker 1: horse or whatnot, and it's so cool to have a horse.
Speaker 1: And then they realize that, you know, hey, is well
Speaker 1: this year good quality horse. Alfalfa is you know, fifteen
Speaker 1: dollars of bail and Timothy is upwards of bail. And
Speaker 1: that's really what your veterinarian tells you. You should be
Speaker 1: feeding your horse. And oh, by the way you put
Speaker 1: all that into him, what's going to come out the
Speaker 1: other end? And now I have to deal with all
Speaker 1: this poop and it becomes overwhelming and maybe not every
Speaker 1: horse is you know, black, beauty and um, and it's
Speaker 1: not as nice a horse is what they thought it was.
Speaker 1: Or the kid loses interest because now they'd rather be
Speaker 1: playing PlayStation as opposed to outside working with the horse,
Speaker 1: and you know, just a whole bunch of factors. So
Speaker 1: now there's this unwanted horse and they don't know what
Speaker 1: to do with it. Well, the most two main thing
Speaker 1: in their mind is let's take it out and put
Speaker 1: it on the landscape. Oh yeah, there's that tribal land
Speaker 1: out there, and the horse can run out there because
Speaker 1: there's plenty of grass, not realizing that a lot of
Speaker 1: that grass is non native grass that you know, doesn't
Speaker 1: have a high palatability factor and it may look lush,
Speaker 1: but even the cows won't eat it. The deer and
Speaker 1: the elk won't eat it, you know, the antelope aren't
Speaker 1: eating it. And so they put this horse out there thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm doing a good thing because I'm gonna let it
Speaker 1: go out there and eat all that free grass. Starvation camp.
Speaker 1: The same stock detective talked about that too, that you
Speaker 1: could track incidences of wild horses in relation to alf
Speaker 1: alfa prices. Yeah, the more expensive feed got, the more
Speaker 1: wild horses around the landscape because people couldn't afford to
Speaker 1: take care of him. And have you seen the movie,
Speaker 1: the seventies movie Um The Electric Horseman with Robert Redford
Speaker 1: when he goes to cut his horse loose. What does
Speaker 1: he do? He drives out until he finds some horses
Speaker 1: out on the horizon and turns his turns his loose.
Speaker 1: I don't you know, Carl, you got more? What more
Speaker 1: do you have? You I've been, I've been over here.
Speaker 1: It's like I can't even like do my job. I
Speaker 1: can't even do my job right now. I can't do
Speaker 1: my job right now of walking through this because I
Speaker 1: get it's like, I'm so baffled. I'm so baffled by
Speaker 1: the mindsets that are on display when we're talking about
Speaker 1: individuals who are taking steps that they think are improving,
Speaker 1: alleviating suffering, improving the world, that in fact are so
Speaker 1: obviously driving negatives that it makes it like it makes
Speaker 1: it difficult for me to carry on the conversation because
Speaker 1: I want to step out and just try to understand
Speaker 1: it better. Yeah. No, it's a it's a really tough
Speaker 1: position to be in. It's there's no there's no easy solution,
Speaker 1: and a lot of a lot of really good people
Speaker 1: who care a whole heck of a lot about the
Speaker 1: well being of horses and about the well being of
Speaker 1: range conditions and about the well being of rural economies
Speaker 1: that are dependent upon these systems. Have been banging their
Speaker 1: heads against the wall for years trying to come up
Speaker 1: with a solution. And um, there are very disparate competing
Speaker 1: value sets at play here. So UM, you know you
Speaker 1: you're coming at this from a relatively well informed standpoint
Speaker 1: on in terms of the ecological consequences. Um, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people, frankly, are looking at it from
Speaker 1: a really simple lens. They like horses. They don't want
Speaker 1: anything bad to happen to the horses. They want the
Speaker 1: horses to be free. End of conversation, move on to
Speaker 1: something else. It's not something that I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people have put a ton of thought into. Necessarily,
Speaker 1: we don't want anything bad to happen to the horse.
Speaker 1: If it happened from a person Diana thirst getting killed
Speaker 1: by a line, that's all cool. Yeah, But we're at
Speaker 1: a point now, I mean, and and you know, I'm
Speaker 1: recognized I'm preaching to the choir here a little bit.
Speaker 1: But the distribution of species and habitats on the landscape
Speaker 1: on the face of the earth are are driven by
Speaker 1: our decisions. Like the places where we still have wildness
Speaker 1: and wildlife are there because humans have decided it to
Speaker 1: be so. And the places where we don't have those
Speaker 1: characteristics on the landscape are places we haven't made that
Speaker 1: a priority. So it comes down to what we value.
Speaker 1: And you know, this Act some of the language that
Speaker 1: we haven't really talked about in the Act um. You've
Speaker 1: made a couple of comments, Steve about the um. The
Speaker 1: degree to which we attribute wildness to the species is
Speaker 1: it's something that that is rooted in science, is it's
Speaker 1: something that is rooted in reality. And really it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter because it's something that's rooted in the Law. The
Speaker 1: Wild and the Wild and Free Roaming Horses and Burrows
Speaker 1: Act states as the policy of Congress that wild free
Speaker 1: roaming horses and burrows shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment,
Speaker 1: or death. And to accomplish this there to be considered
Speaker 1: in the area where presently found as an integral part
Speaker 1: of the natural system of the public lands. That is
Speaker 1: federal law. So it's not the ecology of it doesn't
Speaker 1: even matter, right it it's a federal law by law
Speaker 1: there to be in the American psyche at that time,
Speaker 1: I think you know, probably these issues around inhumane treatment.
Speaker 1: We're driving this. It captured the minds of America leading
Speaker 1: up to the nineteen seventy one passage of the Act.
Speaker 1: And even if you read the language here, it's none
Speaker 1: of this is is science. Frankly, it's I'll read a
Speaker 1: little bit more of it to to get the point across.
Speaker 1: Congress finds and declares that wild free roaming horses and
Speaker 1: burrows are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit
Speaker 1: of the West, that they contribute to the diversity of
Speaker 1: life forms within the nation and enrich the lives of
Speaker 1: the American people, and that these horses and burrows are
Speaker 1: fast disappearing from the American scene. It is the policy
Speaker 1: of Congress that wild free roaming horses and burros shall
Speaker 1: be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death. And to
Speaker 1: accomplish this, they're to be considered in the area where
Speaker 1: presently found as an integral part of the natural system
Speaker 1: of the public lands. It's beautiful, eloquent language, has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with ecology. They've captured the spirit of the
Speaker 1: American West, you know, so when you're trying to manage that,
Speaker 1: gunfights also kind of capture that spirit, you know. When
Speaker 1: in in the movie Hidalgo, when Vigo Mortenson after he
Speaker 1: wins the Big Arabian you know, the the race, the
Speaker 1: Endurance Race over in South Saudi Arabia, and he comes
Speaker 1: back and he takes Hidalago back to Montana, and he
Speaker 1: lets him go and says, go be within. And the
Speaker 1: picture that you see, I mean, that's what people are
Speaker 1: looking at. And and yes, maybe there are were limited
Speaker 1: areas where you see things like that, and it's but
Speaker 1: it's very romantic, it's very touching. And I wish that
Speaker 1: they all looked that wonderful. I wish that the landscape
Speaker 1: all looks like that, but it doesn't. And so we
Speaker 1: have a responsibility two keep the land where it is,
Speaker 1: try to keep that land so that it can be productive,
Speaker 1: so they can be beautiful. It's difficult when you're in
Speaker 1: these very arid landscapes and there's you know, a caring
Speaker 1: capacity for a cow might be a thousand acres per cow.
Speaker 1: So the cows are going or the deer or the
Speaker 1: elk are going, you know, miles to find that one
Speaker 1: blade of grass or that one you know, um, a
Speaker 1: little bit of oak, which you know oak will kill
Speaker 1: a horse, but um, but you know, see, I think
Speaker 1: we we lose that sense because Hollywood has given us
Speaker 1: these images that that people see and and that's what
Speaker 1: they focus on. You know, they look at at Hidalgo
Speaker 1: and what great measures this mustang did and how he
Speaker 1: beat all the Arabian horses, you know, and everything that.
Speaker 1: You know, they see Vigo mortons and oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: that's what That's what people look at. That's what they
Speaker 1: associate to, and not the cruel reality that a lot
Speaker 1: of these horses are starving in and a hundred and
Speaker 1: nine two of them are dying of thirst and getting
Speaker 1: stuck in the mire on the Navajo Nation in Arizona,
Speaker 1: because there was nothing left for them to eat. That's
Speaker 1: a really good point, and I think that speaks to
Speaker 1: where we are right now in the conversation and what
Speaker 1: likely is ahead in the conversation. The more of those
Speaker 1: kind of instances you have, you can't possibly talk about
Speaker 1: the welfare of these horses when you have situations where
Speaker 1: they're dying by the hundreds due to a lack of
Speaker 1: resources on the landscape and we're not addressing it. You know,
Speaker 1: it's anybody who's willing to spend sixty seconds thinking about
Speaker 1: it will recognize that there's something in the system has
Speaker 1: to change. Right what is what is happening on the
Speaker 1: landscape right now is not sustainable. There are a whole
Speaker 1: host of negative consequences, whether you want to think about
Speaker 1: it from an ecological perspective and the other species on
Speaker 1: the landscape that are being detrimentally affected, or what they
Speaker 1: want to think about it from animal welfare perspective, what's
Speaker 1: happening right now is not optimal. I mean even you
Speaker 1: know these infographics that I've been printing off from the
Speaker 1: Bureau of Land Management, the the language that they use.
Speaker 1: You know, population population is going up, adoptions are going down.
Speaker 1: There's not There's not much here that is like a
Speaker 1: silver lining or a positive takeaway. It's basically recognition that
Speaker 1: we're in a really tough place right now, and um,
Speaker 1: there are difficult decisions ahead about what to do. You know,
Speaker 1: do we want to continue allowing our shared public lands
Speaker 1: to be dramatically impacted in some places and and the
Speaker 1: wildlife other than the horses um suffering and folks trying
Speaker 1: to produce livestock on those landscapes being negatively affected. At
Speaker 1: some point, something's got to change. My perspective on what
Speaker 1: has the change, I have like great clarity on it
Speaker 1: because I understand the argument that people give for why
Speaker 1: they want to recognize them as a form of wildlife.
Speaker 1: I understand it so well I could masquerade as someone
Speaker 1: who held that opinion and deliver it in a somewhat
Speaker 1: convincing way. So I understand it to that level. But
Speaker 1: I just like wholesale reject the idea. And I think
Speaker 1: that from my perspective, the primary, our primary objective when
Speaker 1: looking at land management should be towards the long term
Speaker 1: sustainability of native wildlife and anything that I shouldn't say
Speaker 1: anything that stands in the way, but many of the
Speaker 1: things that stand in the way of the long term
Speaker 1: sustainability of native wildlife would have to move side. And
Speaker 1: I think that it was a tragic mistake that we
Speaker 1: would go and enact a piece of legislation that so
Speaker 1: wholly tied the hands of future generations and addressing a
Speaker 1: problem that I feel should have been anticipated. It's it's
Speaker 1: just the mess, and it's on people's minds because we
Speaker 1: get emails constantly from people being like, dude, I don't
Speaker 1: understand the wild horse situation. You know, me like you
Speaker 1: got a couple of hours. Yeah. There's a great quote
Speaker 1: from Dave Phillips in this article that I've poked out
Speaker 1: a little bit today that I agree with wholeheartedly. Um,
Speaker 1: he says. Wild Horse advocacy groups have blasted the plans
Speaker 1: and are preparing for a legal fight. In all likelihood, though,
Speaker 1: none of these ideas will make it out of Washington,
Speaker 1: particularly unlikely as the slaughter option. No one in Congress
Speaker 1: wants to vote to turn an American symbol into sausage.
Speaker 1: That's from this Dave Phillips article, And I think that's right.
Speaker 1: You know, if you think about the political landscape, you
Speaker 1: put yourself in the shoes of an elected representative, you
Speaker 1: know who wants to have the proverbial blood on their
Speaker 1: hands to make that kind of a decision. You think
Speaker 1: about being on the campaign trail, and I guess the
Speaker 1: question would be, what what proportion of America shares your perspective? Steve,
Speaker 1: I can't answer that. Yeah, you yeah, I do. One
Speaker 1: guy and he agrees, I have no idea. Man, I
Speaker 1: have no idea. There's not a quick fix. And and
Speaker 1: what a lot of people are looking for is they
Speaker 1: want they want us to do a cookbook and get
Speaker 1: hand them a little three by five card that says,
Speaker 1: if you do steps one, two and three and four
Speaker 1: in this order, you will no longer have any issues. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's not a quick fix, but there's not a slow fix.
Speaker 1: And and and a lot of it is driven by
Speaker 1: what he was saying, litigation. You know, we tie things
Speaker 1: up in courts of law with people that have probably
Speaker 1: never even smelled a horse. They have no idea, and
Speaker 1: they've never gone out to where these animals are living.
Speaker 1: They have no idea. And so those of us that
Speaker 1: live out here and and this is what we do,
Speaker 1: and this is our passion. I want to do what's
Speaker 1: best by the horses. And sometimes it's you know, the
Speaker 1: hardest thing for me as a veterinarian. And I tell
Speaker 1: people this all the time. I went to vet school
Speaker 1: to above all, do no harm, because that was huge.
Speaker 1: That was what we were taught. Above all, do no harm.
Speaker 1: But what are we doing right now by not having
Speaker 1: you know, in a lot of in a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: we are causing more harm. Maybe not to one individual
Speaker 1: when we look at you know, just that a single individual,
Speaker 1: but when we look at the landscape as a whole,
Speaker 1: to our entire planet. We are doing harm. And that's
Speaker 1: tough because it calls for some really tough decisions that
Speaker 1: people don't want to to face. And it's hard. Yeah, jeez.
Speaker 1: I ask just like in like a perfect world, if
Speaker 1: if you are now controller of the wild horse issue,
Speaker 1: you could legislate as you please give her the give
Speaker 1: her that you could be commander of the universe, man
Speaker 1: or of the universe, and you can point it gun
Speaker 1: to anybody and say, do as I wish, what would
Speaker 1: what would it look like? What would what would be
Speaker 1: a possible solution er? And I have to think about
Speaker 1: that because you know, as as a force service official,
Speaker 1: I have to go by what the what the federal
Speaker 1: law says. I appreciate, I appreciate that you feel that way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have to. I have to do what the law says,
Speaker 1: and so I have to protect those horses. I have
Speaker 1: to do what's right by those populations that are mandated
Speaker 1: in the law. And so I will do everything that
Speaker 1: I can to protect to maintain uh multiple use viability,
Speaker 1: to make sure that that forest is still able to survive,
Speaker 1: that the grass can still grow there, that the trees
Speaker 1: can still exist, that the little mouse can still exist.
Speaker 1: The horses that are there can exist, the the deer,
Speaker 1: the antelope, you know, everybody that is supposed to be there,
Speaker 1: even down to the earthworms and the rubs that are
Speaker 1: in the ground and sub level, that they all can
Speaker 1: be there. That's what I work on. What's your method
Speaker 1: of protection is what's kind of tricky and contested. That's
Speaker 1: what's tough. You know, we remove um. I'm all about
Speaker 1: trying to find as many homes for these animals. Um.
Speaker 1: I own one myself and and I have an adoption
Speaker 1: Momo Momo, my big old may Bay Mayor. She's she's
Speaker 1: she's gone through gentling. She's now in a trainer's hands
Speaker 1: and he's working with her. And and he's told me,
Speaker 1: he said, it'll be a while before you can write her.
Speaker 1: She's a tough one, you know. She's three probably going
Speaker 1: on four UM, and she came off the Modoc National Forest.
Speaker 1: But I'm not giving up hope. You know, I've had her.
Speaker 1: It'll be a year in September um and and she
Speaker 1: was a purchase because she was deemed unadoptable at the
Speaker 1: Devil's Garden facilities. So we've brought thirty six animals from
Speaker 1: California to our facility on the Carson National Forest. Um.
Speaker 1: One of the animals was in very poor health than
Speaker 1: we had to euthanize a guilding. Um. We have several
Speaker 1: mayors that we're using for our low stress baiting on
Speaker 1: the Carson National Forest where we use them as an
Speaker 1: attractant for other animals that come in a form of
Speaker 1: like Judas Horse kind of sort of yeah. Um, and
Speaker 1: then you know we we got everybody else a permanent home. Carl,
Speaker 1: can you entertain the commander of the universe? Are you
Speaker 1: not allowed to do that? I got a couple of
Speaker 1: things I want to say, but I'm not going I'm
Speaker 1: not going to command you can't do the commander. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to take the reins on what we do
Speaker 1: from here. I think Solani's points really well taken. I mean, ultimately,
Speaker 1: our job is to um execute the law. You know,
Speaker 1: what we're told by the American people the Congress as
Speaker 1: our legal mandate is what we're here to do. I
Speaker 1: think it's worth pointing out some of the ecological science
Speaker 1: around the issue so that folks who are involved in
Speaker 1: the democratic process can weigh in in a more informed
Speaker 1: manner um. But ultimately it's not up to us to
Speaker 1: be the controllers of the universe because we are in
Speaker 1: fact public servants. We work for the American people, so
Speaker 1: we do what we are told by all of you,
Speaker 1: our bosses. You all are the controllers of um our
Speaker 1: programs of work. So that's one of the um limitations
Speaker 1: and beauties of being a public servant, I suppose. But
Speaker 1: there are a couple of things I want to point
Speaker 1: out thinking about the ecology of horses, all right, going
Speaker 1: back to the place to see when we had not
Speaker 1: just wild horses, but like the wildest landscape that you
Speaker 1: could imagine clearly a prey species being haunted by a
Speaker 1: whole host of incredible carnivores that I've already described, saber
Speaker 1: tooth tigers, short faced bears, dire wolves, American lions, human beings.
Speaker 1: So it's a species that has evolved as a prey animal.
Speaker 1: And getting to your point, Steve, about this topic being
Speaker 1: one which is very irony rich. Another paper we're going
Speaker 1: to share recently came out that speaks to this debate
Speaker 1: about whether or not the coortinary megafonal extinctions were driven
Speaker 1: by more by climate or more by people. There's a
Speaker 1: really cool fresh science paper that came out um by
Speaker 1: Felicia Smith at All titled body sized downgrading of Mammals
Speaker 1: over the Late Coortinary. When all these huge species from
Speaker 1: around around globe we're just dropping off like flies. And
Speaker 1: here's a quote from the abstract. Although all habitable continents
Speaker 1: once harbored giant mammals, the few remaining species are largely
Speaker 1: confined to Africa. This decline is coincident with the global
Speaker 1: expansion of hominins over the late coortinary. So they go
Speaker 1: through and and present a pretty compelling case for the
Speaker 1: likelihood of humans being the source of the extinction of
Speaker 1: all of these large mammals, not just in North America
Speaker 1: but around the globe. They kind of trace the expansion
Speaker 1: of humans and the concurrent elimination of all these big
Speaker 1: you know, giant ground sloth, wooly rhinoceros, sabretooth tiger. List
Speaker 1: goes on, Yeah, I want to can I can I
Speaker 1: expand that just real quick first, at least jump on it. So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's the thing put out by someone by the last
Speaker 1: name of Martin Uh and another guy, the blitz Creek
Speaker 1: hypothesis will be the idea that you see the large
Speaker 1: mammal extinctions occur with the arrival of man. And what's
Speaker 1: interesting is you go and look like people arrived in
Speaker 1: Australia forty or fifty thousand years ago on that continent.
Speaker 1: That's when you see the elimination of the large mega fauna.
Speaker 1: You see the elimination of the large mega faunta in Europe,
Speaker 1: which closely resembled the large mega fauna we had here,
Speaker 1: occur twenty thousand years earlier than it did here, contemporaneous
Speaker 1: with the arrival of modern man there. And then you
Speaker 1: see these last little holdout locations of large mega fauna,
Speaker 1: like on Wrangle Island in the Baring Sea, where a
Speaker 1: mammoth existed until four thousand years ago, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem that anyone showed up there till around four thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. It winds up being it makes it paints
Speaker 1: of there's a very compelling argument. It's not bulletproof, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of problems with it, but there's this really
Speaker 1: compelling argument that there's something about the arrival of humans
Speaker 1: that spells trouble for man. And of course you have
Speaker 1: the African exception. The African exception is that people had
Speaker 1: always existed on that landscape and a large mega fauna
Speaker 1: had learned strategies to coexist with humans, and it didn't
Speaker 1: work in places where all of a sudden people just
Speaker 1: show up and walk up to these things and jab
Speaker 1: them with a spear because the animals had not had
Speaker 1: a chance to learn how to coexist with humans. It's
Speaker 1: a really interesting idea, and you're gonna like this paper
Speaker 1: if you haven't already. Yeah, Okay. So they also talk
Speaker 1: about climate. They kind of the historical climatic cycles, and
Speaker 1: they point to the fact that there had been a
Speaker 1: number of these fairly similarly dramatic changes in climate historically
Speaker 1: prior to the expansion of hominence, where these giant animals
Speaker 1: persisted through those climate changes, like like twenty some glacial episodes. Right.
Speaker 1: So one of the interesting as a brief aside, one
Speaker 1: of the interesting predictions in this paper they talk about
Speaker 1: if we continue on the trajectory were on in terms
Speaker 1: of the loss of large mammals and looking at the
Speaker 1: species that are threatened with potential extinction on the horizon.
Speaker 1: You know, many of our largest mammals, as an example,
Speaker 1: Rhinoceros um African elephants, et cetera. The authors here say, thus,
Speaker 1: the largest mammal on Earth and a few hundred years
Speaker 1: may well be the domestic cow at about nine So
Speaker 1: the takeaway from this paper, though with regard to horses,
Speaker 1: is that this is a species which evolved as a
Speaker 1: prey species, including a human relationship to it as predators,
Speaker 1: likely to the point where we played a central role
Speaker 1: in the elimination of the original wild horses which we're
Speaker 1: now trying to resurrect, while also staying totally out of
Speaker 1: the equation in terms of any kind of population management
Speaker 1: to your point about it being irony rich. And then
Speaker 1: another paper that I want to share, also from Science UM,
Speaker 1: talks about the ancestry of domestic and Perswolski horses, and
Speaker 1: Perswolski horses were long thought to be the last remaining
Speaker 1: truly wild horse lineage UM and these researchers did a
Speaker 1: bunch of genetic analyzes and compared modern day Preswolski horses
Speaker 1: to various potential sources and essentially came to the conclusion
Speaker 1: that even the modern Perswolski horses are the direct descendants
Speaker 1: of horse is which were maintained for agricultural purposes about
Speaker 1: four thousand years ago um by bow tie people, and
Speaker 1: this was a very different relationship to horses. They talked
Speaker 1: about these archaeological sites where they found horse dung as
Speaker 1: well as evidence for pole axing, which would have been
Speaker 1: a way of dispatching horses, and they found evidence against
Speaker 1: selective body part transportation, suggesting controlled slaughter at settlements rather
Speaker 1: than hunting. Tools associated with leather, leather thong production, bit
Speaker 1: related dental pathologies and equine milk fats within ceramics support
Speaker 1: pastoral husbandry involving milking and harnessing. So these were people
Speaker 1: four thousand years ago living with the predecessors of the
Speaker 1: horses that have long thought to be the last wild
Speaker 1: horses in a situation where they're maintaining them for milking
Speaker 1: and also pole axing them for meat in their settlements
Speaker 1: as opposed to hunting forum. So a couple of takeaways
Speaker 1: would be just another example of the complexity of this
Speaker 1: relationship that we have to horses and the fact that
Speaker 1: four thousand years ago, the descendants the ancestors of the
Speaker 1: horses that we thought were the last wild horses domestic species.
Speaker 1: So let's say for a moment that we want to
Speaker 1: we want to treat these special status horses today as
Speaker 1: a wild species. To do so in the absence of
Speaker 1: any kind of meaningful predation, whether it's from a non
Speaker 1: human predator or a human predator, just seems like a
Speaker 1: recipe for more of what we've experienced thus far. And
Speaker 1: then the last point I would make is the horse
Speaker 1: issues are largely of an American public land issue. We've
Speaker 1: talked about the tribal lands issue, and we're talking about
Speaker 1: forest service and BLM management. We're talking about our shared
Speaker 1: American public lands. And to the point I made earlier
Speaker 1: about us Tailanni and I, you know, we're public servants.
Speaker 1: We do what the people want us to do as
Speaker 1: employees of the U. S D a forest service. The
Speaker 1: condition of our shared public lands and the work being
Speaker 1: done on those public lands, whatever is being prioritized or
Speaker 1: not prioritized to me, paints are very powerful and telling
Speaker 1: picture of the priorities and values and knowledge of the
Speaker 1: people of our country. Full stop, full stop. We're responding
Speaker 1: to what the people want, all right, You're honest, No,
Speaker 1: I can't. Dr Carl Malcolm and Dr Tilani Francisco, thank
Speaker 1: you very much for joining us and taking some time
Speaker 1: to talk about feral horses, and also the wild ones
Speaker 1: and the free ranging ones, and the free ranging ones,
Speaker 1: the special status ones, and the ones that one might
Speaker 1: argue we have a few too many of, so thanks
Speaker 1: again