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Feral horses

H

HARPERC

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
7,684
Location
Spokane, WA
crazymonkey said:
Just wish people would see the damage feral animals have done. We to have horses and a problem with the horse lovers not willing to see how destructive they can be . It's not just horses but donkeys also . It's truly a big problem here in Arizona.
Click to expand...
:) Very true, we used to have a mini Donkey in our pasture- it seemed she would eat as much pasture as our 1200 pound Angus Cows. They don't have the same level of Rumen efficiency. Had a bad drought and had to take her to the sale barn.
 
Arizona is getting bad in feral horses and burros. I never hear much about round ups. At one time ~10 years ago, we were 5x over the limit of burros. Now the horse activists are trying to stop any horse actions taken by agencies around the state.
I'm encouraged by the immediate improvements on WY tribal land where ferals have been cleared.
 
This has been obvious to common sense people for at least a century, my great great and great grandpa's made a good part of their living rounding up the wild horses in CA, OR and NV. It had to be done so that they had game to hunt and grazing for cattle. Old/bad genetics/lame whatever horses were sold for animal feed, hides, glue etc. The old timers were smart enough to round up all the stud horses they could and put good genetic stud horses out there to breed the mares that were left after all the bad genetics were mostly gone, they got generally good quality cow horses out of the young horses in the wild roundups after 15-20 years of managing the herd. My dad had a mustang from that desert until I was a teenager. Cranky bastard but a superb riding horse.
 
I love a good horse, have had horses all my life. But wild horses etc need to be controlled. They are very destructive. But some people are crazy, they want save every thing no matter the cost and or destruction to others.
 
I've had horses, and treated them as well as they can be treated. Feral horses no use for whatsoever. Old enough to remember the Game department managing them. 1 a day at one point, never ran out of them.

The newest song when confronted with horses as a non-native species is "rewilding" they were here 10,000 years ago so we're just bringing them back like wooly mammoths.

Given they are just abandoned pets, or livestock, if we got rid of all of them starting over won't be an issue.

Another article.

wyofile.com

Overpopulated wild horses are hurting sage grouse survival rates, Wyoming study finds - WyoFile

Research, nearly 15 years in the making, suggests that non-native equines add another stressor to the struggles of sagebrush-dependent birds.
wyofile.com wyofile.com
 
One of the other destructive things burros do is kick up waterline between series of guzzlers. Ranchers constantly have to mend those lines between guzzlers which also water wildlife of all kinds. It's really a problem in the Arizona desert ranches on BLM lands. I'm not sure if horses are that destructive except they eat a lot of food in competition with wildlife.
 
Bob Wright said:
Now the horse activists are trying to stop any horse actions taken by agencies around the state.
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More idiots who like the idea of the pretty horses running wild, never actually go and see what they're doing.

There are a bunch of fancy riding stables around Fort Worth, rich people with money to burn playing cowboy in an arena on a horse that doesn't ever walk more than 100 feet without hitting a fence and only travels on a trailer. There are worse things in life than death, living in a box is apparently fine yet dying isn't. People projecting their own fears of mortality on animals.

For all the hippie dippy low-IQ rejects, somehow "non-native" is part of "restoring nature". There's not a lot I wouldn't do to have native prairie grasses back instead of the bluestem and johnson grass.
 
The herd closest to me is famous for letting people get close to them. I've been thirty yards or so, they are very mellow for real ferals (not recently abandoned trained horses). Every so often though some dewy eyed birdbrain tries to pet one and they get chewed on pretty good. I'd like to think those animals are doing their own PR for controlling the numbers. Of instagrammers lol.
 

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