Feral horses

HARPERC

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
7,647
Location
Spokane, WA
I saw this with my own eyes the week of Sept 20 at the Lander One Shot. Our 29th year there. I would rarely see more than 15 or 20 mule deer during the whole hunt week. This year we saw hundreds of mulie does in very large herds. Hundreds? I'm talking 450-600 head.
 
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.
:) 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.
 
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