Native Wild Horses? Horse Shit

Animal Rights groups are suing the Bureau of Land Management claiming that its removal of wild horses and burros from the area around Susanville, CA was unlawful. The lawsuit claims that the BLM didn’t prepare an environmental impact report before it removed the horses and that, since horses are native to the American West, they should be treated like native animals and not like an invasive species that can be pushed aside and replaced with cattle.

I try to avoid name-calling as much as I can, but these people are morons.

Horses in North America went extinct about 10,000 years ago. Saying that these feral horses are a native species because their now-extinct ancestors lived here is like saying that cattle are native because there were buffalo here before them, and they’re pretty much the same right? We could also re-introduce elephants as native species, since the wooly mammoth roamed North America thousands of years ago. And God forbid someone actually clones a triceratops, because the animal rights groups will undoubtedly demand the restoration of their populations.

The horses that roam Nevada and the other western states right now are descended from the horses brought over by European explorers. They have no natural predators that can make a real dent in their numbers. They reproduce rampantly, and horses in general are just hard on the land. If these groups are able to halt the removal of horses by the BLM they will soon have to choose between allowing cattle and sheep to graze and allowing feral horses to graze. Then they will have to choose between letting the BLM scientifically manage the horse population and watching the horses starve to death. Then they will blame the BLM and whichever president is in power for not taking action sooner.

Although so far in my blog I have advocated for allowing ranchers to shoot wolves and for allowing the BLM to remove wild horses from the range, I really don’t hate these animals. I have been lucky enough to see wolves in the wild and I own a mustang I adopted from the BLM’s program. I don’t want to see these animals wiped out any more than the biggest vegan weenies out there do. What I do want is for these animals’ populations to be scientifically managed by agencies that don’t have agendas and that understand the science behind the choices they make. I want conservation to be truly sustainable, and not a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived injustice.