Science Friday - The West’s Wild Horses | Artist Explores History Of Humans Genetically Modifying Pigs

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Reporter Ashley Ahearn bought a wild horse from the federal government for $125. Also, with opera and visual art, an exhibit looks at modern genetic engineering of pigs.The Captivating Story Of The West’s Wild HorsesWild mustangs are an icon of the American West, conjuring a romantic vision of horses galloping free on an open prairie. But in reality, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) says the sensitive Western ecosystem can’t handle the existing population of horses.There are about 80,000 wild horses in the American West, a number that grows about 10-20% each year. The BLM says the fragile, arid rangelands the horses occupy can only support a third of that number before they overgraze habitats critical for other species. This has led to controversial roundups to get wild horses off the open range.Science and environment reporter Ashley Ahearn dove deep into the history, symbolism, and ecological impact of the West’s mustangs for the new podcast Mustang. She even adopted a wild horse, named Boo, from the federal government for $125. Ashley speaks with guest host Flora Lichtman about her boots-on-the-ground reporting, and what she learned from how tribal nations manage mustangs.An Artist Explores The History Of Humans Genetically Modifying PigsOver 100,000 people are waiting for organ donations in the United States. Many will likely never receive one, since there are so few available. So scientists are turning to pigs for potential alternatives. Their organs are remarkably similar to ours, and scientists are now using CRISPR to modify pigs’ DNA to improve transplantation outcomes. But although the field has shown major advances in the last decade, the technique isn’t ready yet. Recently, a patient who received a modified pig heart died six weeks after the surgery.Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg was intrigued by these recent advances, and looked into humanity’s history of modifying the pig over thousands of years for her new gallery exhibit, Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera. For the work, she interviewed scientists and archaeologists and even filmed in a lab that’s experimenting with genetically modifying pigs to create more human-compatible organs.In the resulting documentary, which plays in the exhibit, the words from the scientists she interviewed are transposed into an opera composed by musician Bethany Barrett. Visitors can also find 3D-printed clay pig statues and a timeline of how humans have transformed pigs over ten millennia, thanks to selective breeding.Dewey-Hagborg sat down with SciFri producer D. Peterschmidt to talk about how the exhibit came together, and how CRISPR could further transform pigs and our relationship to them. To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Did you know that the U.S. has too many wild horses? Now we're at a point where some scientists are sounding the alarm that we're facing an ecological and ecosystem collapse. It's Thursday, November 23rd, and it's time to dig into some science Friday. I'm sci-fri producer Dee Petershmit. There are 80,000 wild horses in the American West, but the Bureau of Land Management says the ecosystem they live on can only support a third of that number. The Bureau has resorted to roundups of the horses to reduce strain on the land, but these tactics have been controversial. Guest host Flora Lickman talks to a science reporter who's been covering the story,

and then we'll take a visit to a museum exhibit that explores humanity's millennia's long relationship with pigs through opera. Wild horses are an icon of the American West. I bet you can picture it. A herd of Mustangs galloping free on an open prairie. But as romantic as that may sound, the Bureau of Land Management says there's a problem. The ecosystem can't handle all of them. There are 80,000 wild horses roaming around, but the land can only support about a third of that herd. So what to do? That's the subject of a new podcast from Boise State Public Radio.

Joining me now is my guest, Ashley Ahern, Science and Environment Reporter, and host of the podcast, Mustang. She's based in Okinawagon County, Washington. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Okay, 80,000 Mustangs trotting around the West. What's the problem? Well, just like having too many, any kind of livestock in an area, that land can be heavily impacted. And so what we've seen in the West, and there are more than 80,000 horses and burrows, I should say, across 11 Western states.

The BLM, Bureau of Land Management, manages these herds, assesses the landscape, looks at the forage, how the grasses are growing, the soil health every year, and makes estimate, sets goals for how many horses would be a healthy amount on the herd. landscape. And keep in mind, they're also managing how many cows are allowed to graze on the landscape. So it's a very tenuous balancing act. But what the BLM scientists and many, many other scientists who I spoke with, I should be clear about that, who don't work for the BLM, are saying is that the numbers of horses have increased steadily ever since we passed to the Wild Horse and Burrow Act in 1971. And now we're at a point where some scientists are sounding the alarm that we're facing an ecological and ecosystem collapse, especially in places like Nevada. So I traveled to Nevada, of course, because I wanted to see what this looked like firsthand.

And I met up with this. He's been working for the Nevada Department of Wildlife for 30 years as a biologist. His name is Mike Cox. And he is one of the folks who have been vocal about what he's seeing on the ground. And he took me out into the Stillwater Range in northwestern Nevada. And, I mean, just walking around out there, Flora, you can see manure everywhere. There's not a lick of grass. It's kind of like scraggly sagebrush with nothing around it that any animal would want to eat,

whether that's mule deer, prong, horn, elk, or cows, or horses for that matter. And it's, you know, Nevada is the driest state in the U.S. And it is that these parts of the world are so harsh that when you then add this many animals on the landscape, you can see firsthand what it does to habitat that many other species rely on. I don't have answers for you today. You got a lot of anger, though. I have a lot of frustration. Yeah.

Ben up frustration. Yeah. And. the ecosystem was going to collapse. I would give parts of Nevada a decade. That's all that's got left. With this number of horses on it. Yeah.

And there's not going to be anything for anyone, for any animal. A decade. So what's the federal government doing? How are they managing the horses currently? I got to say the Bureau of Land Management is caught between a rock and a hard place. They do roundups, and they use. helicopters, which are incredibly controversial, and frankly, the videos are hard to watch. And, you know, they basically corral horses run them over the landscape into traps, you know,

shoots that then close a gate behind them and ship them off to long-term holding facilities, where they may or may not be adopted. But they've also adopted other methods. Bate trapping is one that I think is becoming more popular, but it's not as effective in gathering large numbers of horses. So what they'll do is they'll set up hay and feet. put feed out in a herd management area and the horses will become acclimated to going and eating there, and then they'll close the gates around them so that you can catch maybe five horses, 10 horses at a time,

but you're not getting 20, 40, 100 horses in when you use helicopters. And I'm not saying that I'm a proponent of helicopter gathers by any means, but when you look at the numbers, you know, some of these herd management areas have thousands more horses than the science says the landscape can support. So bait trapping may not get the BLM to their target numbers fast enough as helicopters maybe could. In the course of your reporting, did you talk to any indigenous communities, people in indigenous communities, about horses in the area? I did. That was a priority for me because, of course, indigenous nations in the American West are some of the most incredible horse people in the world. And it was fascinating to learn because, of course, there are more than 80,000 wild horses on.

on public lands, you know, government-owned public lands, but there are potentially far more than that on Native American reservations. And as sovereign nations, they can manage those horses in whatever way they see fit. In one episode, I traveled to the Spokane Indian Reservation, which is not far from where I live in Okanagan County in Washington State, and learned about how they manage their horses, which is by rounding them up on horseback, and some of those horses do end up, unfortunately, going to slaughter. Some of them are adopted into homes and used as riding horses. But it was just really powerful to hear their historical and cultural connection to the horse as a relative, is the term that they used when they talked about the horses there.

I want to get to one of the most amazing parts of your podcast to me, which is your own jaunt in this muddy corral. You adopted your very own wild horse from the federal government. Please tell me more. Yeah. So this was part of my education process. Talk about life imitating art or art imitating life. I'm not sure how you want to phrase that. But I really wanted to immerse myself in this story.

And I grew up riding horses, and I have a horse already, a domestic horse, that I'd been riding for years now. And I had kind of myself fallen in love with the mystique of the Mustang. And then was happy to find out that you can get one from the federal government for about $125. You have to pass, you know, they require certain things about your property. before you can take one home. But yeah, so I brought home a Mustang from Oregon a year and a half ago. He was wild for the first two years of his life. And then he was gathered up. They used the bait trapping, actually. So he wasn't helicopter gathered. He was trapped and then brought in. And I brought him home. And we've been figuring each other out ever since. We test each other and we push each other,

but he's an amazing partner. And yeah, I cherish him. His name is Boo. Has he changed the way you thought about this story and kind of the controversy? Do you think about the controversy around wild horses differently because of boo? I do. It hurts me to think about him being taken away from his family. I do think about that. He was roaming the wild Oregon sagebrush desert for two years. And horses do live in family bands.

So that is a hard thing. But now that I've seen that landscape up close and I've seen what happens when too many horses are out there, my brain fast forwards to where that's headed if we don't do something about it, if we don't try to manage these populations. We have a gift. We have amazing animals in this country roaming free, and we have an opportunity, I think, to form these deep relationships with them if we choose to

and potentially take a small bite out of a very big ecological problem in the process. Where did these Mustangs come from? How did they get to the West? So the dominant Western science narrative for many, many, many years has been that horses evolved in North America millions of years ago, right, to equis roaming the vast grasslands and rainforests of what is now the American West. But they went extinct, according to Western science, in the last Ice Age, so 10,000, 13,000 years ago. And they didn't come back until the conquistadors brought them from Europe to Central and South America about 500 years ago. And then from there, they were traded or some would say stolen. I don't like to use that terminology with the Native American peoples who then, through trade routes,

brought the horses up through the middle of the country into the North American West. I have been intrigued by another narrative that's emerging with scientists like Dr. Yvette running horse Colin, who are challenging that or questioning that accepted wisdom that the horse went extinct and wondering and positing that rather it was here all along, pockets survived the last ice age with the indigenous peoples of North America and has been a part of their culture for millennia, in fact, and that it was not bestowed upon the natives by the colonialists when they arrived. And so Yvette Running Horse Collin has some really powerful thoughts on that. She is the executive director of the Global Institute for Traditional Sciences,

and she's a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. So Shai visited her in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and I'd love to play you a cut from her. The mainstream narrative just continues. used to get pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed. And an entire body of knowledge is ignored, passed by, purposefully pushed away. So that is something that we could not have happen if we were truly trying to understand the history of the horse and the Americas. Because whether they like it or not, we were the ones here. Powerful. You know, listening to your podcast, I felt like horses and their history are really wrapped up with all of these kind of huge American narratives, you know, good and bad. It just feels like they're saddled with so much symbolism.

But I wanted your take on that. Oh, yeah, no, I couldn't have said it better. I think that we all have some kind of a connection, even if it's just growing up reading, reading books about them as a little kid, there is a mystique and there's a power to them. And it was a wonderful. experience to gather all of those perspectives and to be surprised by those perspectives. That's all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Ashley Ahern, Science and Environment Reporter and host of the podcast Mustang. She's based in Okanagan County, Washington. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. To close out today's show, producer Dee Peter Schmidt is bringing us a story about an art exhibition that explores our relationship with pigs. D. is here to

Tell us about it. Hi, Dee. Hey, Flora. Okay, tell me about this show. Yeah, it's called a hybrid and inner species opera. And it's basically a multimedia ode to the pig. So there's opera, there's 3D clay prints of pig statues, and a short documentary of scientists who are working to create these compatible organs and pigs

for human transplantation, which is called xenotransplantation. And basically the show is just trying to get at, like, you know, humanity has had this millennia's long relationship with pigs. we've been genetically modifying them for centuries just through like breeding. And the show is kind of asking like, how far will we actually go to make pigs work for us? Did the show make you see pigs in a new way? It did. I mean, it was really striking to see during the documentary the pigs actually in the lab.

And the scientists are like very respectful towards them and are clearly care about them. But ultimately, their lives are going to be used for research. And so we think about pigs in the context of our food. But this kind of made me think about them in terms of like how, or trying to solve human health problems using them. Well, I can't wait to hear more. D. Take it away. In 2015, artist Heather Dewey Hagborg came across news from the Vise Institute at Harvard,

which had made a record 62 edits to a pig's genome using CRISPR to make their organs more compatible for human transplantation. More than 100,000 people are waiting for an organ donor in the U.S., and many of them will likely never get one. So since pigs' organs are so similar to humans, scientists have been genetically modifying them to make sure people can actually live a full life with, say, a pig heart. And I thought that was really fascinating on a philosophical level and, of course, all of the ethical questions that it raised. Heather also self-describes as a biohacker and has worked

with genetics before in our art and decided to pursue that topic for her next exhibit. So the main kind of research question for me was really to probe this question that scientists very often say that genetic engineering is a continuation of 10 millennia of domestication, selective breeding. And I wanted to just dig into that and see, is it a rupture, is something radically new happening with CRISPR gene editing, or is it a continuation? You're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So she started doing research into xenotransplantation and interviewed scientists and archaeologists, and Heather was surprised how long we've been modifying pigs for our benefits.

There's a timeline on the wall in the exhibit that gives kind of a highlight reel of our relationship over the last 10 millennia, how modern pigs were domesticated from ancient wild boars in both China and Europe. Tissue and organ transplant experiment started in the 1900s. And in the last decade, scientists have been using CRISPR to reduce the chances of organ rejection from the immune system after surgery. But the field is moving so fast that she had to make a last minute change to that timeline. So as we were putting up the story of the last individual who received a xenotransplanted heart, it originally said that the individual would still be living. And he passed away basically the day before the opening of the art exhibit. So that was a sad change that we had to make.

That patient, who was the second person to receive a genetically modified pig heart, died six weeks after surgery. Heather didn't want to talk to just scientists over Zoom about xenotransplantation. she wanted to actually see one of these labs for herself. So she went to the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, which has its own lab that is working on genetically modifying pigs for xenot transplantation, and she brought a film crew. The resulting documentary plays in the exhibit,

but she took a slightly different approach to the soundtrack. And I was just really blown away by the power of the words of these people, the drama that was there, sometimes the humor. And so I started to suddenly start to start, hearing it in this kind of opera voice, you know, singing these words out. And then I thought, I wonder if I could make that happen. That would be a really interesting approach and do something very different than your standard kind of talking heads documentary. I mean, one of the really important points is what a tiny fraction, the number of pigs being used for xenotransplantation,

would be relative to the number that would be used for meat production. And he says in there, a few hundred thousand per year, a fraction of the three billion consumed for food. And then, of course, the chorus that comes there, which is thousands of clones every day. Luckily, I'm also not the one singing. Yeah, that wasn't that bad, though. But I do walk around with it stuck in my head.

The film ends with Heather standing on a. beach, making a pit fire, and placing 3D printed clay pig models that were scanned from ancient bore ceramic statues into the flames. It's her way of memorializing pigs, past, present, and future. When I started through research, I thought that seems pretty problematic to be exploiting all these pigs, and then through talking with scientists, eventually then meeting the pigs, meeting the veterinary scientists who were working with the pigs, seeing the care that was there in addition to, of course, the kind of tragic deaths that they face. It definitely did give more dimension to my understandings of it.

But another branch of the project is around anticipating what pigs might become and thinking about directions that pigs might go in the future. Thank you, Dee. That was producer Dee Petershmet. You can check out hybrid and interspecies opera at the Friedman Gallery in New York City for the next couple weeks, and there will be a live performance of the opera at the Explore in San Francisco in March. You can learn more at our website, ScienceFriday.com slash pig art. And that's it for today. Lots of folks help put the show together, including Kathleen Davis. Diana Plasker. Beth Remy. Danielle Johnson. Tomorrow we'll talk about

the winners of science's strangest and silliest awards, the Ig Nobels. Until then, I'm Cyfry producer Dee Peter Schmidt. See you later.