The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 126: Wild Horses

Episode Date: July 23, 2018

Tempe, AZ- Steven Rinella talks with Wild Horse and Burro Coordinator Dr. Tolani Francisco, along with wildlife ecologist Dr. Karl Malcolm, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects discussed: kids and the fundamentals of bow shooting; the Pueblo Revolt; the brief and glorious lifespan of the equestrian buffalo hunters of the Great Plains; where feral horses end and wild horses begin; the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis; horse fat in your ceramics; mustangers; wild horse holding yards and adoptions; the flameout of a Navajo horse hunt; dying while stuck in the mud; the baddest mofos of the Pleistocene; the NY Times has a big miss; mountain lions as wild horse predators; poleaxing; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. ordered but have not received a little kitty compound bow for my eight-year-old. And I can't decide.

I didn't have one of those when I was eight. I can't decide. Carl, I'd be interested to get your perspective on this. I can't decide if it's like, right? Should he be shooting like a stick bow to learn or should he just like jump in because this is how it works with a sight pin and a compound?

Like, are you wasting time messing around learning fundamentals with a traditional bow? Like, are you just like messing around in order to get to the real thing or is it better just to be like this is where it's leaded this is where it's heading so just do this now learn how to shoot a compound and a pin and at eight years of age i got i got one major issue that you said i'm taking for granted the fact that this is where it's headed. Yeah, man. I feel that that's where it's headed. Okay.

Well, you could line up. You mean archery and hunting in general? Just me. Oh, no, no, no. We're not on the same page. I was saying that a compound with a pin is where it's headed. Yeah, I just mean that in four years, five years, when he's ready to hunt with his bow,

I just feel like we'll have landed at a compound with pins. And we will not have landed at a traditional bow, just basing it on what his old man shoots. It'd be weird that he would be a purist, that he would develop a purist sensibility in defiance of his old man right at the age of 12 so i'm just jumping him into i just bought him a compound you're like bank fishing with night crawlers and he's casting upstream to rising fish only yes he'll do that later when he

realizes that he in fact doesn't like his father. But at 12, he's still going to like me. No, I think you could also, I'm sure, secure the right equipment for him to be dabbling with a variety of different options. Just lay out, just throw all the bowls out. It's almost like a good analogy would be the dad who's helping his son or daughter learn to bat from either side of the plate

from an early age i like that what's your take on it do patel's kids are still shooting bows made out of pvc but trad bows made out of yeah a trad bow out of pvc is that oxymoronic uh no no i don't think so um i think yeah give him both and then let him choose you know let him play with dabbling both and you know if he's like man this one's more fun than you know let him shoot archery because i don't think that really the important thing is that he really needs to be developing archery skills you know at the age from 8 to 12 but the more important thing is that hopefully at 12 he he still likes to shoot a bow. Oh, see, I yell at him already.

You yell at him how? Like what? Like about his stance. Why yell at him when I catch him shooting from a seated position? Okay. I take all the fun out of it. Except for my little girl.

And I'm like, oh, oh sweetheart whatever you want classic i know it's really bad um but he seems to be receptive to it at least from what i see oh dude they love shooting bows yeah what's the nice like about it like you know but even when you're like kind of hammering on him about technique oh yeah he's not he's not like yeah throws the bow down walks away you know it's like mildly dangerous and definitely destructive. And so it's like, they love it. So you're sending a thing going really fast across the yard and it can like break something.

So it's what's not to like. We just had the, I think I was telling you this, that with my oldest who's six now, she just had, and I wasn't even there to witness it, but my wife was saying that she just picked up the bow and up until now, it's still been like left hand, hold the bow with the string towards you, right hand, put the arrow on,

kind of explain everything, every single shot. And for the first time, they just pulled their bows down and she's out there all on her own, just flying, flinging them. But they still have way more enjoyment that both the six-year-old and the four-year-old together. They get more enjoyment out of, they each shoot once or twice.

And as long as there's an arrow sticking in the target, whether it's the turkey that's there, the deer or whatever, the bows go down and then they have this like, this big imaginary play of, you know, sneaking up to it and talking about who killed it and how it died and what they're going to do with it. And that goes on for 15 minutes and they finally loop back around to take another shot. Really? Yeah. They like that part of it. Yeah. Just that the play time around,

you know, what happens after there's an arrow stuck in that thing. You know, I'll be like, oh, gut shot. I'm going to lay out a little bit about what we're going to be talking about here and just give a kind of brief overview of the deep history of the feral horse, wild horse issue here in the U.S. And this story can go back as deep as you want because horses evolved here on our continent many, many millions of years ago. So the funny thing about it is if you look at continental drift, at that time, our continent wasn't even where it is now on earth. So it gets to be this sort of like really weird question of where it happened, but sort of like this land mass that we now know was configured differently and in a different position at one point in time. And at that point in time, we had horses, right? And horses seemed

developed here and spread into Eurasia. And then horses were around here for a long time. They used to be like a four-toed horse and it became a one-toed horse. And at the time that human beings first arrived in the new world, 14, 15, perhaps 20,000 years ago, they would have come here and found a type of horse along with all sorts of other Pleistocene megafauna that went extinct

around the time of the end of the last ice age. And so starting around 13,000 years ago, there's no horses here in North America. They're gone. No horses in South America, no horses in North America. We'll get into later what might've happened to them, but they just weren't here. And then we enter into this long period, this basically 13,000 year period where we have a horseless continent. Then we get into the early 1500s and the Spanish start coming over into the new world, messing around out of Mexico, and they bring horses with them. They bring a domesticated form of the horse with them.

And it's around the late 1540s that the Spanish start bringing some horses up into what's now the U.S., up into the Rio Grande region, around Santa Fe, New Mexico, up around Taos, New Mexico, they show up with horses. And there's this long period of time where you have domestic horses owned by the Spaniards and sort of managed by Pueblo tribes and Native American groups for the Spanish who are like living among and working with the Spanish up until this thing that happens called the Pueblo Revolt. And we'll talk about the Pueblo Revolt in a minute, but you got to understand like how much time passes between the arrival of the Spanish with horses and the later distribution of those horses up into the central parts of the continent through trade paths developed by Native American

tribes. From the date when the Spanish showed up up until the Pueblo Revolt, when horses really started to move north, that time span is about as long as what separates us now from Custer's death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. So horses for a long, long time were confined down to the American Southwest. But during the Pueblo Revolt, a lot of the Pueblo Indians rose up

and in a very violent outbreak and retaliation for even worse violent outbreaks committed against them, drove the Spanish back out of the US and they made off with hundreds of horses. And the Spanish had always had these prohibitions like Indians weren't allowed to ride horses, Indians weren't allowed to own horses, but they had learned how to breed and handle them.

And once they booted the Spanish out and stole all these hundreds of horses, it was like, you know, you took the cap off the bottle, right? And all of a sudden these horses start getting traded in various northward directions. They were traded up the west side of the Rockies. They were traded up through the Great Plains.

And it happened fast, man. So the Pueblo Revolt is 1680. By the 1730s, horses were up in the hands of plains tribes up along the Missouri River. By the 1770s, tribes up in the Canadian plains had horses. The principle-like forms of distribution, it seems that the Comanche Indians were very involved in moving horses.

And in fact, once the horse came into being here, it really changed the way a lot of the tribes functioned. So the Comanche, Lakota, the Cheyenne, they all left their traditional homelands and moved onto the plains to become nomadic bison hunters because of the introduction of the horse. It changed everything. You could move more material on a horse. You could keep a bigger lodge.

You could follow the herds, buffalo herds throughout the year. And it really changed everything. And it caused this major power division where these groups that had once been kind of small, weak tribes became very powerful, dominant tribes through the horse trade. And it said that perhaps the Comanches, through distribution channels that they created, that they had funneled horses through their network and subsequent tribes along the trading path all the way to French settlements east of the Mississippi.

So horses were just exploding out there and going everywhere. And it's interesting to think like how narrow this time window was, right? That when Lewis and Clark show up on their transcontinental journey out to the American West, they're encountering groups of Indians that had only had horses for less than 50 years. We now look and we think that this idea of the equestrian Native American bison hunter, so an Indian mounted on a horse out chasing buffalo across the Great Plains.

We tend to think of it as this thing that had just occurred for a long time. There's like this static thing that had always happened. And then it was interrupted by the arrival of Europeans. But in fact, it was a narrow blip. Those cultures lasted about a hundred years from the introduction of the horse up until the military conquest of those tribes and the beginning of the reservation systems. But it's this sort of like indelible images burned into our cultural mind that these people were interacting

and using horses in their daily life for time immemorial when in fact it wasn't that long. But horses just exploded across the American West in these years. And there's this estimate that even between the Arkansas River and the Rio Grande at one time, around the time of when we were doing early European settlements on the Great Plains, that there was maybe 2 million horses, wild horses, existing between those rivers. As you got more north, right, the more severe winters, much harder for them and far fewer. But on the southern plains, there were probably so many wild horses that it was probably displacing native wildlife even back then, even in the late 17 and early 1800s. What happened from there is that over the course of Western settlement,

those horse herds were just reduced and reduced into reduced. They weren't protected. People could go out and round them up to sell them. They could round them up and use them for their own personal use. And many, many, many of them were rounded up by dudes called Mustangers who would go out and just round a bunch up and put them in a trailer and haul them off to a slaughter facility and get some money for them. And they would go into sausage and dog food and export markets. And that line of work continued until it started to seem like the wild horse was going to vanish from the American landscape. By the time we got down to perhaps as few as 25,000 wild horses in the American West. And then Congress came in and made what I regard as a pretty big mistake, where they came in and do the wild horse

burrow, wild horse and burrow protection act, which gives wild horses like a level of protection that's greater than what we give things when we put them on the endangered species act. Because when things go on the endangered species act, imperiled species go on there, there's a mechanism by which they come off once they're recovered. But the Wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act doesn't do that. It just says, hands off. Not doing lethal control on these. And it just, it was a mess. It created a mess. Even like in 2007, there were 28, maybe an estimated 28.5 thousand wild horses in the American West. A decade later, 83,000. There is now far and away more wild horses living in the

American West than we can sustain. It's having devastating impacts, devastating ecological impacts, devastating ecological impacts, devastating impacts on native wildlife where we're taking this feral creature, this feral horse, it was a domesticated animal cut loose out in the landscape and it's wreaking havoc on our native wildlife. So we're losing native wildlife in the advancement of the interests of an introduced feral species. It's a mess. And since there's not lethal control right now,

people take some of these excess animals, not nearly all of them, and move them to these off-range holding facilities where you lease private land and more lush grasslands to the east, and they got 44,000 of these horses there living out their lives at the expense of american taxpayers and at the expense of a minimal budget for managing wild horses in general to the point that half of the money designated for wild horse work is being sucked up in these off-range holding facilities it It's a total mess.

So much of what I just told you, a lot of that has a serious bit of personal spin thrown on it. I'm revealing my opinion about the issue, but we're going to talk to some people who know a hell of a lot more about it than I do, and they might prove some places or show some places where I was wrong or mistaken. But I just wanted you to have that little bit of background. And we're joined here by a frequent

guest on this show, Dr. Carl Malcolm, and also Dr. Talani Francisco. So how did you come to get involved in the feral horse issue? I want you to answer that. Then I want to talk about what term we're going to use during this conversation. Okay. Yeah. I'm glad because, yeah, that's a lot of discussion. The term you use says a lot about you. It does. It really does. So you're probably checking out that I just said feral horses. Feral horses. Yes. Well, go ahead with the first question. How did you get involved in this? How did I get involved in it? Well, I went to- Like in a career path sense.

Yeah, so I knew from the outset that I wanted to be a veterinarian. I mean, from, I think somewhere in junior high. I mean, I grew up around animals, grew up around horses. And so I've always had a desire to do that. My family owned lots of horses. Of course, we were cattle people. So I grew up riding a horse.

I think I first got on a horse when I was two weeks old, my dad said. So yeah, I've had a lifelong history of working horses. And life on the res, free-ranging horses on the res, when you needed a horse, you went out, you rounded horses up, you put them in a corral, and then you proceeded to tame them. So that's something you grew up around. I grew up around. That's great. you put them in a corral and then you proceeded to tame them. And, you know, so I- So that's something you grew up around. I grew up around-

That's great. I grew up around, you know, untamed horses, taming them and then riding them out on the res and, you know, and using them for transportation. So I knew at an early age, I wanted to do something to help horses. So what, right now, like, what is your, what is your role right now in working with

wild horses or feral horses yeah we still haven't talked about what we're going to call yeah we have to we have to talk about what we're going to call them so my position right now is i'm with the for u.s forest service because they are part uh there are two agencies that are entrusted with the management of wild horses and burros as per the 1971 Act. And so the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. I specifically work for the southwestern region of the U.S. Forest Service, which is Arizona, New Mexico, and our grasslands in Texas and Oklahoma. And my primary duty, my actual job, is the wild horse and burrow coordinator.

So I am not employed as a veterinary medical officer, which is a federal job, which I was before I came to the Forest Service. And you, so you're working on the horse issue on federal lands. Just on Forest Service lands. Just on Forest Service lands. Just on Forest Service lands. So when you say coordinator,

it's coordinator of activities across Forest Service lands. Yes. But what's interesting to me is that, I want to take a minute and back up in a second just to walk through what we're talking about. But really quickly, what is the estimate right now of how many wild horses

or feral horses live in the American West? So, you know, I really wish we had a good solid number. There are people that will say we're 90,000. Some people have said, no, we're closer to a million. Some people, yeah. And I'm like, I don't believe that. I know that in North- That seems like a real stretch.

Well, and I think where they get confused is that owned horses. So you go back to the latest count by the World Animal Health Organization. They reported that North America, well, United States, in 2016, the US had 1.5 million owned horses. Okay.

So there's a million and a half. Horses in the United States. And some component of that could be some of these wild or feral or unowned horses that are free ranging. Because the reason I ask that is because you've lived on the Navajo Nation. And the Fort Apache, the White Mountain Apache Reservation, the Mississippi Band of Choctaws. But I've read that perhaps 30,000 wild horses

are on the Navajo Nation. Navajo Nation. Navajo Nation. But then there's only 80,000 in the American West. Right. Does it really have that percentage of animals are found on that landmass? That's what they say.

In fact, their latest one that I read was 38,000. Yeah. And then the Yakima- I see they were between 30 and 50. Yeah, yeah. And the Yakima Nation up in Washington, they think they may have somewhere in the same, you know, like 20 to 30,000.

So, I mean, really, we don't know. To be honest with you, we don't know. I mean, you'll see all kinds of numbers. How many of these things are out there? Yeah, you'll see all kinds of numbers thrown out out there. And when it really comes down to it, we don't know. We just know there's an awful lot. Okay, I want to talk about why that's a problem. And when it really comes down to it, we don't know. We just know there's an awful lot. Okay.

I want to talk about why that's a problem. Or is it a problem? Well, it's an issue. What? Yeah, it's an issue. Okay. So I want to talk about why that's a problem slash issue. But the next thing I want to get into is,

break down for me what people are signaling when they say feral horses and what people are signaling when they say wild horses. Okay. So I'm glad you asked that because a lot of people throw the term wild horse out and they just take it as a horse that's untamed, that's come off of the landscape.

Yeah. So, and Mustangs, wild horses, people will use that term and not realize that the true wild horse is a legal definition based on the 1971 Act. And so a true wild horse is a horse that is associated with either one of the U.S. Forest Service wild horse and burrow territories that Congress established in 1971, or it's a horse that has come off of a Bureau of Land Management herd management area that was established in 1971. So it's a legal term that is a horse that is associated with one of those two types of properties. See, this isn't the answer I expected.

Yes. That's a wild horse. It has to be legally associated with a territory or a herd management area. Like an area where someone came in and specified, this is a place where wild horses exist and can exist. Yes. Okay. So what is, so then talk about what a feral horse is.

So a feral horse is any horse that has once been in domestication, regardless of how long back in time it was once domesticated. So it was once managed by two-legged. A particular horse and not like a population? No. Whether it's a population of horses, whether it's a single horse. So regardless of how long ago it was, that animal or that group of animals was once in domestication. So it was once managed by two-legged. So we look at like feral pigs, you know, and we know the southeastern United States

and all through like Texas and Florida and Georgia and all that, tons of feral pigs. Well, we know that we call them feral pigs because they were not in the united states or they were not native here they were brought in by whomever however they were let free and but but they had been brought here as domesticated swine yes now they're free they're roaming back and and you know some people say well yeah they look like eurasian boars. And so they're obviously, I think that just shows that they adapt back to their environment and stuff. In the case of pigs though, there are pigs.

There are, I'm gonna call them all feral pigs, but there are pigs that were brought here that hadn't gone through a domestication process and that they were the ancestral wild pig because if you look at the domestic animals we now know like you take like a cow okay the wild yeah the wild ancestral one is gone the oryx doesn't exist anymore. Or now people argue that the wild ancestral horse of the Eurasian steppe no longer exists. We only have domesticated varieties.

But pigs are unusual because there still are the ancestral wild version of Seuss Scroffa is still running around out there on its native range. And people have at times captured them, not domesticated them, and brought those specific animals in and cut them loose here where they promptly go and find a feral farm version running around in the wild and interbreed. But I think that that little difference causes a lot of head scratching among wild pig enthusiasts, of which I kind of count myself. But I think that because they're

not native here and they all are here from the result of some form of human introduction, we tend to refer to them as, like when you're getting technical, you refer to them as like feral pigs because they're all just dumped out. When I was talking about calling, like the debate between feral horses and wild horses, I didn't know that there was a legal... Yep.

Yeah. Can I tell you what I thought it was? Okay. I thought it was a sort of statement of one's acceptance of this animal as wildlife no meaning but i but i do okay but i do want to walk through i want to touch on a couple things to to bring people to speed and you can jump in where you want. But in this horse debate, there's some things that people love to point out. Okay.

Right? They love to point out that it seemed that the horse evolved here 25 million years ago. Right? We weren't here because of continental drift, but on this like moving hunk of land and how its orientation has changed dramatically but on this sort of moving hunk of land which now happens to sit where it currently sits today horses came about and

emanated from here and spread to europe and what is now Eurasia. Right. And in that process, they became a solipid because the first ones were bipeds. Had like four, that's like four toes. There's a one toe. And then they existed here in a recognizable form up until the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. So they existed here in some kind of recognizable form up until around 13,000 years ago.

And it's reasonable to assume that human hunters once hunted the native North American horse, that there was a overlap of horses' existence here and human existence here. But then for 12,000 years, 13,000 years, roughly, there were no horses here. Are you cool with everything I'm saying so far? Yeah. Okay. No horses here. Are you cool with everything I'm saying so far?

Yeah. Okay. No horses here. The Spanish show up and they bring with them some horses. Yeah, because the Vikings probably didn't. Probably didn't carry them with them.

Yeah, they probably didn't carry their horses. And the Spanish introduce a different form of horse here. And these horses were established in the American Southwest and in Mexico. And eventually they were, through trade networks, spread northward. And by around, I think by around the 1770s, horses had spread all the way up into the Canadian plains.

And so some people choose to look at this as being a continuum. And that horses in some, by some definition, horses could count as wildlife that just happened to be gone for 12,000 years, but now they're back in their rightful home. Some people look at horses the same way they look at wild pigs. And they say, nope, not from here.

It's a different kind. They were brought here by humans and they're feral livestock. When I say feral horse, I'm signifying my belief. I feel as though I'm signifying my belief that they should be treated like feral livestock. When I think people say a wild horse, they're sort of signifying a belief that it's wildlife. That was what I thought up until the moment

that you just told me that there's an actual definition of a wild horse. Yeah, no, the wild horse, like I said, it's a legal definition. And those are the animals that are associated with those territories or HMAs, herd management areas. Is it fair to say right now that we have vastly, well, let's not put that word in there.

Is it fair to say right now that we have, let's say way or just too many, too many wild horses, feral horses, wild and feral? Yeah, there are people that would say, yes, we have too many horses. And then there will be people that say, we don't have too many horses. We have too many people with livestock, sheep and goats and cattle that are using the same area. And that's where the disagreement comes in.

We have groups that are on either side that say, and then there's people that say, you know what, we can all coexist. And really what we deal with in the Forest Service and in the Bureau of Land Management are just those managed territories that we, by mandate, Congress told us, thou shalt, you will manage these territories so that we can have thriving ecological balance, that horses can be on the landscape with the wildlife. permitted lands, land allotments where people can come in for certain periods of time throughout the year and graze their livestock because that is part of America West as well. People grazing their cattle and their sheep. So we have to allow for all of that.

And one doesn't take precedence over the other on those specified lands. We can't say that the horses are more important than the cattle if there is a part of allotment that is there. What it says is you first and foremost have to manage that piece of land so that it can grow enough forage and browse and everything to allow for horses, for cattle, for wildlife, and for everybody to be there. Okay, but where in this equation, you mentioned the conflicts between livestock grazers and feral horses,

but when you rank all that out, where does the needs of native wildlife fit in? It's equal. It's a three-legged stool. Yes. They all have to be there. On those particular lands. On those lands.

Yes. On the wild horse territories and on the HMAs. How do you, what is the difference? If you talk about the legal difference between a legally designated wild horse and a legally regarded feral horse, you know, let me ask this first because that doesn't make, it won't make sense yet.

Can you explain what happened when the Wild Horse and Borough Protection Act came in in the 70s? Can you explain what was going on prior? How did we manage and control wild horse numbers before that and what happened after that happened? Well, I think the biggest thing that happened was people, horses were just out on the landscape.

Like I mentioned on my reservation, if we needed a horse, you know, horses were just out on the landscape. Like I mentioned on my reservation, if we needed a horse, you would go out, you knew that there were areas, you know, on these vast landscapes where horse bands were at. And so you knew, hey, we're going to round up horses and we're going to see which ones we can use, which ones maybe are not usable. And we would tame those horses.

We would, you know, in quote, domesticate them. When in reality, they probably somewhere, like I said, some ancestor of that horse had been domesticated. But so- Well, I mean, indisputably. Right. So-

Even if you had to trace it back to the 1700s, it absolutely was. It came over on a ship. However long ago it was, it was in domestication. Yeah. So what had happened really was that throughout like the 30s, 40s, 50s, and really, I guess it was really like in the 50s and 60s. So, you know, when you had the Dust Bowl back in the 30s and stuff,

animals were starving, you know, it was, and we'd go through these droughts like we have this year where you just have, you know, massive die-offs and stuff. And people will say, well, that's Mother Nature and all of that. Well, what would happen is ranchers, people that were making money or whatever, they would go up and they would round up horses, sometimes by not all that humane methods. I mean, I've seen pictures, I've never seen it

personally, where people would very inhumanely rope these horses and drag them. And I mean, it was pretty barbaric the way some of the methods that people used. For what purpose? Why were they rounding them up then? They were Mustangers, right? They were Mustangers and they would take them to dog food plants, you know. And so the methods, and you have to remember that back in that time, the mentality or the paradigm was animals don't have feelings, animals don't understand pain, so it doesn't really matter.

So very different paradigm than where we are at today where we recognize that humane methods are necessary, low stress. Stress has a huge effect on animals. But to, I guess, a little bit to that defense, people didn't know any better. Yeah. Now, I know you weren't there to, I know you weren't like there to witness all parts of this, like personally, but was it perceived that horses were handled

in a way that one wouldn't handle cattle? Like, would a mustang be more aggressive, more cruel, if you will, with when rounding up wild horses, then would be standard handling practice for cattle? No, I think they handled them all the same. I think that, you know, and being around cattle and stuff, I think people just look at horses, I mean, let's face it, you look at a horse and you just kind of, oh, you know, and you want to think that every horse is like Secretariat, you know, and they're gentle and every horse is black beauty. And, you know, and I grew up, I mean, I, you know, Justin Morgan had a horse and I read all of my

friend Flicka. And so we all want to believe that those horses are like that, that every horse is gentle and every horse is, you know, just wonderful. And you see them out on the landscape and I'll tell you, I'm, you know, same way. You see them running and you're like, God, they're just beautiful. And yeah, I mean, I agree. They're gorgeous. They're majestic. They're just beautiful animals. Yeah. Bodie Mines suggests that eye size and eyelash length have a lot to do with how we perceive animals, and they score very high in that way. majestic animal. And we equate that to, you know, looking at animals going back then to, you know, Kentucky where you've got race horses and stuff. And yeah, I mean, there's a romantic nature about them. And then you look at, well, you know, how the West would not have been one were it not

for horses. You know, so coming from a native background where I came from, the horse was huge for us. That was our means of, you know, transportation. And I mean, we're Pueblos. We were not horsemen like the Plains tribes, you know, that were very accomplished horse people. We had horses, but they were, you know, they were pretty much, you know, beasts of burden.

They were transporting. They were burden. They were transporting, they were helping with farming and stuff like that. That's a really interesting perspective about thinking about our association of plains tribes, the nomadic plains tribes and the horse. It's interesting when you look at what a narrow window of time that was. Right. Where when Lewis and Clark were doing their transcontinental journey, they were encountering

tribes along the Missouri that had probably had the horse for only 50 years. Right. And then that window and with the beginning of the reservation system and the final bloody conquest of the nomadic plains tribes, that window was a 100-year window. Yeah. Of the equestrian Native American bison hunter was this finite thing.

But it's when people from my culture, it's when we caught it and saw it. And so we hold in our heads this constant thing, this idea of the mounted. When you had perhaps tens of thousands of years of human history absent the horse. But it seemed to just have this, of years of human history absent the horse. Yeah.

But it seemed to just have this like, it just still today like really captures, you don't see that image, you know, of the person with the bow and the flowing headdress on a horse. You don't see that image and be like, oh, that was just like this little thing that happened. Right. All of a sudden for a short period of time.

It really, it just, it like seems to captivate people. Yeah. The idea of it. Yeah. And I don't know if this is true, but I've even heard that there are, that there are Native American creation myths that account for the horse as though it had always existed.

I don't know if that's true or not, but I've heard people say that. Yeah, and you have horse societies in different tribes. They have horse societies. I've heard different... My tribe doesn't have a horse society at the Pueblo of Laguna, but I've heard other tribes that talk about they have a horse society or a clan or something like that, that goes back that they believe the horse, yeah, was very important that when creator made all creations, he made horse. Now, they don't specify what type of horse creator made,

but creator made horse, just as he made us. That's one thing I've heard people reference when people are talking, when people are trying to express their opinion that the wild horse has a sort of legitimate claim as wildlife in this country, that they would cite oral legend from indigenous peoples about deep relationships to the animals. Yeah.

So during this era, the Roundup when people could like you said like when you grew up you could go out and catch a horse if you wanted it or you could go out make it couldn't have been a ton of money but some money rounding up horses and selling them into slaughter right that the animals were actually pushed to a point where people felt that they might vanish from the landscape which is hard to a point where people felt that they might vanish from the landscape, which is hard to believe when you see that some people estimate that around the time of the late 1700s, early 1800s, that there were maybe 2 million horses,

I've heard, between the Arkansas and Rio Grande rivers. Yeah. So there were that many, but then there was a fear that we were going to, that people thought that the Mustangers, the individuals out collecting up horses for their own purposes would eradicate the animal. Yeah.

Does that seem like something that we could have plausibly pulled off? I mean, did it seem like that, like that the resource was that finite? You know, as two-legged, I think we always think that we're the apex predator on the planet. And so I think that people probably thought, yeah, you know what we could potentially, if everybody went out there, which is why we have the Threatened Endangered Species Act, right? Because we tend to look at one thing and a lot of people will say, whether it's evolution, that things are changing

and species die off and new species come in, whatever. I mean, I don't know how that whole theory goes and everybody's got their own opinion of it. And some of it is very scientifically it's some of it is very scientifically based and some of it is just opinion based but um to think that that we would eradicate all horses and that's where i think a lot of people lose track in in saying that the wild horse is a species within itself you know know, genus species, even though it's Equus calibus, but, and then you look at, you know, thoroughbreds and standard breds and Tennessee

walkers and, you know, the American pinto and all the different known breeds of horses, that they are different than the wild horse. So I think that's where a lot of people get mixed up is because they think that the wild horse, as they like to call where a lot of people get mixed up is because they think that the wild horses, they like to call them, and now you might know that that's not correct, but that a feral horse or a free-roaming horse, because the act does call them wild free-ranging or wild free-roaming horses and burros. So it indicated that they were wild because they were associated to that territory. They were free-roaming, meaning that they were not held in the confines of any fencing or they were not restricted just to that territory. But they should

be associated with that territory. And as long as they were on that territory, they must thrive. There must be ecological balance. There must be genetic diversity, all of that. Of the states in the American West, which states have what are legally recognized as wild horses? Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our Northern

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in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona. I'm just going up, basically up the West, Utah, Nevada, they probably have the most. Utah and Nevada by far have the most. California and Oregon. And then Wyoming and the The prior mountains in Montana. So in those places, it's around these designated areas. Yes. Those are the places where horses have some level of federal protection. So if you're not in one of those states, let's say you're in Kansas, and there's a horse running around and no one really knows who owns it,

and it's running around out in the woods or running around out on the plains, that horse would not be legally regarded as a wild horse. It would not be protected by the Wild Horse and Burrow Act. That would depend because we have, the Bureau of Land Management has some long-term holding pastures in the Midwest where there's abundant grass.

So in Kansas, Missouri, Nevada, I mean, not Nevada, Missouri and Nebraska. And so I think there's some in South Dakota even where they pay ranchers or farm, land owners that have big plots of land, that have abundant grass, because it's prairie grass, where those animals are taken and they live there the rest of their lives. Those animals are still protected because they're wild horses and burros

because they have been removed from a designated territory or HMA. Which kind of points to the real mess, right? Where we have what many would argue is a great overabundance of wild horses that have like exceeded carrying capacity of certain landscapes. Yes. But we can't do lethal control on the wild horses

because of the Wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act. So they need to be gathered up and sent to other places where the government leases grazing lands from private individuals to allow those horses to live out their life. Yes. And we paid, I think we paid about a billion dollars to feed these horses and it's projected that it'll probably push in at some point into three billion dollars yeah right now right now the the latest um that we're looking at is it on average in long-term holding

five to seven7 per horse. So yeah, for the lifetime of their, it gets pretty expensive. Yeah, there's an estimate from the BLM that one unadopted horse can run about $48,000 to remain in a corral over its lifetime to the American taxpayer. $48,000 per horse for its lifetime in captivity. That's what a horse winds up costing.

That's what a horse has the potential to wind up costing. And to your point about the proportion of the budget, we're at a point now where the investment in these kind of holding facilities and paying for pasture well exceeds 50%, almost two thirds of the budget for the total wild horse and burrow program goes to off range care.

So I've got some numbers from the BLM that talk about 46,000 wild horses and burrows in off range corrals and pastures to the tune of $49 million for the 2016 data, it looks like. Did you follow what went on this past February when the Navajo Nation proposed that they were gonna do a horse hunt? Yeah, we were having an all voices summit

at New Mexico State University. And that week that they put that out, we were having this summit and we wanted everybody there. We wanted advocate groups. We wanted the pro-slaughter groups. We wanted the ranchers. We wanted everybody there.

And we got a lot of tribal because New Mexico has so many tribal nations. But the horse that they proposed was going to happen in Arizona. Right. But Navajo Nation, you know, goes into Utah, Arizona, New Mexico. And so on Window Rock,

their headquarters is right on the state line, Arizona, New Mexico state line. So we had a lot of Navajo Nation representatives at our All Voices Summit. And that was one thing we wanted them to talk about because we got there on Monday and they, you know, they were talking about thing we wanted them to talk about because we got there on Monday and they were talking about, we're going to have this horse hunt. It was only for 60 animals. It was in a very remote area and they only wanted to sell to tribal members. It was $5 and a head. 10 bucks. Yeah. 10 bucks was the tag. Yeah yeah and you were allowed a non-branded a non-branded

animal in this one specific location in a very small area of the navajo nation and it was in response to a drought correct yeah like they figured that hard times were coming well yeah and they knew and they knew that that years before they've had a hard time with their mule deer population in that area. And so they said, you know, we need to really look at this. And when you look at a lot of tribal groups, they are, I mean, we're very connected to the wildlife, to all the creatures that Creator made. And so they said, yeah, we need to really protect those deer. And so they were really working hard to try and increase the, you know, the browse for the deer.

And so they said, we need to get, we need to knock some of these horse numbers back. And so they've been fighting over it, you know, kind of, you know, I know it's a very difficult decision. And so I was surprised when i saw that come out and i said oh wow i mean that's bold that's really bold that's a struck me people right away i can't tell how many people sent me a link yeah to like links to the the basically the the fish and game site right of the tribal agency yeah for for for Navajo Game and Fish. And they were like-

The link didn't last long. It did not. I think it lasted over the weekend. But someone pointed out that we have maybe 40,000 horses. Yeah, upwards of 40,000. 40,000 horses on our reservation. They eat about 32 pounds of grass a day, 10 gallons of water a day,

and we just don't have the grass and water. Yeah, yeah. Anybody who's driven through Southern Utah, Northern Arizona, Western New Mexico, you will see there is not a lot of vegetation. And then you throw in this drought that we've had. We've had, what, two rains since last October? So what were the primary things that,

what were the primary pushbacks that caused them to cancel the hunt? Was it internal or external? What I was told was that it was twofold. So they did have some external involvement from non-natives that, of course, came up and talked to the tribal council and presented their, you know, anti, you can't do this, you can't do this. And then I've also been told that internally within the tribal people, they said, hey,

the tribal council never voted on this. This was not something that was taken to the tribal people, and the people were allowed to vote on this. This was just something that was done arbitrarily. And so rather than having lawsuits for arbitrary and capricious decisions made by the Department of Natural Resources, Game and Fish, they just ceased it. They said, you know what, we're not going to go there. And then in May, 191 horses.

192. 192 horses on the Navajo Reservation turned up dead around a dried up waterhole. Yeah, very unfortunate up at Gray Mountain. And it's something that we fight with, those of us that are out here, where you have dirt tanks like that, natural catchments, whether they were man-made or not,

when the water starts drying up, especially if you've had a lot of silt in that dirt tank, it becomes kind of a bog. And we have, you guys have probably heard about it, you know, we have quicksand out here, a lot of it. And so- Like expandable clays. Yeah, expandable clays and stuff.

And so whether that was part of it, or it was just these animals get in there and you get stuck down in that mud where that silt is at. And they're already, you know, their health is already compromised because they're very skinny to go in there in the first place. There's nothing out there for them to eat.

There's nothing for them to drink. And they find this little tiny bit and, you know, nearly 200 animals getting in there. They're all competing for that little bit of moisture. They get stuck in the mire. And it was a horrific scene, the pictures I saw. It just, how tragic, how tragic.

So how are people balancing out? Like if you were looking at a similar situation with rabbits, a situation with feral pigs, a situation with white-tailed deer, people would be like, sure, this seems like a, this seems like a, the reasonable thing here is that if there's demand, we would allow some hunting to occur. Yeah. And how did it be that they wound up being that it's this like exceptional animal that we would rather watch die of thirst than feed some human desire?

You know, I think it goes back to, like I said, you know, we have this romantic notion of horses and everybody, you think of horse, you know, you say horse, and what's the first thing that pops in your mind? It's like the black beauty stallion. It's something like that when you, especially when you look at our largely urban masses

that we have. So I think you get a very different opinion when you have people that are in rural communities that are not associated with urbanization. And you get this expanding urban population and they don't know the difference. They don't know where their food comes from. They don't know that their shoes,

their leather and stuff was once a living, breathing animal. And so they're very, very much separated from where the origins of their food and their fiber and everything they have. They're very separated from that. And so, you know, the thought of, oh, my gosh, this hamburger I'm eating was once that really pretty cow over there. Oh, my gosh, you know. Or that people actually raise animals and every fall sell their steers off so that you can eat your steak and your prime rib and whatnot.

I think people are very separated from that. And so likewise, I think that's where we get this issue of managing horses. They're very separated from that because they look at horses and to them, every horse is secretariat. It's black beauty. It's this majestic animal. And yet they don't realize that those animals do consume a lot of food. They do consume a lot of water. They don't necessarily put those two things together and that there is a huge responsibility in keeping those animals healthy and at a level where they're not damaging the landscape. Carl, when you look at it from the wildlife angle,

what is the, how does native wildlife get, like how is native wildlife affected by wild horses? Well, there's a- How are native wildlife species affected by wild horses? Yeah, there's a number of answers to that question. My mind, to be honest, is still on what you asked Talani. And I think she's making some good points about the perception of,

the differing perceptions of people with respect to animals and a lack of awareness around where food and leather come from, et cetera. But I would say with respect to horses, before I go to your question about wildlife, just thinking about how cultural this issue really is, because I think you could put it to a room full of hunters. How comfortable are they with shooting, eating an elk,

a deer, slaughtering beef cattle versus horses? Do they put all those in the same category or not? Because I think here in America, even in a rural landscape, horses are not typically a species that we think of as food. You know, it's not part of our menu. No, they're in the group with cats and labs. Yeah. And in this country, yeah. But that's very different than what you might get overseas, right? There's plenty of cultures where consuming horse meat is totally normal. And if you were to

ask somebody, you know, what's the first thing they think of when they think of a horse, there are plenty of people who would say food. Having had a chance to spend some time in Northwest China, where there's a very strong community of a Muslim group called the Uyghurs up in Xinjiang province in the Northwest near the border with Mongolia,

we routinely had horse served to us at meals when we were doing field work there for some of my research. So this is such an interesting cultural issue. And I would say you could think about it from the same standpoint of if you were to ask a Hindu what they think of when they think of a cow, how different that is from what an American would say when they think of a cow. There's just so much steeped in culture here, where in Hindu culture, Hindu religion, the animal is venerated. It's considered sinful to even toy with the idea of slaughtering a cow compared to here in America. So none of that is rooted in ecology at all, right?

To your point, all of these animals are capable of reproducing. Historically, you would have had predator prey dynamics controlling horses. We had a cast, a whole host of predators historically that would have been eating horses during the Pleistocene that are gone now. But with respect to your question

about some of the implications, I guess for starters, it's just, you could look at the impact that horses have on the landscape in terms of soil compaction, in terms of the amount of forage that they consume. We've touched on that a little bit. But then there are a couple of other interesting, a little bit more complex interactions. So one would be, we're talking about landscapes, given the list of states we've

touched on, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, relatively dry places, water is oftentimes a limiting factor. Horses are very effective at capitalizing on a water resource and excluding native wildlife from being able to access that water supply. So you'll have horses that will drive away the indigenous wildlife. So typically we'd be talking about pronghorn, bighorn, mule deer, even elk in some cases

can be displaced by wild slash feral horses. And then another really interesting consideration here is what horses represent in terms of a prey base that has the potential to elevate the density of predators on the landscape, which has the potential to have implications for other native prey species. So for example, if you think about a landscape

where you've got- Yeah, I need to have a big for example on that one. I'll spell it out for you. And before I do, I want to have a big for example on that one. I'll spell it out for you. And before I do, I want to point out, I had a chance recently to talk about this issue with a bighorn biologist from the state of New Mexico, a guy named Eric Rominger. And he pointed me to a couple of papers

because we were brainstorming about a recent New York Times article that we both had read that had us both kind of steaming a little bit. And this issue of apparent competition is something that was totally overlooked in that article. And the reason this pattern that arises in ecology is called apparent competition is because on its surface,

it looks like two species might be competing with one another. But in fact, the dynamics that are being observed are mediated by a predator. Okay. So I'll spell this out so it makes a little bit more sense. Imagine a system, a very simple system where all you have for predator prey interactions are mule deer and mountain lions. The mountain lion population is going to depend on the availability of prey, which in this case is exclusively mule deer. So if the mountain lion population manages to drive the mule deer numbers down, ultimately the mule deer herd is going to be able to support fewer mountain lions. So the mountain lion numbers are going to decline. Mule deer numbers would then potentially rebound.

This is where you get those classic predator-prey cycles. Lynx and snowshoe hares being like the classic example. It's like the seven-year recurring cycle of elevated snowshoe hares followed by elevated lynx, collapse, rise, collapse, rise. Exactly. So now imagine adding another prey species into the equation. And imagine that that second prey species is relatively superior at evading predation

compared to the mule deer. Would you mind if we talk, can we talk about the New York Times article we're talking about? Yeah, I would love to talk about the New York Times article. Because you are talking about it, right? Don't you think we should talk about it before we talk about it? Yeah, we could talk about it a little bit. And Talani and I offered up

to provide a rebuttal to this article. Let me say what he says, though. Because this is the guy, in all fairness, we tried to get the writer, a gentleman by the name of Dave Phillips, we tried to get the writer to come on the podcast to talk about his book about wild horses

called Wild Horse Country. And I read the book in its entirety. And he's of the mindset that the 12,000-year absence of horses and the fact that they were reintroduced by humans is sort of a little bit put in words of his mouth, but proves to be kind of inconsequential in that we should regard wild horses as a sort of native wildlife or they kind of like have established a sort of honorary status as native wildlife. And he goes on to say how we have way too many of them

now on the landscape and that it's untenable that they would be put to human use. It's untenable that they would be rounded up and sent to slaughter or used for human food or used for dog food. That's not a realistic solution. And he goes on to say that what ought to be going on is we need a bunch more mountain lions to kill wild horses. And that if we allow this to play out and no one hunted mountain lions anymore, that we would not entirely take care of the problem, but we would lick a good

bunch of it if we just had more mountain lions. And this, when I read it, was like almost maddening. And that was why I wanted to have him on to discuss his perspective and my perspective on it. But I felt that it overlooked a handful of things. He throws out how many mountain lions are killed in the American West and if they each killed three horses, but he doesn't give any acknowledgement toward the fact

that the distribution of those lions is not overlapped over the distribution of horses. And a handful of other things, I'll let you take it from there. But I just wanted to establish like what the argument was. Yeah, I mean, the title of the article is Let Mountain Lions Eat Horses. And there's a few quotable quotes that I think would

kind of further cement in the listener's mind what we're talking about. So direct quote from the article. I'm going to interrupt him just so the listener knows he agreed to do the podcast with us, but couldn't make it. We couldn't come and do it in person. Yeah, the offer still stands.

I still love to have the rebuttal guy yeah yeah it'd be a good conversation so one of the things he says it isn't that there are too many horses is that there aren't enough mountain lions that is one thing he says he also says because the bureau bureau of land management has always seen the horses as livestock not wildlife it has never tried to understand the Mustang's place in the Western ecosystem or tried to take advantage of the ancient relationship between the horse and its main predator, the mountain lion. Okay.

And one of the reasons I have a problem with that is because if you look at the time period when the horses that we all could agree were absolutely wild native indigenous horses, towards the end of the Pleistocene, when they were still here being hunted by humans, they're also being hunted by a cast of other species that were far better equipped to take down a horse

than the mountain lion. The mountain lion would have been like the 10th baddest predator in the Pleistocene landscape. So you're talking about the American lion, which is a main mountain lion. We're talking about the main lion, like the African lion, except give it another 25% body weight. It's estimated the American lion weighed somewhere between 930 and 1150 pounds. You're talking about a variety of saber-toothed cats being on the landscape.

Significantly larger in the 600 to 900 pound range. Talking about short-faced bears, notorious for their long legs. It's thought that they had potentially a gait that would have equipped them to run down horses. Talking about dire wolves, which based on their jaw anatomy had crushing power that far exceeds

the wolves of the modern era. So you're talking about a whole list of species. The American cheetah. Yeah, we can keep going, man. But this quote. And your horse was not the size of horse that we have today. Smaller horses too.

It was a much smaller animal. It was probably five to 600, maybe 700 pounds. So it was a much smaller animal. Okay. So to refer to the main predator, the main predator in this ancient relationship to be the mountain lion is just factually inaccurate. And we could go on, but I want to get back to this

topic of apparent competition. Okay, so I'm going to bring you back to the system where you have mule deer, mountain lions, and then let's add in horses to the equation. One thing that the author of this piece got absolutely right, is that mountain lions will kill horses. That is well documented. Mountain lions will potentially kill enough horses to boost their own numbers, which has the potential then to drive other indigenous prey species, potentially the point of extirpation or extinction through this process of apparent competition. And again, it's called apparent competition because it looks like, in this case, the horses and the mule deer are competing with each other. You see horses show up, mule deer numbers go down. But in fact, it's not competition for resources between those species. It's this

predator-mediated apparent competition where the collection of all that prey supports a higher abundance of mountain lions in the system, which then disproportionately targets the mule deer in this case, driving them down in numbers potentially to extinction. Because the apparent competition would be just a competition for resources? Well, so competition would be, the term for that would be competition, whether it's a limitation in, say, forage or a limitation in water. And of course, I've already talked about the ability of horses to exclude other species from accessing water. So none of these patterns exists in a vacuum. But one of the pieces of this article, the author talks about

this kind of predator-prey balance being a boon, not just for the wild horse program, but for the entire Western ecosystem. He says, if herds have exhausted the land, everything else suffers. Native wildflowers and lizards, sage grass and butterflies, as well as ranchers who rely on the same range and hunters who want to see thriving populations of deer and bighorn sheep. So if we would just stop killing mountain lions, those mountain lions would take care of the horses

and we would have, quote, thriving populations of deer and bighorn sheep. The reality is if we would stop hunting mountain lions and if we had numbers of feral horses, wild horses on the landscape that supported an increased abundance of mountain lions, that would not be a boon for bighorn sheep, mule deer, pronghorn,

because it would likely support a larger population of those predators. A couple of other drawbacks of the argument. We have somewhere around 30,000 mountain lions in the Western United States today. Every year, somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 of those are shot. Let's say you leave those ones in the system. You then have, let's say, 32,500 or 33,000 mountain lions instead of 30,000. We're talking about a situation where, based on the BLM's most recent estimates,

we're at 73,000 horses, which is about three times the appropriate management level that the BLM has estimated for its lands. And if you're thinking about a territorial predator whose distribution, as you've already pointed out, Steve, does not entirely overlap with where the horses are, the landscape of the West does not even have the ability to support a number of mountain lions that could begin to take a bite, so to speak, out of the horse population. Furthermore, we have examples of places on the landscape where there is no lion hunting,

including a lot of our tribal lands. Many of our reservations, many of those tribes have no history in their culture of hunting mountain lions. And they have a ton of horses and they have robust numbers of mountain lions killing a fair number of horses in those situations. We've got some examples in New Mexico where there are mountain lions specializing

on killing horses. And again, Eric Romiger, the bighorn biologist for Game and Fish pointed this out. In those situations, you still have horses eating themselves out of house and home. The lions are there killing them, but by no means are they sufficient source of predation

to maintain a healthy balance in the ecosystem. I just want to point to California in particular, because can you tell me about mountain lion hunting in California real quick? They banned it years ago. Yeah, I'll tell you exactly when they banned it. It was Ronald Reagan, actually, in 1972, when he was was the governor he issued a moratorium on all mountain lion hunting and then it took and they kill about 100 a year took 18 years till california passed a ban

formally proposition 117 and reagan reagan yeah re. 1972 moratorium. I wonder if contemporary politicians would all still compare themselves to Reagan if they knew the heat banned lion hunt. That's a good question. And so now they kill right around a hundred per year through depredation permits if their mountain lions cause them trouble, which by the way is about four times the number of depredation permits they issued prior to the moratorium. But about a hundred lions killed a year in california and these are lions that are incompatible with people arguably they're the ones that are causing a problem for the most part and that's out of a population of somewhere between four and six thousand mountain lions in california so we could take california as an example of a state where there is relatively low mountain lion hunting occurring.

They got four to 6,000 mountain lions. A hundred are getting killed every year. 98 killed a year. And those hundred that get killed are the ones that are killing livestock. Yes. A depredation permit is issued by the state to remove an offending individual lion. State of California. So my question for the author of this article, Dave Phillips,

taking California as a case study. I expect you to tell me now that wild horse numbers in California are plummeting because of all the lions. Yeah. Maximum AML, maximum appropriate management level for the state of california 2200 horses and burros combined total estimated population for 2017 10 971 approximately fivefold the max aml in a state where it is illegal to hunt mountain lions. Just driving that nail deeper and deeper.

And this pattern of apparent competition, we're going to post a few pretty cool papers that spell this out, but some examples I can give you. One is the Woodland Caribou, Southern British Columbia, Northern Idaho, diminishing numbers of woodland caribou. Like two. Well, not quite that. Well, maybe on the US side. Yeah, on the US. But yeah, so Southern BC, Northern Idaho, very imperiled populations of woodland caribou.

A couple of things that are happening in that landscape. One is you have quite a bit of timber harvest occurring, which is boosting early successional vegetation availability, which is forage for moose and white-tailed deer. It also reduces the amount of lichen available, which is the primary food source for the woodland caribou. So you're changing the habitat such that it benefits an expansion of moose and white-tailed deer into woodland caribou habitat, which in turn boosts the numbers of wolves because they're eating the moose and the white-tailed deer, but they're also eating the woodland caribou. So you're talking about a system which historically was a few wolves and some woodland caribou. So you're talking about a system which historically was a few wolves and some woodland caribou.

Now it's woodland caribou, moose, white-tailed deer, and a bunch of wolves, wolves killing a ton more woodland caribou. So there's a great paper where through a very controlled study, these researchers went in and rather than doing the standard thing, which is to kill the wolves, a lot of which has happened in the interest of protecting woodland caribou, they issued very

generous numbers of moose tags and reduced the moose population dramatically. And the wolves followed that decline. And the vital rates like survivorship of adult females in the woodland caribou, went up. Because you reduced the main thing that the wolves were going in there to kill. Predator-mediated apparent competition is the term. So this is like pretty complex stuff. And it's really relevant to the discussion about the implications of having another prey species on the landscape, especially prey species that's not being subjected to

sufficient sources of mortality that its numbers are being kept at a level that is sustainable for the habitat over the long term, I think is a pretty objective thing to say, but it's just totally glossed over. And this idea of just leaving the mountain lions alone, and you're going to have, you know, it's going to be a boon for everybody who loves deer and bighorn sheep is absurd. And one of the most ironic things as I was doing some research into this was one of the papers that the author of this piece points to talks about a system where you had heavy predation by mountain lions on a horse herd that was being studied. And towards the end of the study, and we'll post this paper as well, towards the end of the study, the researchers, and I want to turn to the page here

so I can give you the great quote. This is in the discussion section of this paper. They say at the end, we do not know why numbers of lions declined toward the end of our study after the lions had been eating all these horses. We do not know why numbers of lions declined toward the end of our study. Hunting pressure was low to non-existent. The migrant mule deer population,

which winters in the study area, decreased by 40% over the course of our study from an estimated 500 animals in 1987 to less than 300 in 1997. And they just kind of leave it at that. So you certainly cannot point to causation here, but that kind of a pattern suggests the possibility. In one of the papers that this guy points to

in his op-ed in the New York Times that the horses may have been supporting a more robust predator base that was driving down the mule deer herd right before their eyes. And they didn't connect that in this paper, but there's evidence here to suggest that even in one of the papers he's talking about you witnessed a decline from 500 mule deer to 300 mule deer in 10 years in this migratory herd and it's possible that the horses were a causal factor for that mule deer decline so it's pretty easy to you know throw out, man, if we would just stop hunting mountain lions, it would take care of the wild slash feral horse issue. But without really digging into the science,

you're doing a disservice. And I have to say, I mean, I generally admire the work of the New York Times as a periodical. You know, I have read it and admired that publication for my entire adult life. They have correspondents around the world reporting from some of the most dangerous,

I mean, among many other services, reporting from some of the most dangerous hotspots and bringing news to people that you would otherwise not be able to get. Absolutely. And I admire and appreciate that. There's a tremendous service being provided to the American people.

Yes. And I absolutely, I mean, I'm critiquing this piece because this is an area where I and my colleagues, our minds and our hearts are in this kind of work and these kinds of conversations day in and day out. And to try to make an inch of gain around these concepts is such a politically sensitive and divisive issue as managing wild slash feral special status equines.

We haven't thrown that term out yet. No, we have not. But I feel like something like this article being published and read by however many millions of readers around the country, it does a disservice to the really complex, difficult work. And it feels like steps in the wrong direction. So it's not very often that the New York Times or nationally syndicated media are talking about these concepts, and then to have them publish something that feels like a step in the wrong direction is

pretty frustrating. There's another thing that I would want to ask the writer about, and that's his idea that if we didn't kill X number of mountain lions, that you would just automatically mean that you'd have that many more. Meaning if Wisconsin, who kills some years, 50,000 turkeys in a year, you'd say like, oh, so if Wisconsin didn't have a turkey hunt, we would have 50,000 more turkeys in Wisconsin when in fact you'd probably wind up having somewhere around how many you have

even despite the fact that you killed 50,000 turkeys. That is very likely to be a product of competition and that would be intraspecies competition, competition among individuals. We all know mountain lions are very territorial, not tolerant of other individuals intruding into their territory. They are very capable of killing one another and maintaining a density on the landscape on their own through that direct competition, intraspecific competition. So yeah, you're not just going to stop hunting them

and have mountain lions suddenly deciding that their home range can overlap with five other conspecifics. They're going to kill the weaker competitors in their landscape. So for a variety of reasons, it's a flawed argument. When the Navajo, do you say Navajo or Navajo? Navajo.

Navajo. The horses that the Navajo were proposing to hunt are not federally recognized wild horses or are they? No, they're not protected. Sovereign nation, right? Any tribal group of free-ranging horses are not protected unless they are within a certain area. And we do have some areas on our national forest where we have an adjacent wild horse and burrow territory to tribal lands. So we have a few of those, but not very many, but certainly not on the Navajo reservation. So even in a situation where you have a not fairly protected,

not federally protected population of wild horses that- Free ranging horses. Okay. Yeah. They're free ranging horses in that case. They're free ranging horses in that case, but not federally recognized wild horses. Yes.

And you have land managers who feel like they should do some kind of coal or reduce the numbers mechanically in service of wildlife habitat and grazing habitat. And they're not able to execute on that wish because of public sentiment. And in the federally recognized areas, we're not able to do any kind of lethal culling. Right. Unless it's- And we're running- We do have, we can do lethal only if, and it's in the act,

if it is a horse that is diseased, is lame, is sick, you know, there has a wound that cannot be repaired so that it's to maintain the health of that animal. So if that animal, its quality of life is so bad, then we can use lethal methods to humanely destroy that animal. So if that animal, its quality of life is so bad, then we can use lethal methods to humanely destroy that animal. And that is in the act. But that's not going to solve for the bigger problem. No. And if we take all of the excess horses and send them to live somewhere else on private grazing lands and pay those landowners money in order to allow the excess horses. Like, and everyone regards that as being not sustainable

because of budgetary constraints. What in the end winds up happening? Well, right now, what's happening to unwanted horses. So regardless in private ownership, if someone has an unwanted horse, unfortunately, a lot of times, because there's no means for disposal other than euthanasia, humane euthanasia, which is generally done with a barbiturate overdose, then renders that carcass unusable. Private owners will sell this horse and it goes into slaughter channels and it either goes to Canada or Mexico. And so they go down to Mexico and there are laws for transporting in the United States, but once it hits the border, everything changes. Yeah, because they closed all the slaughter facilities in the U.S. In the U.S., yes.

There's two in Texas and one in Illinois, right? Yeah, there were up until 2006 and it officially closed 2007. So those people, private ownership horses, some go in that channel. Probably a lot of them just get turned out on the landscape. And because tribal lands are massive and there's not a lot of them just get turned out on the landscape. And because tribal lands are massive and there's not a lot of patrolling, they get turned out. And so it's plausible to think

that that's where a large number of these free ranging horses on tribal lands. That's why those numbers are increasing. And so tribal land managers are really looking at this and they're trying to decide what can we do? What can we as tribal land managers, knowing that in a lot of times it's not something that's very palatable to the public because the public doesn't necessarily understand what the tribal land managers are trying to do. Like what they're up against.

Yeah, what they're up against. Not only, I mean, on're, you know, on any reservation, we're fighting massive poverty. We're fighting alcoholism and drug abuse and missing parents and a lot of, you know, just abuse in general. We have rising dog and cat populations. And so you look at all of this and then you say, well, you know, leave the horses alone. And a lot of the tribal land managers are like, look, it's just another symptom of what's going on in tribal communities. And we have got to stop something somewhere. And so, you know, you look at, okay, let more mountain lions, you know, let more mountain lions live. And I know Carl and I said this and I go,

well, you know what? I mean, unfortunately, I think we look at threshold levels and we say, okay, so what is our threshold level for numbers of species and whatnot? And the minute any animal, regardless of what it is, but the minute any animal does negative, has a negative impact to the two-legged, and I'm always telling people that I talk in two-legged and four-legged terms. So if there is a negative impact on a two-legged to the point that it is death, that's your threshold. Then people start saying, oh, you got to do something about this. Yeah, that's most people's tipping point.

That's, yeah, that's their threshold is when they're- Not all people have that tipping point. Right, but the masses in general, and especially when you look at urban communities, that's their tipping point is, okay, now we have negative effect on humans because it's causing a human death. Or our pets, right?

Yeah. Also the mountain lions are in the backyard eating the dogs. Right, right? Also the mountain lions are in the backyard eating the dogs. Right, right. So if you're out hiking, you're out enjoying nature, quote unquote, enjoying nature, and a mountain lion comes and takes your two-year-old, that's your threshold. You want all the mountain lions taken care of because it took your two-year-old and the depletion of wildlife habitat and the depletion of like commercially viable grazing landscapes does not match most people's threshold right there's also it seems to me an element when you look at the the article we keep talking about

that argues that if we weren't, that if we didn't hunt mountain lions, we'd be licking part of the horse problem. It demonstrates a type of self-loathing, like a type of human self-loathing that I see from people now and then, which is this idea that it's untenable that we would eat horses,

but it's acceptable that a lion would do so. As though the horse in his moment of death is thinking to himself, thank God, I wasn't just shot by a rifle. I'm so much happier that I happen to have this thing gnawing me to death. As though the horse would find some level of satisfaction or good feelings about that cause of death. Because why else would it be acceptable for someone to say like,

oh, that's not something we could do. That's awful. But we should allow the lions to go do it for us. Because it's natural. Because people think that's natural. But the problem you run into here is you even lose that argument.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Yeah. It's kind of a nice piece because it's like a helpful piece because it demonstrates the trouble that we humans find ourselves in. Right. In situations when it comes to wildlife, or in this case, not quite wildlife, and balancing out how are we going to be good people and at what expense.

When in reality, we're all trying to do the same thing. We're all trying to take care of our mother, the earth that we live on. And we talk about that and whether it's excessive pollution, you know, trash, whether it's too many animals, whether it's too many two-legged, whether it's, you know, junked cars, whether, you know, it's, it's getting our ecosystems, you know, our marine areas, you know, full of garbage and stuff. We all talk about trying to take care of our mother and we're going to do this in this one area. And we fail to see the big picture that it's all interconnected. And so, yeah, there might be, you know, some, well, like right now in California, they've got a chicken disease, a poultry disease going on in animals. And so they're having to take out,

this is the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, to prevent it from coming in and really devastating our avian species. So they're taking out domestic poultry down in Southern California. If we had something like that that happened with horses, oh my goodness. I mean, that would be terrible. People would be like, oh my gosh, how could we have African horse sickness or Venezuelan equine encephalitis that will kill horses. And they're dying on the landscape. And guess what? Those are both, I mean,

especially Venezuelan equine encephalitis, that's a human health problem because it's spread through mosquitoes. So, you know, mosquito bites an infected horse that comes over, bites a human. Guess what? Now the human's got it. High death rates.

There would be something very, very different if we had something like that going on, but we don't tend to see that all of these things are interconnected, that the trash we have on the landscape is also decreasing the forage for the animals that want to live there, whether they're deer or elk or cattle. I don't know how many times I've worked on cattle that have hardware disease because they're eating wire and they're eating cans. Yeah, they pick up garbage because they're foraging. It's called hardware disease?

Hardware disease because what they do is they swallow the wire or the nail or whatever this piece of metal is because they're eating on it. It goes down and it punctures the rumen and then it spreads and you get this massive infection and an endoparacarditis or endocarditis or, you know, wherever it's punctured. And so what we do a lot of times with livestock is we will, especially in dairy cattle, is we'll go ahead and put magnets into their rumen to try and attract that metal to keep it from migrating out. Hardware disease.

Hardware disease. It's just a common term in veterinary medicine, in large animal vet medicine. So you look at that and you look at horses, and I don't know how many times I've looked at horses that have stepped on glass, that have stepped on nails, and their foot becomes infected

and there's no way to do anything with them because now this infection has gone all the way up into their tendon sheaths. And the most humane thing to do is to put them down because they've got this spreading infection because they stepped on something that a human left out there. And that happens with the free-ranging horses.

So I think people forget that we as two-legged, we're just as much a component of this, and we have to be responsible about the whole thing. So whether you hunt or fish, or whether you're not a proponent of it, or you are, that realize that it's all interconnected. And I think a lot of people lose that sense. They live in their little vacuum in their little suburban house

and they watch Netflix and whatnot, and they're completely separated from all of that. That the hamburger that they got at McDonald's or In-N-Out Burger was actually once a living, breathing bovine animal that had a life, that had a spirit, that its heart was beating, but now they're eating it at In-N-Out Burger. And people have lost that connection. Writing in, simultaneously writing in letters about saving the horses. Yeah.

Among wildlife managers, is there any serious talk that the Wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act was a mistake and that we ought to revisit it and repeal it because it's ultimately damaging? Because it's proven

to be quite damaging to wild horses and wild horse habitat? No, I've not heard anything about repealing it, but I have heard discussions about how we need to really clarify more of what we are to do. We talk about, in the act, it talks about appropriate management levels. And so that appropriate management level or AML for those territories is determined, it's a very scientific method of determining how many animals can reside. It's far more than carrying capacity, because we throw that term around, well, carrying capacity of this plot of land or this

area of land is X, Y, Z. Well, so it's far more than that because it does look at the entirety, the whole usage of that area. Yeah. Not just like how many horses can you cram on it, but how many horses can you put on it and still have room for? Right. You know, for everything, for the fin, the feather, the, you know, the animals that are being brought in by the permittees, whether they're cattle or sheep, certainly all of the, you know, the native wildlife, the fish, I mean, and almost hesitate to say this, but, you know, a little mouse, you know, that-

In this company, it's okay to talk about little mice. About that little mouse. Little mice are people too. Yeah. And so all of those, they all have a right to live there. They all need to exist there. And so we've got to look at, okay, what do we do so that we can have that? And some people talk about, well, all the different tools that are in the toolbox. And a lot of people will say, well, we can't have this tool. Well, we can't use that tool, whether it's immunocontraception, whether it's the big S, whether it's something.

The big S being slaughter. Yeah. Is the contraceptive thing legitimate? Yes, it really does work in populations where you can already have them under control, where you've already got manageable population levels. Immunocontraception, I'm certified in it. I believe in it. I love Gonicon.

That actually stops ovulation. Where PZP, depending on the different levels, and that's the other thing in science, you look at people, you know, say, well, PZP is the way to go, and HSUS, you know, has the patent on the 100 microgram dosage of PZP, but then you look at different adjuvants, and I mean, there's so many different things that I explain it to people. I said, PZP is not just PZP. It's kind of like an apple is not just an apple. You've got all these different varieties of apples. And that's kind of what we're dealing with with PZP right now

is that we have different varieties of it. And so its usage and the response and what you see in literature varies because you've got different concentrations and different adjuvants being used. So what is the animal rights perspective on using contraceptives on horses? Because it'd be like, if you, imagine if someone proposed that we would go and inject, without consent, forcibly inject humans with contraceptives, people would be irate. So if you have this idea

that this is this untouchable thing that should be allowed to live its life and that we have no right to come in and manipulate it, yet we're going to come in and take away its sexual viability without asking it or consulting it, I would think that some people would recognize that as a pretty offensive idea, but it seems to be embraced by people who resist the big S. Yeah. Yeah, HSUS owns the patent on the 100 microgram PZP. The Humane Society of the United States.

Yes. Yeah. And they have had great success in certain areas. The Spring Basin HMA up in Colorado, they're having great success there. But it's much smaller. I mean, it's 68 animals. And you've got somebody who lives in amongst them. The animals have become acclimated to that person.

I see. So, you know. It's a very special circumstance. It's a very different circumstance. The prior mountain horses, there again, you've got more acclimation to the humans and people that are going in and doing the darting. So in situations like that, it's very successful. And I'm very much in support of those kinds of things.

Okay. and I'm very much in support of those kinds of things. But you look at larger landscapes, larger populations, it may not be that easy. You've got some, I mean, the average, I'd say, and this is certainly not scientifically proven, but a lot of people will, you know, and I can't pull the papers that Carl's got, but you look at like the flight zone of these free ranging horses

and it far is much farther than the darting range of a dart, of a, you know, one CC dart. So you're looking at horses that when they see a human at a quarter mile, they're like, hell no, I'm gone. So there's kind of some irony here that like the horses that are actually treatable are less wild than the horses that are untreatable, right? This flight distance being the distance

at which they're going to flee from your presence. So this example in Colorado, we're talking wild, the legal definition, but in terms of wildness, like flightiness, if they're kind of tame wild horses, then there's the chance of applying a contraceptive program that's more effective than if they're wilder wild horses. So it's almost like the more their wildness is compromised, the more that's a viable option, which strikes me as ironic. Yeah. Wild horses, it's like an irony rich.

It is. Not iron rich, but irony rich environment. Yes. Another piece of it that we haven't touched on in terms of workable solutions, I'm glad that the contraception topic came up. Could you talk a little bit about adoptions? Yes. I don't think we've spent any time on that yet. So a lot of people want, you know, any of these horses that are removed, they want them to be adopted out. And as per the 1971 act,

it said that any horse that was over 10 years of age was considered probably not adoptable. So you can sell those horses because the older a horse gets, just like a human, the harder it is to change their behavior. So horses that are taken off the ranges or that are no longer free-ranging horses and they're over 10 years of age, they're sold. Now, anybody that's under, and especially the younger animals,

they go into adoption. And so adoption is $125. Sorry, the over 10-year-olds that are taken off the range, they go to where we pay to have them grazed on private land. They can go that way, or they can be sold outright. And we cannot sell knowingly to a slaughter buyer because they're they those people do exist you know because they they make their living by taking horses to either canada or mexico yeah dave phillips um the guy that wrote wild horse country he spends quite a bit of time talking about the illegal trade right of at times where people have said like oh no i have an interest and i'll find a place for them when in fact they're getting them and selling them into slaughter. Right. And so part

of what the act does to protect those animals is that we are not able to sell more than four horses to any one individual. Okay. And that kind of helps decrease, you know, because people realize, well, you know, if somebody's coming in and saying, yeah, I want to buy six animals, that's a big flag. We go, yeah, probably not going to sell to that person because we pretty much know. So we do have, at least on the Carson National Forest in New Mexico, we have a very successful adoption program

for the horses that we take off of two of our wild horse and burrow territories on the Carson National Forest. And we've been very successful in finding forever homes with those animals. When you adopt, there is a mandatory one-year inspection before you can get your bill of sale for that horse. Before that horse truly belongs to you, we have to go back out and do an inspection, make sure that you still own the horse, belongs to you, we have to go back out and do an inspection, make sure that you are in still, that you still own the horse, that you still are in possession of that horse and that its quality of life is good, that it, you know, hasn't gotten a Heineke body score of like a two or a one. And that it's, you know, it's being treated humanely and

everything because we have that responsibility as per the act. And the BLM does the same thing. So it's $125. So how many, like off the Carson National Forest, how many horses have come off there and gone into adoption? Since 2004, we've had 500. Shoot. Sean just gave me this number. I think it was 527 animals.

And right now we're still way, we're about five or six times over our AML. Five or six times? Yeah. So what is that number? And the AML is that portion of Carson National Forest. Right, for one of the territories, we're looking at about 571. It was almost 500 animals, right around 500 animals.

And you feel like you should have about 100. Yeah. I was reading that in two. That's the high range of the AML. Because AMLs are given in a range. So that it allows for fluctuations based on drought and forage availability. And so you'll always have a lower range in the AML and then a higher upper range. And we are at exceeding our higher upper range five or six times. Yeah.

I was reading about the ways that wild horse numbers can explode when conditions are good. That in 2007, there was an estimated 28.5 thousand wild horses in the American West. Ten years later in 2017, an estimated 83 thousand. Right. Because it's given that in any given year, we say that our reproductive rate is 20%.

And so you look at in five years, that population is 100% greater than it was five years previous. So if you just take the Carson National Forest part of it, is there enough demand? Are people waiting in line to adopt one of these horses? No, no. So you don't have 400 people saying like, go get me one?

No. And the BLM actually had some numbers published from their databases looking back to 1995, the number of adoptions. So in 1995, they had 9,700 adoptions nationally. 10 years later in 2005, it was down from 9,700 to 5,700. Then from 2005 to 2016, it went down from 5,700 to 2,912. So I've heard talk, and maybe you could confirm it, Talani,

but the idea of the adoption market being saturated over time, like the people who wanted to adopt a horse have adopted a horse. And so the ratio of them during these roundups when they go out and capture to try to reduce the population on the landscape closer to AML, rather than those being adopted, they're going more and more to the holding facilities. So a downward trend in adoption, meanwhile, an upward trend in the population, both in holding facilities and on the landscape. To the point where there's 44,000 in holding

facilities. 46,000 as of 2017. Yeah. And to your point about the population growth, again, looking at the BLM numbers, which are readily available online, between 2017 and 2018, there was a 13% increase on range. So not including the ones that are being held at the facilities. And that bump in population was from an estimated 72,674 up to 81,951. And the AML, the max AML is 26,690. So the max AML is basically being exceeded by about an order of 300%. Man, it seems like an insurmountable problem. Have you heard the argument? You're shakingable problem. Have you heard the argument?

You're shaking your head. Have you heard the argument? Years ago, I was working on a story about, a magazine story about livestock theft. And that led me into some other conversations with people in the livestock world. And a stock detective, a guy who investigates livestock theft,

was talking about the unanticipated consequences of when we closed the horse slaughter facilities in the u.s where when you had horse slaughter facilities in the u.s and people could sell unwanted horses to slaughter facilities, it created an outlet for unwanted horses. And he felt that once you remove that outlet, even though you could still sell into Canada, Mexico, which was much less convenient and far more expensive and less profitable for operators, that without that outlet, he saw, he and his colleagues, saw a dramatic increase in horse abuse and neglect and a dramatic increase in feral horses on the landscape. Because suddenly it used to be that all horses had some monetary value. And it went to being that most horses now, there was no value for unwanted horses.

And he felt it was like one of these great, like I said, unanticipated or unforeseen consequences of an action where supposedly in an act to eliminate horse suffering, you open the floodgates of horse suffering by creating a problem. He said, we used to get phone calls because someone's horse had been stolen. Now we get phone calls because someone has a horse in their yard and they don't know where it came from. And he cites that shift in particular, he talked about in California, that shift in leading to new populations of wild horses in places where they didn't previously exist because people would simply load a stock trailer

with unwanted horses and drive it out and open the gate. Right. And that's where I was saying, especially on tribal lands, that's one of the theories that tribal land managers have of why we have so many free-ranging horses on tribal lands. It's because in the urban populations that are close to tribal lands, people will get a horse or a pony, you know, and they're, oh, I want to buy this for my daughter. She really wants this horse or whatnot. And it's so cool to have a horse. And then they realize that hay is, well, this year, good quality horse alfalfa is $15 a

bale. And Timothy is upwards of $22 a bale. And that's really what your veterinarian tells you. You should be feeding your horse. And oh, by the way, you put all that into them. What's going to come out the other end? And now I have to deal with all this poop. And it becomes overwhelming.

And maybe not every horse is, you know, black beauty. And it's not as nice a horse as what they thought it was. Or the kid loses interest because now they'd rather be playing PlayStation as opposed to outside working with the horse. And, you know, just a whole bunch of factors. So now there's this unwanted horse and they don't know what to do with it. Well, the most humane thing in their mind is let's take it out and put it on the landscape. Oh yeah, there's that tribal land out there and the horse can run out there

because there's plenty of grass. Not realizing that a lot of that grass is non-native grass that, you know, doesn't have a high palatability factor. And it may look lush, but even the cows won't eat it. The deer and the elk won't eat it. The antelope aren't eating it. And so they put this horse out there thinking, oh, I'm doing a good thing

because I'm going to let it go out there and eat all that free grass. Starvation camp. Yeah. The same stock detective talked about that too that you could track incidences of wild horses in relation to alfalfa prices yeah the more expensive feed got the more wild horses were on the landscape because people couldn't afford to take care of them and have you seen the movie, the 70s movie,

The Electric Horseman with Robert Redford? Yeah. When he goes to cut his horse loose, what does he do? Yeah. He drives out until he finds some horses out on the horizon and turns his loose. Yep. I don't, you know, Carl, you got more. what more do you have you want to talk about i've been i've been over here it's

like i can't even like do my job i can't even do my job right now i can't even do my job right now of walking through this because i get it's like i'm so baffled i'm so baffled. I'm so baffled by the mindsets that are on display when we're talking about individuals who are taking steps that they think are improving, alleviating suffering, improving the world, that in fact are so obviously driving negatives that it makes it difficult for me

to carry on the conversation. Because I want to step out and just try to understand it better. Yeah, no, it's a really tough position to be in. There's no easy solution. And a lot of really good people who care a whole heck of a lot about the wellbeing of horses

and about the wellbeing of range conditions and about the wellbeing of rural economies that are dependent upon these systems have been banging their heads against the wall for years trying to come up with a solution. And there are very disparate competing value sets at play here. So you're coming at this from a relatively well-informed standpoint in terms of the ecological consequences. I think a lot of people, frankly, are looking at it from a really simple lens.

They like horses. They don't want anything bad to happen to the horses. They want the horses to be free, end of conversation, move on to something else. It's not something that I think a lot of people have put a ton of thought into necessarily. They don't want anything bad to happen to the horse if it happened from a person.

Dying of thirst, getting killed by a lion, that's all cool. Yeah, but we're at a point now, I mean, and I'm recognizing preaching to the choir here a little bit, but the distribution of species and habitats on the landscape, on the face of the earth are driven by our decisions. Like the places where we still have wildness and wildlife are there because humans have decided it to be so. And the places where we don't have those characteristics

on the landscape are places we haven't made that a priority. So it comes down to what we value. And this act, some of the language that we haven't really talked about in the act, you've made a couple of comments, Steve, about the degree to which we attribute wildness to the species. Is it something that is rooted in science? Is it something that is rooted in reality? And really it doesn't matter because it's something that's rooted in the law. The Wild and Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act states as the policy of Congress

that wild free roaming horses and burros shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death. And to accomplish this, they are to be considered in the area where presently found as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands. That is federal law.

So it's not, the ecology of it doesn't even matter. Yeah. Right? It's a federal law. By law, they are to be considered. What was going on in the American psyche at that time? I think, you know, probably these issues around inhumane treatment were driving this.

It captured the minds of America leading up to the 1971 passage of the act. And even if you read the language here, none of this is science, frankly. I'll read a little bit more of it to get the point across. Congress finds and declares that wild free roaming horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West, that they contribute

to the diversity of life forms within the nation and enrich the lives of the American people. And that these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene. It is the policy of Congress that wild free roaming horses and burros shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death. And to accomplish this, they are to be considered in the area where presently found as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands. It's beautiful, eloquent language has nothing to do with ecology. They've captured the spirit of the American West. So when you're trying to manage that. Gunfights also kind of capture that spirit too.

Yeah, but think back to Viggo Mortensen. Think back to Viggo Mortensen, you know, when in the movie Hidalgo, when Viggo Mortensen, after he wins the big Arabian, the race, the endurance race over in Saudi Arabia. And he comes back, and he takes Hidalgo back to Montana, and he lets him go and says, go, be within. And the picture that you see, I mean, that's what people are looking at. And yes, maybe there were limited areas where you see things like that, but it's very romantic.

It's very touching. And I wish that they all looked that wonderful. I wish that the landscape all looks like that, but it doesn't. And so we have a responsibility to keep the land where it is, try to keep that land so that it can be productive, so that it can be productive, so that it can be beautiful.

It's difficult when you're in these very arid landscapes and there's, you know, a carrying capacity for a cow might be a thousand acres per cow. So the cows are going, or the deer or the elk are going, you know, miles to find that one blade of grass or that one, you know, little bit of oak, which, you know, oak will kill a horse. But, you know, I think we lose that sense because Hollywood has given us these images that people see and that's what they focus on. You know, they look at Hidalgo and what great measures this Mustang did and how he beat all the Arabian horses and everything that they see, Viggo Mortensen, oh my gosh, that's what people look at. That's what they associate to and not the cruel reality that a lot of these horses are starving and 192 of them are dying of thirst

and getting stuck in the mire on the Navajo Nation in Arizona because there was nothing left for them to eat or drink. That's a really good point. And I think that speaks to where we are right now in the conversation and what likely is ahead in the conversation. The more of those kind of instances you have, you can't possibly talk about the welfare of these horses when you have situations where they're dying by the hundreds due to a lack of resources on the landscape, and we're not addressing it.

Anybody who's willing to spend 60 seconds thinking about it will recognize that there's something in the system has to change, right? What is happening on the landscape right now is not sustainable. There are a whole host of negative consequences, whether you want to think about it from an ecological perspective and the other species on the landscape that are being detrimentally affected, or whether you want to think about it from an animal welfare perspective, what's happening right now is not optimal. I mean, even, you know, these infographics that I've been printing off from the Bureau of Land Management, the language that they use. Population is going up, adoptions are going down.

There's not much here that is like a silver lining or a positive takeaway. It's basically recognition that we're in a really tough place right now. And there are difficult decisions ahead about what to do. Do we want to continue allowing our shared public lands to be dramatically impacted in some places

and the wildlife other than the horses suffering and folks trying to produce livestock on those landscapes being negatively affected? At some point, something's got to change. My perspective on what has to change, I have great clarity on it because I understand the argument that people give for why they want to recognize them

as a form of wildlife. I understand it so well, I could masquerade as someone who held that opinion and deliver it in a somewhat convincing way. So I understand it to that level, but I just wholesale reject the idea. And I think that from my perspective, our primary objective when looking at land management should be toward the long-term sustainability of native wildlife. And anything that,

I shouldn't say anything that stands in the way, but many of the things that stand in the way of the long-term sustainability of native wildlife would have to move aside. And I think that it was a tragic mistake that we would go and enact a piece of legislation that so wholly tied the hands of future generations

in addressing a problem that I feel should have been anticipated. It's just a mess and it's on people's minds because we get emails constantly from people being like, dude, I don't understand the wild horse situation. You know, I'm like, you got a couple hours? Yeah, there's a great quote from Dave Phillips

in this article that I've poked out a little bit today that I agree with wholeheartedly. He says, wild horse advocacy groups have blasted the plans and are preparing for a legal fight in all likelihood though none of these ideas will make it out of washington particularly unlikely is the slaughter option no one in congress wants to vote to turn an american symbol into sausage that's from this dave phillips article i think that's's right. If you think about the political landscape, you put yourself in the shoes of an elected representative who wants to have the proverbial blood on their hands to make that kind of a decision. You think about being on the campaign

trail. And I guess the question would be, what proportion of America shares your perspective, Steve? Can't answer that. Yanni, do you? Yeah, I do. So 100%. I asked one guy and he agrees. I have no idea, man. I have no idea.

There's not a quick fix. And what a lot of people are looking for is they want us to do a cookbook and hand them a little three-by-five card that says, if you do steps one, two, and three, and four in this order, you will no longer have any issues. Yeah, there's not a quick fix, but there's not a slow fix. No. And a lot of it is driven by what he was saying, litigation.

You know, we tie things up in courts of law with people that have probably never even smelled a horse. They have no idea, and they've never gone out to where these animals are living. They have no idea and they've never gone out to where these animals are living. They have no idea. And so those of us that live out here and this is what we do and this is our passion, I want to do what's best by the horses. And sometimes it's, you know, the hardest thing for me as a veterinarian,

and I tell people this all the time. I went to vet school to above all do no harm because that was huge. That was what we were taught. Above all, do no harm. But what are we doing right now by not having, in a lot of cases, we are causing more harm. Maybe not to one individual when we look at,

you know, just that a single individual, but when we look at the landscape as a whole, to our entire planet, we are doing harm. And that's tough because it calls for some really tough decisions that people don't want to face. And it's hard. Yanni? Jeez. Can I ask, in like a perfect world, if you were now a controller of the wild horse issue,

and you could legislate as you please? Give her the, that she could be commander of the universe. Commander of the universe. You can point a gun at anybody and say, do as I wish. What would it, what would it look like? What would, what would be a possible solutioner? And I have to think about that because, you know, as a Forest Service official, I have to go by what the federal law says. I appreciate that you feel that way. Yeah, I have to. I have to do what the law says.

And so I have to protect those horses. I have to do what's right by those populations that are mandated in the law. And so I will do everything that I can to protect, to maintain multiple use viability, to make sure that that forest is still able to survive, that the grass can still grow there, that the trees can still exist, that the little mouse can still exist, the horses that are there can exist, the deer, the antelope, you know, everybody that is supposed to be there,

even down to the earthworms and the grubs that are in the ground and sub-level, that they all can be there. That's what I work on. But your method of protection is what's kind of tricky and contested, right? That's what's tough. You know, we remove. I'm all about trying to find as many homes for these animals. I own one myself. You did an adoption?

I have an adoption. Momo, my big old bay mare, she's gone through gentling. She's now in a trainer's hands, and he's working with her. And he's told me, he said, it'll be a while before you can ride her. She's a tough one. You know, she's three, probably going on four. And she came off the Modoc National Forest. But I'm not giving up hope.

You know, I've had her, it'll be a year in September. And she was a purchase because she was deemed unadoptable at the Devil's Garden facility. So we brought 36 animals from California to our facility on the Carson National Forest. One of the animals was in very poor health and we had to euthanize a gelding. We have several mares that we're using for our low stress baiting on the Carson National Forest where we use them as an attractant for other animals that come in. Okay. A form of like a Judas horse. Kind of, sort of. Yeah. And then, you know, we got

everybody else a permanent home. Carl, can you entertain the commander of the universe, or are you not allowed to do that? I got a couple of things I want to say, but I'm not going to... You can't do the commander. I'm not going to take the reins on what we do from here. I think Talani's point is really well taken. I mean, ultimately, our job is to execute the law. You know, what we're told by the American people via Congress as our legal mandate is what we're here to do. It's worth pointing out some of the ecological science around the issue so that folks who are involved in the democratic process can weigh in in a more informed manner. But ultimately, it's not up to us

to be the controllers of the universe because we are, in fact, public servants. We work for the American people. So we do what we are told by all of you, our bosses. You all are the controllers of our programs of work. So that's one of the limitations and beauties of being a public servant, I suppose. But there are a couple of things I want to point out.

Thinking about the ecology of horses, all right? Going back to the Pleistocene, when we had not just wild horses, all right? Going back to the Pleistocene, when we had not just wild horses, but like the wildest landscape that you could imagine. Clearly a prey species. Being hunted by a whole host of incredible carnivores that I've already described. Sabertooth tigers, short-faced bears,

dire wolves, American lions, human beings. So it's a species that has evolved as a prey animal. And getting to your point, Steve, about this topic being one which is very irony rich, another paper we're going to share recently came out that speaks to this debate about whether or not the quaternary megafaunal extinctions were driven more by climate or more by people. There's a really cool, fresh science paper that came out by Felisa Smith et al. Titled, Body Size Downgrading of Mammals Over the Late Quaternary. When all these huge species from around the globe were just dropping off like flies. And here's a quote from the abstract.

Although all habitable continents once harbored giant mammals, the few remaining species are largely confined to Africa. This decline is coincident with the global expansion of hominins over the late Quaternary. So they go through and present a pretty compelling case for the likelihood of humans being the source of the extinction of all of these large mammals, not just in North America, but around the globe. They kind of trace the expansion of humans and the concurrent elimination of all these big, you know, giant ground sloth, woolly rhinoceros,

saber-toothed tiger, the list goes on. Yeah, I want to connect. Can I expand on that just real quick for a second? Please, jump on it. So there's a thing put out by someone by the last name of Martin and another guy, the Blitzkrieg hypothesis would be the idea that you see the large mammal extinctions occur with the arrival of man. And what's interesting is you go and look like

people arrived in Australia 40 or 50,000 years ago. On that continent, that's when you see the elimination of the large megafauna. You see the elimination of the large megafauna in Europe, which closely resembled the large megafauna we had here, occur 20,000 years earlier than it did here, contemporaneous with the arrival of modern man there. And then you see these last little holdout locations of large megafauna, like on Wrangell Island in the Bering Sea, where a mammoth existed until 4,000 years ago. And it doesn't seem that anyone showed up there till around 4,000 years ago, and it doesn't seem that anyone showed up there till around 4,000 years ago.

It winds up being, it makes, it paints, there's a very compelling argument. It's not bulletproof. There's a lot of problems with it, but there's this really compelling argument that there's something about the arrival of humans that spells trouble for man. And of course you have the African exception.

The African exception is that people had always existed on that landscape and the large megafauna had learned strategies to coexist with humans. And it didn't work in places where all of a sudden people just show up and walk up to these things and jab them with a spear because the animals had not had a chance to learn how to coexist with humans. It's a really

interesting idea. And you're going to like this paper if you haven't already seen it. I've read that paper. You have, okay. So they also talk about climate, the historical climatic cycles, and they point to the fact that there had been a number of these fairly similarly dramatic changes in climate historically prior to the expansion of hominins, where these giant animals persisted through those climate changes. Yeah, like 20-some glacial episodes. Right, right.

So one of the interesting, as a brief aside, one of the interesting predictions in this paper, they talk about if we continue on the trajectory we're on in terms of the loss of large mammals and looking at the species that are threatened with potential extinction on the horizon, many of our largest mammals, as an example, rhinoceros, African elephants, et cetera.

The authors here say, thus the largest mammal on earth in a few hundred years may well be the domestic cow at about 900 kilograms. So the takeaway from this paper though, with regard regard to horses is that this is a species which evolved as a prey species including a human relationship to it as predators likely to the point where we played a central role in the elimination of the original wild horses, which we're now trying to resurrect while also staying totally out of the equation

in terms of any kind of population management, to your point about it being irony rich. And then another paper that I want to share also from science talks about the ancestry of domestic and Perswalski horses. And Perswalski horses were long thought to be the last remaining truly wild horse lineage. And these researchers did a bunch of genetic analyses and compared modern day Perswalski horses to various potential sources

and essentially came to the conclusion that even the modern Przewalski horses are the direct descendants of horses which were maintained for agricultural purposes about 4,000 years ago by bow tie people. And this was a very different relationship to horses. They talk about these archeological sites where they found horse dung, as well as evidence for pole axing, which would have been a way of dispatching horses. And they found evidence

against selective body part transportation suggesting controlled slaughter at settlements rather than hunting tools associated with leather thong production bit related dental pathologies and equine milk fats within ceramics support pastoral husbandry involving milking and harnessing so these these were people 4,000 years ago living with the predecessors of the horses that have long thought to be the last wild horses in a situation where they're maintaining them for milking and also pole axing them for meat in their settlements

as opposed to hunting for them. So a couple of takeaways would be just another example of the complexity of this relationship that we have to horses and the fact that 4,000 years ago, the descendants, the ancestors of the horses that we thought were the last wild horses were a domestic species. So let's say for a moment that we want to treat these special status horses today as a wild species to do so in the absence of any kind of meaningful predation, whether it's from a non-human predator or a human predator, just seems like a recipe for more

of what we've experienced thus far. And then the last point I would make is the horse issues are largely an American public land issue. We've talked about the tribal lands issue. And we're talking about Forest Service and BLM management. We're talking about our shared American public lands. And to the point I made earlier about us, Talani and I, you know, we're public servants.

We do what the people want us to do as employees of the USDA Forest Service. The condition of our shared public lands and the work being done on those public lands, whatever's being prioritized or not prioritized, to me, paints a very powerful and telling picture of the priorities and values and knowledge of the people of our country. Full stop. Full stop.

We're responding to what the people want. All right. Giannis? No, I can't answer that. You're tapped out. Dr. Carl Malcolm and Dr. Talani Francisco. Thank you very much for joining us and taking some time to talk about

feral horses and also the wild ones. And the free-ranging ones. And the free-ranging ones, the special status ones, and the ones that one might argue we have a few too many of. So thanks again. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that

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