Wild and Feral Horses: Studies, Pictorial and Information

[Balam]

I'm going to start by analyzing the claims made by a conservational group on the real impact that feral horses have in Canada, according to them and a 2015 report:

"Wild horses have been a part of the Canadian west for hundreds of years. There are currently wild horses living in the Chilcotin region of British Columbia and parts of Saskatchewan, including a population of protected wild horses in the Bronson Forest.

There are also approximately 900 wild horses in Alberta spread out over thousands of square kilometres of terrain in the Rocky mountain foothills. In the 1990s, a population of approximately 1200 wild horses also lived on Canadian Forces Base Suffield near Medicine Hat. Unfortunately, despite a concerted effort by Zoocheck, Animal Alliance of Canada, Albertan’s for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Grasslands Naturalists, the Department of National Defense (DND) removed the horses. Despite promises to the contrary, most of the horses were sent to slaughter.

A population of wild horses also exists on Sable Island, a small sand island approximately 112 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. The Sable Island horses are the most famous of Canada’s wild horses and have been on the island for hundreds of years.

Despite the fact that Alberta’s wild horse numbers are very low and spread out over an enormous range of largely fragmented and disturbed habitat, private interests and the Alberta government have long claimed that the horses are causing irreparable damage to natural ecosystems. No compelling scientific evidence has ever been produced to substantiate their damage claims. In fact, horses should be characterized as native wildlife and protected. Not only did horses emerge in North America and co-evolve with the habitats they currently exist in, they can serve a range of beneficial ecological functions. Additionally, modern horses are genetically equivalent to the horses that existed in Alberta just a few thousand years ago, a blink of an eye in evolutionary time. When determining whether a species is native or not, typically several criteria are used. When these are applied to Alberta’s wild horses, there is no question that they should be considered wild and a part of Canada’s natural wildlife heritage."

Source: https://www.zoocheck.com/wild-horses/
Full report in PDF: https://www.zoocheck.com/wp-content/uplo...b-site.pdf

The above article makes claims that contradict the long-held belief that populations of free-roaming horses are more damaging than they are positive to the environment. Personally, I believe this to be true, but only in the areas where equids were present during the Pleistocene and have gone extinct ever since, most noticeably the Americas and Europe. Most of the claims I have seen being made to exterminate free-roaming horses from areas in which their relatives lived not too long ago are based on unsubstantiated fear-mongering, probably driven by the cattle industry who sees them as competitors to the resources in their lands and want them gone.

In North America, most of the large herds of herbivores that lived before the European settlement numbered in the millions, much larger quantities than we find today in terms of bison, elk, pronghorn, and deer. They thrived because they lacked the large megafauna carnivores that controlled their populations in the past, and yet the ecosystem itself was flourishing. Arguments to cull current numbers of ungulates in North America over fears that they will consume all of the natural resources simply do not hold weight. Horses have evolved in that same area, the environment itself is built for animals like them, and if we were to allow the natural predators that remain extant in the areas where horses are found (most noticeably wolves and cougars, who have been proven to successfully reduce the growth rate of certain herds), the argument that they cannot be managed falls apart.

I do believe, however, that the issue becomes more complicated in areas where equids have never existed such as Australia and NZ, from an ethical and environmental point of view. Ethical because the total removal of hundreds of thousands of horses in those areas is hard to rationalize, but environmental because those habitats are not suited for animals like horses to roam free in, especially when their presence is harmful to the native species. In this sense, it seems more reasonable to support campaigns to aim to reduce horse populations to the point of total removal, which may include shootings, but once again, in my opinion, the dynamics that we see in Australia or NZ are completely different from those in North America, and having a better understanding of them can provide us with better inside into how to deal with free-roaming populations.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them. Reply