All The Wild Horses… Must Die?: Greenwashing Today

This is another story about the League of Reactionary Environmentalists (Please note that this is not all environmentalists, nor do the people I will discuss actually qualify as environmentalists as they rarely ever have a background or education in the environment). The aim of this story is to highlight why it is important for everyday readers to be able to discern between the real environmental movement, and faux environmentalists. In this case its from psuedo-environmental animal rights activists, but often times the movement is just as easily hijacked by industrial opportunists.

Yesterday NPR broke the story that soon the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) will have to begin the slaughter of 30,000 captured wild horses if people do not begin adopting them. Every year the BLM rounds up thousands of wild horses in an effort the keep their population low so that they don’t go around overgrazing the landscape of the Western Rockies.

In past years the horses that were rounded up were simply vaccinated, branded and given out for adoption, but with high fuel and hay prices this year it looks like the BLM will be unable to give away thousands of the wild horses; leaving only two options for the remaining horses: euthanasia or slaughter.

The possibility of the slaughter of thousands of symbols of the “Wild West” has of course led to protestation amongst many local animal rights groups. There have been many accusations of mismanagement, misrepresentation and outright lieing in an attempt to exterminate wild horses against the BLM. Arguments range that herd mismanagement has led to the overpopulation of the herd, that the BLM lies about herd size so as to be able to shoot more horses than is necessary and that all the horses will have to “face the bullet.”

What I am here to tell them is that A: There is no such thing as a North American Wild Horse. What we have here are feral horses which represent escapee populations of domesticated horses from Spanish colonization on down. The last American Wild Horse, The Yukon Wild Ass, died about 10,000 years ago and that in fact most wild asiatic horses are near extinction: The Mongolian Przewalski’s Horse, the Middle Eastern Onager and the Tibetan Kiang. Activists would do better by fighting for these horses.

B: As a non-wild species of animals maintaining them on public lands is merely for the sake of novelty and as a monument to American cultural history.

C: Killing the horses is not an abberation from natural evolution, but is in fact natural to the horses evolution. Horses have co-evolved with humans, and much like when humans migrated to this continent and started supplanting sabertooth tigers and cave bears, then later wolves and pumas, it became natural for us to have to manage the other species affected by the removal of top predators from the food chain.

Those are my main points, but I’ll provide you with some of the horse-crazies non-scientific, emotional arguments and direct counter arguments of my own, to show why it is important not to let the environmental movement be hijacked by a bunch of faux environmentalists.

Chris Heyde from the Animal Welfare Institute said in the NPR interview:

The reason we’re in this position is simply because of horrendous management of the program by the Bureau of Land Management. We’ve been screaming about this for decades — that the system is broken and sadly in the last 10 years, it’s gotten even worse because of their proposal to do mass roundups.

Really Chris, is it the BLM’s fault that the Spanish first released the horses into the wild or that the U.S. military simply didn’t slaughter them all when they made a campaign to exterminate the wild horse in order to lessen the mobility of the “Indian Problem?” The honest truth is that the BLM doesn’t have hundreds of people at their disposal to seek out and selectively make a census and then shoot a certain amount of horses ever year. The easiest way to make a census and control the herd would be to simply allow hunting of wild horses, from which the number of dead horses tagged and reported a relatively accurate census of the herd population can be extrapolated; this is how deer, moose, elk and other large ungulates populations are figured out. Herd round-ups are simply the BLM’s way of not horrifying the horse activists with the vision of hundreds of gun-toting hunters going out to shoot horses in the wild.

From the American Horse Defense Fund:

At this level any other species would be on the endangered list. At the current rate of removals of burros we could see them vanish from the wild completely before you could even plan a vacation to see them (if you could even find them).

Actually, your census is a bit off. There are millions of horses (and burros, just spanish for Donkey after all) around the world, the only difference between wild ones and domestic ones is the pen that keeps them, and as the adoption of wild horse program shows, the wild ones are just as easily redomesticated as domesticated ones are just as easily given to the wild. The amusing part is how the Horse Defense Fund gives ammunition to the argument that they are just a historical and cultural novelty, as they are a ‘vacation must-see.’

From Return to Freedom, A pro-wild horse organization:

Wild horses have long been considered a living symbol of freedom. And perhaps more than any other species, they embody the rugged and indomitable spirit that gave birth to this nation. They have survived centuries of change and have been forced by industry and urbanization into the most remote and inhospitable areas of the west. But they have adapted and survived. These horses are our horses, they are our spirit. We need to be their voice

Actually, while the actual predecessor to the modern domesticated horse is shrouded in history, by looking at modern relatives of the horse it becomes pretty clear that the natural evolution of the horse probably happened in an ecosystem not unlike the American West’s; it’s just rugged and inhospitable to us soft-footed and unable-to-eat-grass-and-sticks humans. While horses may be evolved to the American Western landscape the American Western landscape isn’t evolved for horses. Even though Return to Freedom argues that horses are not feral but wild because the genus equude evolved on the North American continent and then emigrated to Asia, the reality is horses haven’t been on this continent in large numbers for thousands of years. As BLM points out in the NPR interview about killing horses:

“Yeah, horses die. But before all that happens you’ve potentially ruined your soils, you’ve destroyed your plant communities,” she explains. “The wildlife and the other critters” — meaning deer, elk and cattle — “that rely on this country are probably long-dead or moved out of the country … it’s a bigger, more complex picture than just horses.”

Some of you may wonder why I posted this article, as it is kind out of tone with our usual posts about nation-level politics but I’d like to indicate that this is in fact just a microcosm of whats wrong about our scientific debate in this country, and it’s what leads to bad policy formation. I also have a bug up my ass about people who advocate for something good (the ethical treatment of animals) and then do something bad, such as state that the death of an animal in-line with the laws of nature is unethical. It is above ethics, it’s nature.

The type of arguments the animal rights activists use are the same as the arguments used by oil advocates who have quite recently asserted that drilling in ANWR is OK because it would be done on the barren North Shore instead of the beautiful mountains. Most of these advocates have been writing through op-ed pieces asserting themselves as experts, such as the editor of the National Review’s comment that, “If you wanted a picture to go with the word Godforsaken‚ in the dictionary, ANWR would do nicely.” We’d like to point out that he works everyday pouring over words on paper, not surveying the landscapes of Northern Alaska. Actual experts in the meanwhile, say that drilling is harmful to an important ecological landscape. 

Just like the pictures put out by both sides of the artic drilling debate like to alternatively show images of either herds of vibrant caribou or barren, lifeless frozen hells. Showing pictures as such and stating that the picture is the norm for the region is about as objective as shoving 900 people from Rhode Island in the room and saying, “Look, there must be millions of them!” The actual truth is that Alaska’s North Slope is both a frozen hell and a vibrant landscape filled with life and many of us from the very ecologically different lower 48 just aren’t equipped to handle that dichotomy.

It’s also about as objective as saying offshore drilling is safe because an oil expert says very little oil is leaked to hurt the birdies and fishies. What the hell does he know about birds and fish? It’s about as scientific as when the nuclear experts said during above-ground nuke testing that a little radiation released into the atmosphere was OK without consulting climatologists or doctors. Duh.

What you, the public, need to do is learn how to develop a critical eye. I know they failed to teach it you in school but luckily myself and many other cynics who look cross-eyed at any emotional argument and go digging for real truth, whether it meshes with our world-view or not, are here to help.

We’re entering a new era, an environmental era, and the publics lack of environmental education and propensity for falling for greenwashing, is what will lead us astray.

Hit the books.

-Marc-