Feral Horses Can Offer a Wildfire Solution

[Sparrowette]

From the article:
"Today, that grazing happens largely on mixed-use public range lands - alongside livestock operations where ranchers and others have hunted out the predators to protect their animals. Without mountain lions, bears and wolves, wild horse herds grow unchecked. That leads to resource competition with cattle and resource depletion on the ranges, which can trigger roundups.
…
Simpson says the ideal areas are too rugged for ranchers to run cattle, which studies show extract a heavy toll on the lands they graze. That’s partly because of their propensity to stay in one area and graze it thoroughly. Free-roaming horses move constantly as they graze, logging as many as 10 to 20 miles a day. “Predators are the key driver in this movement,” Simpson wrote in his study.
…
Cows also affect the soil far differently than horses, due to a distinctly different hoof anatomy.

Both animals weigh about the same, but a cow has a much smaller, double-toe hoof, Simpson explains. In wet and riparian areas especially, cow hooves sink into the soil like a stiletto heel on a soft lawn. Horses’ hooves are comparatively wide and rounded, which distributes the animal’s weight over a larger area, limiting hoof penetration and soil damage."

[Bluey]

@Sparrowette

From the article:
"Today, that grazing happens largely on mixed-use public range lands - alongside livestock operations where ranchers and others have hunted out the predators to protect their animals. Without mountain lions, bears and wolves, wild horse herds grow unchecked. That leads to resource competition with cattle and resource depletion on the ranges, which can trigger roundups.
…
Simpson says the ideal areas are too rugged for ranchers to run cattle, which studies show extract a heavy toll on the lands they graze. That’s partly because of their propensity to stay in one area and graze it thoroughly. Free-roaming horses move constantly as they graze, logging as many as 10 to 20 miles a day. “Predators are the key driver in this movement,” Simpson wrote in his study.
…
Cows also affect the soil far differently than horses, due to a distinctly different hoof anatomy.

Both animals weigh about the same, but a cow has a much smaller, double-toe hoof, Simpson explains. In wet and riparian areas especially, cow hooves sink into the soil like a stiletto heel on a soft lawn. Horses’ hooves are comparatively wide and rounded, which distributes the animal’s weight over a larger area, limiting hoof penetration and soil damage."

Someone got ttheir science wrong in that last paragraph.
As anyone that has horses in herds in pastures, or watches feral horse herds, you can see how horse’s hooves do considerably more damage to any turf than cattle.
They tend to pack the ground hard in places they congregate, like around riparian areas especially, causing erosion.
We had to rest and rotate our horse pastures and let cattle help them heal from horse use regularly.
We figure a cow/calf per 25 acres and 30 for a horse, horses being harder on our SW short grasses. Nothing against horses, is plain range management, each species brings to the mix whatever it does and it takes good management to keep ranges thriving in all kinds of regions and conditions, those facts clearly determined now thru decades of studies.
Cattle are used to regenerate old pastures as their feet help disturb packed soils into letting them absorb more water and aerate plant roots, unlike horse hooves, that tend to pack soils.

The main reason feral horses were given ranges in the SW and W was because they were designated as a symbol of pioneer days, as they truly are an invasive species.
As such, they have a place, but it does take good, careful management to keep them in their ranges and be part of a, in many places, sensitive environments, no different than any other species.
Remember, horses are in those ranges year around, along with all kinds of other wildlife, native ones that also need to be taken into consideration when managing.
Cattle get permits for a few weeks only in federal land permits during the year, in whatever parts of those ranges and times those are, where their impact will be neutral or beneficial.

That is a big difference with trying to manage horses there year around, why comparing horses and cattle grazing is a straw-man’s argument here.

[trubandloki]

@Sparrowette

Horses’ hooves are comparatively wide and rounded, which distributes the animal’s weight over a larger area, limiting hoof penetration and soil damage

This made me giggle.

If this was true then there would not be endless threads here on how to fix the mud and products out there just for that job.

[Sparrowette]

Isn’t the difference that we keep horses in pastures/paddocks etc. where they can’t travel distances in the way they would out in the area where he wants to locate them? He’s talking about far northern CA, up by Oregon in the mountains there. And the horses would be able to roam without our fences.

To me, the project makes loads of sense. The large herbivores don’t seem to be coming back and the horses may be the hardier animal to use to try to bring back forest balance for all the reasons he cited. They eat fodder for fire, keep tree growth up away from allowing fire to enter forest canopies etc.

Not a perfect solution but seems very workable to me.

Inquiring minds…

[StormyDay]

In the UK there is a guy who after realizing that his fields had become completely depleted of nutrients and were having worse and worse crop yields every year decided to ‘re-wild’ his land. It’s called the Knepp Wildland Project. It’s 3500 acres.
Well, the idea of the land is that humans don’t do anything to it. No clearing, no tending. Even most national parks have someone tending that environment. Clearing small trees from places there should be fields. Burning underbrush. Removing non-native plants.
The problem with this the Knepp project is that very quickly the whole area would just become a forest. And even though forests are good, they actually tend to not be the best for endangered species. Especially insects, which we desperately depend on. Thousands of years ago, those fields would have been maintained by megafauna that no longer exists. So they have herds of examoor ponies, deer, and pigs. The deer are native, the ponies kind of, and the pigs not at all; but they are supposed to resemble the boar that would have been there.

It’s been a huge success. Yes, those larger animals ‘make a mess’. The pigs root around and make holes and eat roots. The horses make hoofprints. The deer eat wildflowers that are rare. But despite what you would think, that’s a good thing. Disturbed habitat is good for wildlife. It’s good for plants. And it’s good for rare species. Those bare patches the horses create are habitat for rare bees. The pigs that eat the roots keep certain kinds of plants in check. The horses and deer eat the tiny trees and keep the fields from becoming forest.

Another example of disturbance being a good thing is also in the UK. Another kind of bee is extinct pretty much all over except for one place; a military training ground. The tanks disturb the mud which is where the bees need to live. Because we use paved roads and try to keep grass everywhere the bees aren’t doing so well near cities.

My point is sometimes our best efforts to make everything pristine actually are hurting nature. Ideally, the United States would still have herds of Buffalo, elk, possibly even mammoth and camel roaming from coast to coast. There were herds of Buffalo in Georgia, North Carolina, etc. Those animals are hard on the land. But it’s how the ecosystem evolved to be. It’s only in the last 400 years or so that there hasn’t been megafauna from coast to coast. Maybe horses are a good fill in for Buffalo.

[Bluey]

@StormyDay

In the UK there is a guy who after realizing that his fields had become completely depleted of nutrients and were having worse and worse crop yields every year decided to ‘re-wild’ his land. It’s called the Knepp Wildland Project. It’s 3500 acres.
Well, the idea of the land is that humans don’t do anything to it. No clearing, no tending. Even most national parks have someone tending that environment. Clearing small trees from places there should be fields. Burning underbrush. Removing non-native plants.
The problem with this the Knepp project is that very quickly the whole area would just become a forest. And even though forests are good, they actually tend to not be the best for endangered species. Especially insects, which we desperately depend on. Thousands of years ago, those fields would have been maintained by megafauna that no longer exists. So they have herds of examoor ponies, deer, and pigs. The deer are native, the ponies kind of, and the pigs not at all; but they are supposed to resemble the boar that would have been there.

It’s been a huge success. Yes, those larger animals ‘make a mess’. The pigs root around and make holes and eat roots. The horses make hoofprints. The deer eat wildflowers that are rare. But despite what you would think, that’s a good thing. Disturbed habitat is good for wildlife. It’s good for plants. And it’s good for rare species. Those bare patches the horses create are habitat for rare bees. The pigs that eat the roots keep certain kinds of plants in check. The horses and deer eat the tiny trees and keep the fields from becoming forest.

Another example of disturbance being a good thing is also in the UK. Another kind of bee is extinct pretty much all over except for one place; a military training ground. The tanks disturb the mud which is where the bees need to live. Because we use paved roads and try to keep grass everywhere the bees aren’t doing so well near cities.

My point is sometimes our best efforts to make everything pristine actually are hurting nature. Ideally, the United States would still have herds of Buffalo, elk, possibly even mammoth and camel roaming from coast to coast. There were herds of Buffalo in Georgia, North Carolina, etc. Those animals are hard on the land. But it’s how the ecosystem evolved to be. It’s only in the last 400 years or so that there hasn’t been megafauna from coast to coast. Maybe horses are a good fill in for Buffalo.

May consider that the US would have been a solid forest when europeans first settled if tribes of native indians, for millennia, had not “grazed” buffalo herds in their ranges.
They would follow the herds, move them and use traditions of controlled burns to keep the natural progression of plant species at bay, that starts with weedy plants and ends up in forests.
All those traditions faded as Europeans came in large numbers and displaced the very rich cultures they didn’t understand and brought their own land management, including farming.
Some of those european farming practices worked fine in similar land, not so well once europeans crossed into the plains and even less in the arid regions, ending in dust bowls.

Decades ago when organizations like The Nature Conservancy first started buying land and leaving it “wild”, they started realizing some of those lands were degrading.
There are pictures of SW pastures they owned now partly bare with bunches of old grasses keeping new ones from growing and grazed land across the fence thriving.
Today they have learned more and manage whatever lands they have as best for their region, some of those grazed, not very good PR when they spent years playing grazing as evil in their donation drives.

Managing land is so very regional, hard to make general rules because there are not that many general conditions that apply every placer or apply consistently.
When managing land, to keep learning and be adaptable seems to work best all around.

[StormyDay]

@Bluey

@StormyDay

In the UK there is a guy who after realizing that his fields had become completely depleted of nutrients and were having worse and worse crop yields every year decided to ‘re-wild’ his land. It’s called the Knepp Wildland Project. It’s 3500 acres.
Well, the idea of the land is that humans don’t do anything to it. No clearing, no tending. Even most national parks have someone tending that environment. Clearing small trees from places there should be fields. Burning underbrush. Removing non-native plants.
The problem with this the Knepp project is that very quickly the whole area would just become a forest. And even though forests are good, they actually tend to not be the best for endangered species. Especially insects, which we desperately depend on. Thousands of years ago, those fields would have been maintained by megafauna that no longer exists. So they have herds of examoor ponies, deer, and pigs. The deer are native, the ponies kind of, and the pigs not at all; but they are supposed to resemble the boar that would have been there.

It’s been a huge success. Yes, those larger animals ‘make a mess’. The pigs root around and make holes and eat roots. The horses make hoofprints. The deer eat wildflowers that are rare. But despite what you would think, that’s a good thing. Disturbed habitat is good for wildlife. It’s good for plants. And it’s good for rare species. Those bare patches the horses create are habitat for rare bees. The pigs that eat the roots keep certain kinds of plants in check. The horses and deer eat the tiny trees and keep the fields from becoming forest.

Another example of disturbance being a good thing is also in the UK. Another kind of bee is extinct pretty much all over except for one place; a military training ground. The tanks disturb the mud which is where the bees need to live. Because we use paved roads and try to keep grass everywhere the bees aren’t doing so well near cities.

My point is sometimes our best efforts to make everything pristine actually are hurting nature. Ideally, the United States would still have herds of Buffalo, elk, possibly even mammoth and camel roaming from coast to coast. There were herds of Buffalo in Georgia, North Carolina, etc. Those animals are hard on the land. But it’s how the ecosystem evolved to be. It’s only in the last 400 years or so that there hasn’t been megafauna from coast to coast. Maybe horses are a good fill in for Buffalo.

May consider that the US would have been a solid forest when europeans first settled if tribes of native indians, for millennia, had not “grazed” buffalo herds in their ranges.
They would follow the herds, move them and use traditions of controlled burns to keep the natural progression of plant species at bay, that starts with weedy plants and ends up in forests.
All those traditions faded as Europeans came in large numbers and displaced the very rich cultures they didn’t understand and brought their own land management, including farming.
Some of those european farming practices worked fine in similar land, not so well once europeans crossed into the plains and even less in the arid regions, ending in dust bowls.

Decades ago when organizations like The Nature Conservancy first started buying land and leaving it “wild”, they started realizing some of those lands were degrading.
There are pictures of SW pastures they owned now partly bare with bunches of old grasses keeping new ones from growing and grazed land across the fence thriving.
Today they have learned more and manage whatever lands they have as best for their region, some of those grazed, not very good PR when they spent years playing grazing as evil in their donation drives.

Managing land is so very regional, hard to make general rules because there are not that many general conditions that apply every placer or apply consistently.
When managing land, to keep learning and be adaptable seems to work best all around.

Yes, I didn’t want to get too much into the weeds because I could probably give a TED talk on all of this and bore everyone to death
The idea of the ‘pristine wilderness’ is a lie. At least, it has been for the past 10000 years or so.

The reason we do know that the megafauna naturally cleared fields is that we have species today that only live in cleared fields, and those species have been around for longer than humans have been here. But native people were very good about cultivating the land to suit their needs, even if those needs didn’t look right to European people.

Of course, this also raises the question of how curated our current species are. What does a truly wild ecosystem look like, and do we even want that? Can species today even thrive in a non-maintained environment?

In Knepp the answer seems to have been yes, at least for European species. But, they need megafauna to thrive, and a variety of large animals are needed, not just one species.

The problem with ranching is that you always want to have the maximum amount of animals on the land and have the least amount of loss (predators) which isn’t always healthy for the environment. I think on lands that we want to try to encourage biodiversity we should be mixing species; smaller cattle herds, small horse herds, deer, wolves, etc. (Unless the area naturally wouldn’t have had those animals. No reason to try to put wild horses in the Everglades or wolves in the Mojave).

[sami-joe]

Some important differences between bovids and equids mean horses thrive in more extreme conditions:

Equids’ use their shovel-shaped hooves to dig through snow for grasses & browse materials, and those acclimated to deserts can dig for water seeps and springs.

Their tough, almost prehensile noses and unusual ability to grow a protective layer of stiff hair on those noses (we call them mustaches) enables them to thrive in arctic/subarctic conditions that stymie tender-nosed, split-hooved ungulates.

Cattle, sheep, and goats need winter stores of feed and running water to survive; horses with access to only snow covered grasslands/forests are fine. (Bison, with their giant heads, horns, and wooly manes are split-hooved bovine outliers.)

Several paleo-zoologists and cave art specialists suggest that horses’ excellent adaptations to snow and ice meant that equids led the prey-parade for our ancestors through multiple ice ages and other climate changes. In other words, horse herds broke trail, shoved snow aside, and found water, while the aurochs (ancient cattle), goats, et al followed. Our ancestors followed this moveable feast, too. Equids’ dominance among creatures depicted in those 15-45k y.o. caves may bear out their cultural and dietary significance.

One modern example of the hardiness of the horse vs cattle are the Khangai Herders in Mongolia. Though they keep a few oxen for cart-pulling and skinning purposes, horses remain at the center of their culture and diet. Natasha Fijn, an anthropologist affiliated with Australian National University, has made several short films about these remarkable people who still consider the horse sacred.

Khangai Herds

[Bonnie2]

Thank you for the boots on the ground perspective!

[Bonnie2]

I don’t know that horses are “fine” without a winter water source. If a percentage of wild horses dies over the winter no one notices. Stockmen want their animals to come through the winter in the best possible condition.

No one has explained how one stomached horses are going to browse on fire tinder that ruminants will not eat.

[sami-joe]

All I can tell you is the species would not have survived without some ability to make up for the loss of running water. In a quick search, here’s reference to some Norwegian research.

Can Horses Stay Hydrated From Eating Snow? – The Horse

Though I’m not sure exactly which browse ruminants like, horses happily eat members of the poplar family, aspen, birch, etc., and many chew all manner of wood recreationally.

[Ghazzu]

@sami-joe

Though I’m not sure exactly which browse ruminants like, horses happily eat members of the poplar family, aspen, birch, etc., and many chew all manner of wood recreationally.

They’ll happily strip bark of trees, girdling them completely, which seems at odds with lowering the wildfire fuel potential.

[StormyDay]

@Amberley

@StormyDay

Of course, this also raises the question of how curated our current species are. What does a truly wild ecosystem look like, and do we even want that? Can species today even thrive in a non-maintained environment?

I’m sorry but as someone who spent 20 + years a a professional ecosystem researcher this is nonsense. And dangerous nonsense that I keep seeing repeated online in an effort to excuse the fact that we have destroyed wild ecosystems everywhere by falsely claiming that there is no such thing as a non-human managed ecosystem or real wilderness.

Species can thrive just fine a non-maintained environment. Humans did NOT maintain all pre-industrial environments, they had an impact, sure but it was a fraction of a percent of the effect we have today. And it doesn’t matter what you want. We have destroyed almost all wildlands and wildlife and most ecosystem processes are imperiled. We are destroying the planet. We’ll pay for it soon enough in the wealthy countries, many already are.

Disagreeing with this, or propagating nonsense like domestic horses having continually occupying the american west is right up there with denying climate change or claiming the Covid vaccine “sheds” and causes cancer. It is simply untrue and you know it. It’s also intellectually lazy. Manipulating the truth or engaging with the truth in bad faith is childish. So is not being bothered to take the time to understand complex issues or not understanding the difference between and opinion and evidence. Grow up.

Goodness. Coming in hot, eh?

I’ve never said horses were continuously in the west. And if you read my posts, you’d see I actually am advocating for a more hands off, no human interference approach, since it’s been shown that one of the best things for endangered species is us to stop trying to intervene.

No one is denying climate change. And being rude actually gets you nowhere and ends up kind of negating your argument to anyone reading.

Despite what is good for the planet or ecosystems, our current species in the USA are curated. Wolves have been removed if they were a nuisance. Beaver are still being removed, because god forbid we loose some land and it becomes a swamp or one chops down a tree we like. We cut down saplings to keep meadows open, spray for weeds in parks so people don’t see dandelions, plant trees we ‘think’ should be there, and so much more.
And for (I’d assume) 99% of the population of the USA, they like it that way. They like that Central Park has grassy fields to run in. They like that when they go to Yosemite there aren’t towering trees blocking the view of El cap. So how do you convince that many people, no, what we have been doing is wrong?

Lastly, since Europeans arrived in North America they have been diminishing the impact of native populations on the land. Throw out the idea of pristine wilderness. It’s a romanticized ideation of Native people and it hurts them. The native population of the Americas was just as, if not in some cases more, technologically advanced as the Europeans. But their advancements were different than Europeans and so they have been dismissed. Native populations maintained their land. But the difference is our population numbers. There’s so many of us. We are everywhere like rats. We went from being in some places to all the places.

You’re arguing against me and we are agreeing with each other.

[StormyDay]

@Amberley

We are definitely not agreeing with each other. trust me.

Okay.

[sami-joe]

Thank you for your pragmatic contributions regarding our compromised ecosystems and our lame attempts to repair them. I’m grateful for your expertise.

Not sure anyone has argued that “domestic horses” have been in North America continuously, though. That’s not what I read on the WHFB site. Simpson uses the word, native. The zoological definition of “native” is one of absence, i.e. “not introduced by humans.” No paleontologist would argue that the humans introduced equids of the Pleistocene (some all but indistinguishable from modern varieties) to North America. Most of these scientists admit uncertainty within their own equid classification.

For reasons still not fully understood, gaps in the fossil record suggest humans and megafauna abandoned the continent 12,000 years ago. More recent discoveries vex that view, so I’m not putting my chips on any one explanation other than to repeat my admittedly unlikely analogy: if a eucalyptus tree nut from my yard here in California ends up in its native Australia, it’s still native to Australia.

[sami-joe]

You’re right, eohippus, the so-called Dawn Horse, did evolve in North America. However, as I’ve said a few times in this thread, paleontologists struggle mightily to classify equid fossils from everywhere right up to and through the gap in the NA fossil record starting 10-ish thousand years ago.
Here’s one attempt. There are many.

A new genus of horse from Pleistocene North America - PubMed