00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is a me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything, be honest. I um ordered, but have not received a little kitty compound bow m 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 would be interested. Get your perspective on this. I can't decide if it's like, um right, should he be shooting like a stickbow to learn or should he just like jump in because this is how it works with a site pin in a comp um like are you 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 eight years of age? I got. I got one major issue. You said, I'm taking for granted the fact that this is where it's headed. I feel that that's where it's headed. Okay, well you could you could line up archery and hunting in general, just me like, no, we're not on the same page that like a compound with a pianist where it's headed. Yeah, I just mean that when like 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, like who is what is old man shoots to be weird that he would be a purest like that he would develop a purest sensibility in defiance of his old man right at the age of twelve. So I'm just jumping him into I just bought him a You're like bank fishing with nightcrawlers, and he's casting upstream to rising fish only with the in fact, doesn't like his father, but at twelve he's still gonna like me not. I think you could. You could also, I'm sure secure the right equipment for him to be dabbling with a variety of different options. It's almost like a good analogy would be the dad who's helping his son or daughter learned to bat from either side of the plate from an early age. What's your take on it? Do protel his kids are still shooting m but was made out of PBC. But trad bow is made out of traad ball out of PBC. Is that oxymoronic? Uh? No? 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 eight to twelve. But more important things that hopefully at twelve he still likes to shoot a bow. Oh see, how yelled at him already? You yell at him? How like? What? What like his stance? Why yelled him? When I catch him shooting from a seated position, I take all the fun out of it except for my little girl. And I'm like, oh, s heart, whatever you want classic. I know it's really bad, but he seems to be receptive to it is from what I see. Yeah's to like about it, like, you know, but even when you're like kind of hammering on him about technique, he's not. He's not like but it was the boat away and 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. Was not like we just had the I think I was telling you this. That was 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 boat. And up until now, it's still been like left hand hold the boat, the string towards you, right hand, you know, put the arrow on that, you know, kind of explain everything every single shot, and for the first time, she just they just pulled their bows down and she's out there all on her own final, you know, flinging them. But they still have way more enjoyment than both the six year old and the four yield together. They get more enjoyment out of they eat shoot once or twice, and it's long as there's an arrow sticking in the target, whether it's the turkey that's there or the deer or whatever. The bulls 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 gonna do with it, And that goes on for fifteen minutes and they finally loop back around to taking another shot. They like that part of it. Yeah, just that the playtime around. You know, what happens after there's an arrow stuck in that thing? Ye know, I'd be like, oh, gut shot. I'm gonna 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 US. And this story, like, this story can go back as deep as you want, because horses, you know, evolved here on our continent many any millions of years ago. So the funny thing about it is like if you look at continental drift, like 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 so 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 and horses seemed developed here and spread into Eurasia and then the horses were around here for a long time. They used to be like a four toad horse, and it became a one toad horse. And at the time that human beings first arrived in the New World, you know, fourteen fifteen, perhaps twenty thousand years ago, they would have come here and found a type of horse, along with all sorts of other places scene megafauna that went extinct around the time of the end of the last Ice Age. And so starting around thirteen and 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 like what might have happened to them, but they just weren't here. And then we enter into this long period, this you know, basically thirteen thousand year period where we have a horseless continent. Then we get into the early hundreds and the Spanish you know, start coming over into the New World messing around on in Mexico, and they bring horses with them. They bring a domesticated form of the horse with them. And it's around the late fifteen forties that the Spanish start bringing some horses up into what's now the US. Up into the real Grand region, you know, around Santa Fe, New Mexico, up around Taos, New Mexico. They show up with horses. And there's this like 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 gotta understand, like how 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. Um, that time span is about as long is what separates us now from Custer's death at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. So horses for a long long time we're confined down to the American Southwest. But during the Pueblo Revolt, a lot of the Pueblo Indians rose up and in a very you know, 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 stilled 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 started getting traded in in various northward directions. They were traded up the west side of the Rockies, they were traded up through the Great Plains. Uh. And it happened fast man. So the Pueblo Revolt is eighty. By the seventeen thirties, horses were up in the hands of Plains tribes up along the Missouri River. By the seventeen seventies, 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 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 through a buffalo herds throughout the year, and it really changed everything. And it causes major power division where these one 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 it, like through distribution channels that they created, that they had funneled horses through their network and 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 how narrow this time window was. Right that when Lewis and Clark show up on their transcontinental, you know, journey out to the American West, they're encountering groups of Indians that it only had horses for for less than fifty years. We now look and we think that this idea of the equestrian Native American bison hunter, right, so so that an Indian mounted on a horse out chasing buffalo across the Great Plains. We tend to think of that as this thing that had just occurred for a long time. There's like the static thing that had all always happened, and then it was interrupted by the arrival of Europeans. But in fact there was a narrow blip, you know, like that those cultures lasted about a hundred years from the introduction of the horse up until the military conquest of those tribes in the beginning of the reservation systems. But it's just 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 Grand at one time, you know, around the time of when we were doing early European settlements on the Great Plains that there was maybe two million horses wild horses existing between those rivers. As you got more north right, the more severe winters, much harder for him, and far fewer. But on the southern plains there were probably so many wild horses that it was probably like displacing native wildlife even back then, even in the late seventeen in early eighteen hundreds. What happened from there is that, you know, over the course of Western settlement, those horseherds were just reduced and reduced into reduced, like 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 him, 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 gonna vanish from the American landscape. At the time we got down perhaps as few there's twenty five thousand 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 Borrow 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 recovered. But the Wild Horse and Borrow Protection Act doesn't do that. It just says hands off, um, no, you know, not doing lethal control on these, and it just it was a mess. It created a mess. Even like in two thousand seven there were twenty eight maybe an estimated point five thousand wild horses in the American West. A decade later, eighty three thousand, there is now far and away more wild horses living in the American West. Then then we can sustain um, it's having devastating impacts, devastating ecological impacts, devastating impacts a native wildlife. Where we're taking this feral creature right, this feral horse, it was a domesticated animal cut loose out in the landscape and it's wreaking havoc on our native wildlife. Um 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 moving to these off range holding facilities where you you lease private land and more lush grasslands to the east. And they got forty four thousand of these horses there living out their lives um at the expense of American taxpayers and at the expense of a minim will budget for managing wild horses in general, to the point that half of the money designated for wild horse work is being sucked up. And these off range holding facilities total mess. So much of what I just told you, you know, a lot of that's like has a serious bit of personal spin thrown on it. And you know that there's I'm revealing my opinion about the issue, But we're gonna talk to 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 wanted you have that a little bit of background. And we're joined here by a frequent guest on this show, Dr Carl Malcolm and also Dr Tilani Francisco. So how how did you come, um, how did you come to get involved in the feral horse issue? Yeah? I want to get answer that. Then I want to talk about what term we're going to use during this conversation. Yeah, I'm glad because is um. Yeah, that's that's that's a lot of discussion. It does, it really does. You're probably checking out that I said barr barrel horses. Yes, we'll go ahead with the first question. How did you get involved in this? How did I get involved in it? Well? And path? 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. Um, 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 and life on the rez, you know, free horse, free ranging horses on the rez. 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. And you know, so around I grew up around. I grew up around you know, untamed horses, taming them and then riding them out on the rez, 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 and working with wild horses horses? 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 US for Service because they are part there are two agencies that are entrusted with the the management of wild horses and burrows as per the nineteen one Act, and so the US Force Service and the Bureau of Land Management. I specifically work for the Southwestern region of the U. S Force 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 Borough coordinator, So I am not employed as a veterinary medical officer, which is a federal job, which I was before I came to the Force Service. And you so you're working on the horse issue on federal lands, just on for services, just on for service lands. So when you say coordinators, coordinator of activities across for a service lands. Yes, But what's interesting to me is that I want to like take them and back up in a second, is to walk through kind of what we're talking about, but really quickly, Uh, right now, what is the esset 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. There are people that will say we're ninety thousand. 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 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 two thousand sixteen, the US had one point five million owned horses, and so a million and a half horses in 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 asked that it's so because you've lived on the Navajo Nation and they afford Apache, the White Mountain, Apache Reservation, the Mississippi Band of Choctaws. The but I've read that that perhaps thirty thousand wild horses are on the Navajo Nations. There's in the American West, do they does it really have that like that, that percentage of animals are found on that land mass. That's what they say, In fact that their latest one that I read was thirty eight thousand, and then they gather between thirty yeah, yeah, and the Yakima, the Yakima Nation up in Washington. They think they may have somewhere in the same, you know, like thousand. 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. 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 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. Um. But the next thing I wanted to get into is breakdown 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, so and Mustang's wild horses. People will use that term and not realize that the true wild horse is a legal definition based on the nineteen seventy one Act, and so a true wild horse is a horse that is associated with either one of the US Force Service wild Horse and Borough Territories that Congress established in nineteen one, or it's a horse that has come off of a Bureau of Land Management herd management area that was established in nineteen seventy one. So it's a legal term that is a horse that is associated with one of those two types of properties. This is the answer I expected. Yes, that's that's a 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 for wild horses exist and can't exist. Yes, okay, so what is so then talk about the feral horses. 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 leggeds a particular horse, and not like a population any any whether it's a population of horses, whether it's a single horse, so regardless, yes, so regardless of how long ago it was that that animal or that group of animals was once in domestication, so it was once managed by two leggeds. So we look like feral pigs, you know, and we know the southeastern United States and all through like Texas and Florida and Georgia and all the 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 left free and but but they had been brought here as domesticated swine. Now they're free, they're roaming back and and you know, some people say, well, yeah, they look like Eurasian boors, and you know, and and so they're they're obviously you know, I think that just shows that they adapt back to their environment. In the case of pigs, oh there are pigs. There are, and I'm going to 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. M because if you look at the domestic animals we now know, like you take like a cow, okay, yeah, the wild ancestral one is gone. The orcs doesn't exist anymore. Or now people argue that the wild ancestral horse of the Eurasian step no longer exists. We only have domesticated varieties. But pigs are unusual because there still are the ancestral wild version of Sus scraffa is still running around out there on his 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 feral farm version running around in the wild and and inner breed. 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, like, 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, refer like feral picks, 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 it had I didn't know that there was a legal Can I tell what I thought it was. I thought it was a sort of statement of one's acceptance of this animal as wildlife, no meaning. But but I do, okay, But I do want to walk through. I want to touch on the couple of things to bring people up speed, and you can jump in where you want. But um, in this horse debate, there's some things that people love to point out, right. They love to point out that it seemed that the horse evolved here million years ago, right on we were 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 or what is now Eurasia, and in that process they became a solo ped because the first ones were bipeds, had like four that's like four toes, there's a one toe. And then then then they existed here in a recognizable form up until the place to see hola scene transition. So they existed here in some kind of recognizable form up until around thirteen thousand years ago. And it's it's reasonable to assume that human hunters once hunted the native North American horse, that that there was a overlap of horses existence here in human existence here. But then for twelve thousand years thousand years roughly, there were no horses here. Are you? Are you cool with everything I'm saying so far? Yea, no horses here. The Spanish show up and they bring with them some horses. Yeah, because the Vikings probably didn't probably didn't care. Yeah, they probably didn't carry their horses, and the Spanish introduce a different form of horse here, and these horses um were established in the American Southwest and in Mexico, co. And eventually they were through trade networks spread northward and by around I think by around the seventeen seventies, horses had spread all the way up into the Canadian planes. And so some people choose to look at this as being a continuum and that horses and some by some definition, horses could count as wildlife that just happened to be gone for twelve thousand years, but now they're back on there in their rightful home. Some people look at horses the same way to look at wild pigs, and they say, nope, not from here. It's a different kind. They were brought here by humans and their feral livestock. When I say feral horse, I am signifying my belief. I feel that all I am signifying I believe that they should be treated like feral livestock. Well, 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 the wild horse. Like I said, it's a it's a legal definition. And those are the animals that are associated with those territories or him as herd management areas. Is it fair to say right now that we have vastly well, let's not put that word 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 there and the Yeah, there are there are people that would say, yes, we have too many horses. And then there will people 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. So so and that, you know, and that's where the disagreement comes in. Um, we have groups that are on either side, you know that say, and then there's people that say, you know what, we can all co exist and 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 lives of the wildlife. And in those areas where we have a lot you know, permitted lands, a lot of land allotments where people can come in for certain periods of time throughout the year, um and and graze their livestock, because that is part of America West as well, you know land um, people raising their cattle and their sheep. UM. So we have to allow for all of that, and one doesn't take precedence over the other. And on those specified lands, we can't say that the horses are more important than the cattle. If there is a you know, 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 brows and everything to allow four horses, for cattle, for wildlife and for everybody to be there. Okay, but where in this equation, um, 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 cool, they're they're yes, they all have to be there on those particular lands. On those lands, yes, on the wild horse territories and on the h M A S. How do you what is the difference if you talk about the legal difference between a legally designated wild horse an illegally regarded feral horse. You know, let me ask this first. 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 seventies. Can you explain like what was going on prior, like 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, um, people, 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 you knew that there were areas, you know, on these vast landscape 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, um, when in reality they probably somewhere like I said, some ancestor of that horse had been domesticated. But so I mean indisputably right. So, um, if you had if you had to trace it back however long ago it was, it was in domestication. So what had happened really was that throughout like the thirties, forties, fifties and and really I guess it was really like in the fifties and sixties. So you know when you have the dust bowl back in the thirties and stuff, Um, animals were starving, you know. It was 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 we're making money or whatever. Um, they would go up and they would round up horses, sometimes by not all that humane methods, you know. I mean I've seen pictures I've never seen it personally where people would, um, you know, very inhumanely rope these horses and drag them and um, I mean it was pretty barbaric the way some of the methods that people used for what purpose? While were they rounding them up, then there mustangers, right, they were mustangers, and they would take them to dogfood plants, you know, and 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, you know, humane methods are necessary, low stress. Stress has a huge effect on animals. But you know, to to I guess a little bit to that defense people didn't know any better. 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 handling the way that one wouldn't handle cattle, Like would would a mustang er be more aggressive, more cruel, if you will, with when rounding up wild horses, that would be standard handling practice for cattle. No, I think they handled them all the same. I think that you know, and and being around cattle and stuff. I think 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 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 and you see them out on the landscape and I'll tell you, I'm I'm you know the same way. You see them running and you're like, God, they're just beautiful. And yeah, I mean I agree, they're they're gorgeous, they're majestic, they're they're just beautiful animals. Yeah. Buddy 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 that tail and you know, in a flowing Maine and and in the summertime when they're slick, you know, and and and you see them if you've got grass and stuff. I mean, they are they're a beautiful, just majestic animal. And and we equate that too, you know, looking at animals going back then to you know, Kentucky where you've got race horses and and stuff, and and yeah, I mean there is a there's a romantic nature about them. And and then you look at UM. 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 transportation. And I mean we're poeblos. 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 they were pretty much, you know, beast of burden they were. They were transporting, they were helping with you know, farming and stuff like that. They That's a really interesting perspective about UM thinking about our association of planes, tribes, the plane of the nomadic planes, tribes, and the horse. It's interesting me look at what a narrow window of time that was where when Lewis and Clark we're doing there transcontinental journey, they were encountering tribes along in the Missouri that had probably had the horse for only fifty years. And then that window and then with the beginning of the reservation system in the final like bloody conquest of the nomadic planes tribes. That window was year window of the equestrian right. The equestrian Native American bison hunter was this finite thing. But it's like it's when people it's when people from like my culture, it's when we caught it and saw it, and so we hold in our heads. Is this like constant thing, this idea of the mounted right, you know, when you had perhaps tens of thousands of years of human history absent the horse, but it seemed to just have this like it just seems it just still today like really captures you don't see that image, you know, the person with the bow and the flowing head dress on a horse. You don't see that image would be like, well that was just like this little thing that happened 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. 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 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, and in different tribes, you know, they have you know, horse societies. I've heard um different My my tribe doesn't have a horse society at the Pueblo of Laguna, but I've heard other tribes that talk about they have, you know, a horse society or or a clan or something like that that goes back um that they believe the horse. Yeah, was very important that when Creator made all creations, he made 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 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 sight oral legend from indigenous people's about deep relationships to the animals. So during this era, the round up era, when people could, like you said, like when you grew up, you catch a horse if you wanted it, or you could go out and make it. Couldn't have been a ton of money, but some money rounding up horses and selling them into slaughter. That the animals were actually pushed 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, like around the time, you know, of the late ear, that there were maybe two million horses. I've heard between like the Arkansas and real Grand Rivers, So there were that many. But then there was a fear that we were gonna 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 resources that finite, you know, as two leggeds. 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 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 you know, and and a lot of people will say whether it's evolution, you know that things are changing and species die off and new species come in. Whatever. I mean, I don't know how that that whole you know, theory goes with. And everybody's got their own opinion of it, and 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, gena species, even though it's equis 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 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 does call them wild free ranging or wild free roaming horses and burrows, 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. Well, the states in the America West, which states have what are legally recognized as wild horses. So we have wild horse and borough territories in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona. I'm just going up basically up the west. Um Utah, Nevada they probably have the most. Utah, Nevada by far have the most. California and Oregon they all have it, and then Wyoming and the prior mountains in Montana. So in those places, it's around these designated areas. 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 you and there's a horse running around and no one really knows who owns it, 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 Borrow Act. That would depend because we have the Bureau Plant Management has some long term holding pastures in the Midwest where there's abundant grass, so in uh Kansas, Missouri, Nevada, I mean not Nevada, Missouri, and um Nebraska, and some I think there's some in South Dakota, even where they pay ranchers or farm you know, landowners 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 burrows because they have been removed from a designated territory or h m A, which kind of points of 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. But we can't do lethal control on the wild horses because of the Wild Horse and Borrel 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. And we paid I think we've paid about a billion dollars to feed these horses, and it's projected that will probably pushing at some point into three billion dollars. Yeah, right now, right now, the latest UM that we're looking at is it on average in long term holding five to seven dollars 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 forty eight thousand dollars to remain in a corral over its lifetime. To the American taxpayer forty eight thousand dollars per horse for its lifetime in captivity. That's a little horresponsive costing. That's where the horse has the potential to wind up costing. And to your point about the proportion of the budget UM, we're at a point now where the investment in these kind of holding holding facilities and paying for pasture well exceeds almost two thirds of the budget for the total, while horse and burrow program goes to off range care. So I've got some numbers from the BLM that talked about umto wild horses and burrows in off range corrals and pastures to the tune of forty nine million dollars UM for the twenty sixteen data. Looks like, did you follow what went on this past February when the Navajo Nation proposed that they were going to do a horse hunt. Yeah, we were having uh an All Voices Summit at New Mexico State University and that week that they put that out, Um, you know, we we were having this summit and it was 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 is 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 we had a lot of um Navajo Nation representatives that are 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 we're going to have this horse hunt. It was only for sixty animals, it was in a very remote area and they only wanted to to sell to tribal members. It was five dollars and um ahead, yeah, ten the tag. Yeah, and you're 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, Like they figured that hard times are coming. Well yeah, and they knew and they knew that um years 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 and when you look at a lot of tribal groups, they are I mean, we're very connected to the wildlife, to all the creature, you know, all the creatures that Creator made. And so they said, yeah, we need we need to really protect those deer. And so they were really working hard to try and increase the you know, the brows for 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 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 people right away. I can't tell how many people sent me a link two like links to the the basically the fish and game site for tribal agency, yeah for for for Navajo Game and fish. And they were like, the link didn't last long. It did not like I think it lasted over the weekend. But someone pointed out, some pointed out that the the you know, we have maybe forty thousand upwards horses on our reservation. They eat about thirty two pounds of grass a day, ten gallons of water to 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 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 to twofold, So they did have some um, some external um involvement um from non natives that you know. Of course, you came up and talked to the tribal council and presented their anti you can't do this, you can't do this. And then I've also been told um that that internally within the tribal um people, they said, Hey, the tribal council never 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, you know, 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 We're not going to go there. And then in May, horses on the Navijole Reservation turn up dead around a dried up water hole. Yeah, very unfortunate up at Green Mountain. And that's we've it's and it's something that we fight with those of us that are out here where you have um dirt tanks like that, you know, natural catchments, whether they were man made or not. When when the water starts drying up, especially if you've had a lot of silk in that in that dirt tank, um, you know, kind of becomes kind of a bog. And we have you guys have probably heard about it. You know, we have quick sand out here, a lot of it, and and so expandable clays and stuff, and 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 and they're already you know, their health is already compromised because they're very skinny to go in there in the first place. They 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 two 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, so how are people balancing out? Like if you if you were looking at a similar situation with rabbits, a situation with feral pigs, a situation with white tailed deer, people will be like, sure, this seems like 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 wounded 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 when you say horse, and what's the first thing that pops in your man your mind. It's like the black beauty stallion. It's something like that when you especially when you look at are 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 that are not associated with urbanization, and you get this expanding urban um, you know, population, and they they don't know the difference. They don't know where their food comes from. They don't know that, you know, their shoes, their leather and stuff was once a leaving, living, breathing animal. And so they're very very much separated from where 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 and every fall sell their steers off so that you can eat your steak and your prime rib and you know 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 you know, secretariat, it's black beauty, it's it's this majestic animal. And yet they don't realize that those animals do consume a lot of a lot of food, they do consume a lot of water. They don't they don't necessarily put those two things together are in 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 wild they've affected by wild horses? Well, there's a how our 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 on what you asked to Lanny, and I think she's making some good points about you know, the perception of the different perceptions of people with respect 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 how cultural this issue really is, because you know, I think you could put it to a room full of hunters, Um, how comfortable are they with shooting, eating um and elk, a deer, slaughtering beef cattle versus horses? Are they? Do they put all those in the same category or not? Because I think here in America, um, even in a rural landscape, horses are not typically a species that we we think of as food. You know, it's not part of our menu. No, they're in the group with cats and labs and and in in this country. 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, they there are plenty of people who would say food. You know, Having had a chance to spend some time in Northwest China, where there's a very strong um community of Um, a Muslim group called the Weakers up in Shin John Province in the northwest near the border with Mongolia. We were teamly had horse um 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. You know, where in Hindu culture, Hindu religion, the animals venerated. It's it's considered sinful too, 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 of reproducing. UM historically would have had predator prey dynamics controlling horses. UM. We had a cast, a whole whole host of p editors historically that would have been eating horses during the place to scene that are gone now. UM. 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 UM. But then there are a couple of other interesting, UM a little bit more complex interactions. So one would be, you know, we're talking about um landscapes. You know, 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 be talking about prong horn, big horn, mule deer, even elk in some cases can be displaced by wild slash feral horses UM. And then another really interesting consideration here is what horses represent in terms of a prey base that has the potential two 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 I need to have it, I'll spill it out for you before before I do, I want to I want to point out I had a chance, you know, recently, to talk about this issue with the Big Horn biologists from the state of New Mexico, guy named Eric Rominger, and he pointed me to a couple of papers because we were 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, 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 dear. So if the mountain lion population manages to drive the mule deer numbers down, ultimately the mule deer here it's going to be able to support fewer mountain lions. It's the mountain lion number they're going to decline. Yielder numbers would then potentially rebound. This is where you get those classic predator praise cycles. Links and snowshoe hair is being like classic famous like seven years, the seven year, the seven year yep excurring cycle of elevated snowshoe hair is followed by elevated links. Claps rise, claps rise, exactly. So, now imagine adding another praise species into the equation, and imagine that that second praise 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. I would love to talk about the New York Times because you are talking about right, Like, don't you think you should talk about it before we talk about it? Yeah? Yeah, we can talk about a little bit. And Tilanni and i um offered up offered up a you know, to to provide a rebuttal let me say what he says, though, go ahead, because this is the guy. Like in all fairness, we tried to get the writer, the 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. Um. And I read the book and its entirety, and it he's of the mindset that that the that the twelve thousand year absence of horses and the fact that they were reintroduced by humans is sort of a little bit putting words his mouth, but it proves to be kind of inconsequential, and that we should regard wild horses as an as a sort of native wildlife or they kind of like have an 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. Um, it's untenable that they will be rounded up and sent to slaughter or used for human food or used for dog food. That's just that's not a good it'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 if we allowed this to play out and no one hunted mountain lions anymore, that we would uh not entirely take care of the problem. We would lick a good bunch of it if we just had more mountain lions. And this, when I read it was like, um, almost maddening, And that's 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. Um, 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 towards the fact that the distribute and 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 um, what the argument was. I mean, the title, 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 often just as a listener knows he agreed to do the podcast with us but couldn't make it. We couldn't like come and do it in person. Still stands Yeah, like I still love to have would Yeah, it would be a good conversation. So one of the things 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 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 place to scene, 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 tenth baddest predator in the place to see landscape. So you're talking about the American lion, mountain lion, laned lion, like the African lion, except give it another twenty five percent body weight. It's estimated the American lion waged somewhere between ninety fifty pounds. You're talking about variety of saber tooth cats being on the landscape significantly larger in the six nine hundred pound range. Talking about short faced bears, notorious for their 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. American cheetah. Yeah, we can keep going, man, but you know this quote, and your horse was not the size of horse that we have today. It was a much smaller animal. It was probably five to six hundred, maybe seven hundred pounds, so it was a much smaller animal. So to refer to the main predator, the main the main predator in this ancient relationship to be the mountain lion is just factually inaccurate. It And you know, we could go on, but I want to get back to this topic of apparent competition. Okay, So I'm gonna bring you back to the system where you have mule deer mountain lions, and then let's 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 a parent 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 there's a limitation and safe forage or a limitation in water. And of course i've already I've already talked about the 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 this article UM the author talks about um 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, stage 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 big horn sheep, mule deer, pronghorn because it would likely support a larger population those predators. A couple of other drawbacks of the argument. We have somewhere around thirty thousand mountain lions in the Western United States today. Every year somewhere between thousand of those are shot. Let's say you leave those ones in the system, you then have let's say thirty two thousand, five hundred, or thirty three thousand mountain lions instead of thirty thousand. We're talking about a situation where, based on the BLMS most recent estimates, where it's seventy three thousand 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 distributionists 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 Big Horn biologists for Game and Fish, pointed this out, Um, in those situations, you still have horses eating themselves out of house at 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 was Ronald Reagan actually in nineteen seventy two when he was the governor, he issued a moratorium on all mountain lion hunting. And then it took and they kill about took eighteen years until California passed a band formally Proposition one seventeen and Reagan, Yeah, Reagan Night seventy two moratorium. If contemporary politicians would all still compare themselves to Reagan, if that's a good question. Um. And so now they kill right around a hundred per year through depredation permits if their mountain lions causing 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. For US. They got four to six thousand mountain lions. Those hundred, those hundred to get killed are the ones that are killing livestyle. Yes, a depredation permit is issued by the state to remove an offending into djuwal 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. Maximum a mL maximum Appropriate management level for the state of California horses and burrows combined total estimated population for twenty seventeen ten thousand, approximately fivefold the max a m L in a state where it is illegal to hunt mountain lions, just driving that nail deeper deeper. And this this pattern of apparent competition. We're going to post a few pretty cool papers that spelled this out, but some examples I can give you. One is the woodland caribou Southern British Columbia, northern Idaho. Diminishing numbers of woodland cariboo like like two well, not quite that not well, maybe on the U S side, but yeah, so's southern BC, Northern Idaho UM very imperiled populations of woodland Cariboo. A couple of things that are happening in that landscape. One is you have quite a bit of of timber harvest occurring, which is boosting early successional vegetation availability, which is forage for moose and white tailed deer. It also um reduces the amount of lichen available, which is the primary food source for the woodland Cariboo. So you're changing the habitat such that it benefits an expansion of moose and white tailed deer into woodland Cariboo 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 cariboo. So you talk about a system which historically was a few wolves and some woodland cariboo. Now it's woodland Cariboo, moose, white tailed deer, and a bunch of wolves wolves killing a ton more woodland cariboo. 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 in the interest of protecting woodland cariboo, 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 are 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 pray species that's not being subjected to um sufficient sources of mortality, that it's numbers are being kept at a level that is um 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 big horn 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. Um talks about a system where you had heavy predation by mountain lions on horse heard 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 I want to turn to the page here so I can give you the 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 towards the end of our study, after the lions had been eating all these horses. We do not know why numbers of lions declined towards 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 over the course of our study, from an estimated five animals to less than three, 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 point 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 five hundred mule deer to three hundred mule deer in ten years, and this migratory herd, and it's possible that the horses were a causal factor for that mule deer decline. So it's pretty easy too, you know, throw out ideas like, man, if we would just stop punting 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 I generally admire the work of The New York Times as a a periodical. You know, I have read it and admired that publication for my entire adult life. They have correspondence 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 me. And I admire and appreciate that there's a there's a tremendous service being provided through the American people. Yes, and I absolutely I mean I'm critiquing this piece because this is an area where you know, I and my colleagues, our minds and our hearts are in this kind of work and these kind of conversations dan and day out, and to try to make an inch of gain around these concepts, you know, it's such a politically sensitive and divisive issue as managing wild slash feral special status equines. We haven't thrown that term out yet, 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 or nationally syndicated media are talking about these concepts, and then to have them published something that feels like, um, a step in the wrong direction is is pretty frustrating. There's another thing that I would want to ask the writer about, and that's this 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 fifty thousand turkeys in the year, you'd say, like, oh, so it was sconsin didn't have a turkey hunt, we would have fifty thousand 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 that that is very likely to be a product of competition, and that would be intrust species competition, competition among individuals. We all know mountain lions are very territorial um 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 interest specific competition. So yeah, you're not just gonna stop hunting them, and have you know mountain lions suddenly deciding that their home range can overlap with five other con specifics, 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 Navajo? Navajo Navajo. The horses that the Navajo were proposing to hunt are not federally recognized wild horses, or are they? They're not protected sovereign nation, right, any 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 on our national forest where we have an adjacent wild horse in boro territory to tribal lands, so we have we have a few of those, but not very many, but not on that certainly not on the Navajo reservation. So even in a situation where you have a a not fairly protected, not federally protected population of wild horses, free ranging horses, Okay, yeah, they're free ranging horses in that case. They're free ranging horses in that case, but not not federally recognized wild horses. And you have land managers who feel like they should do some kind of coal or reduce the numbers mechanically mm hmm in service of while they've 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 coaling unless we do how we can do lethal only if and it's in the act, if it is a horse that is disease, is lame, is sick. You know there um has a wound that would that cannot be repaired so that it's too the to to maintain the 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. And that is in the Act. But that's not going to solve for the bigger problem. 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 a lot of what's happening to unwanted horses. So regardless in private ownership, if someone has an unwanted horse, unfortunately, a lot of times um because there is no there's no means for disposal other than euthanasia, humane euthanasia, which is generally done with a barbiturate overdose then renders that carc is unusable. Um. 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 there are laws for transporting in the United States. But once it hits the border, you know, everything changes because they closed all the slaughter facilities in the US. In the US, yes, um, you in Texas and one in Illinois, right, Yeah, there were up until night are two thousand six and officially closed two thousand seven. So so those people private ownership horses, UM, some go in that channel. Probably a lot of them just get turned out on the lands escape and because tribal lands are massive and there's not a lot of patrolling, um, they get turned out. And so it's 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. And yeah, what they're up against, you know, not only I mean, they're you know, on any reservation. We're fighting massive poverty. We're fighting alcoholism and drug abuse and 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 tribe land managers are like, look, it's 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, um, you know, let more mountain lions live. And 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 are 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 leggeds, 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've got to do something about this. That's most people's tipping point. That's yeah, their threshold is when there, right. But but the masses in general, and especially when you look at urban communities, that's that's their tipping point. Is Okay, Now we have negative effect on humans because it's it's causing you know, a human a human death, or our pets. Right. Yeah. Also, the mountain lions are in the back y already 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. There's also it seems to me an element when you look at the article we keep talking about that argues that if we weren't um, that if we didn't hunt mountain lions, we'd be licking part of the horse problem. It demonstrates the 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, Um, I wasn't just shot by a rifle. I'm so much happier that I happen to have this thing gnawing on, gnawing me to death, as though the horse would find some level of 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 can do. Yeah, that's awful, but we should allow the lions to go do it for us, because people think that's natural. But the problem you run into here is you even lose that argument. 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 um 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, what there, it's too many animals, whether it's too many two leggeds, whether it's you know, junked cars, whether you know, it's it's getting our ecosystems, you know, our marine uh areas you know, full of garbage and stuff. We all talk about trying to take care of our mother and how we're going to do this in this one area, and we failed to see the big picture that it's all interconnected. And so yeah, there there might be you know some well like right now in California they've got you know, a chicken disease and a poultry disease going on in in uh in animals, and so they're having to take out this is the U s D a Animal Plant Health Inspection service, to prevent it from coming in and really devastating our avian species. So they're taking out domestic 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 how could we have? You know, African horse sickness or Venezuelan equine and cephalitis that will kill horses and they're dying on the landscape. And guess what those are both? I mean, especially Venezuelan equine andcephalitis. 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 humans got it high 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 want to live there, whether they're they're deer or elk or cattle. Um. I don't know how many times I've I've worked on cattle that have hardwater, are hardware disease because they're eating wire, and they're eating cans, and they pick up garbage because they're flouraging. 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 room and and then it spreads and you get this massive infection and a paracarditis 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 will go ahead and put magnets into them, into their room and 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 of that 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 has stepped on nails, and um, 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. Yeah, and that happens with you know, with the free ranging horses. So I think people forget that we as two leggeds, we're as just 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 you know, not a proponent of it, or you are that realized that it's it's all interconnected. And I think a lot of people lose that that sense. They live in their little vacuum in the 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 an out burger was actually once a living, breathing bovine animal that had a life, that had a spirit that you know, its heart was beating, But now they're eating it in an out burger, and people have lost that connection writing in simultaneously writing in letters about saving the horses among wildlife managers, is there any serious talk that that the wild Horse and Borough Protection Act was a mistake and that we ought to revisit it and repeal it because it's ultimately damaging, because it's it's proven to be quite damaging too wild horses and wild horse habitat. No, I've not heard anything about repealing it, but I've I have heard discussions about how we need to really clarify more of what we what we are to do. We talk about in in the Act, it talks about appropriate management levels and so on. That appropriate management level or a mL for those territories is determined. It's a very scientific method of deter rmining how many animals can reside. It's it's far more than carrying capacity, because we we throw that term around a well, carrying capacity of this plot of land or this this area of land is x y z well, so it's far more than that because it does look at the entirety, the 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 you know, for everything, for the fin, the feather, the you know, the the animals that are being brought in by the permitees, whether they're cattle or sheep. Um, certainly all of the you know, the native wildlife, the fish, I mean almost hesitate to say this, but you know a little mouse, you know that in about that little mouse that. 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 and a lot of people will say, well, you know we can't have this tool. Well, we can't use that tool. Whether it's immuno contraception, whether it's the big s, whether it's you know something, Yeah, it's 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. Immuno contraception, I'm certified in it, I believe in it. Whether it's I love going to conduct actually stops ovulation where p ZP depending on the different levels. And that's the other thing in science, Um, you look at people, you know, say, well, PCPs the way to go and and hs US, you know, has the patent on the hundred microgram um dosage of p z P. But then you look at different adge events and I mean, there's there's so many different things that I explain it to people. I said, p z P is not just p z P. 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 p ZP right now, is that we have different varieties of it. And so it's usage and the response and 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 on using contraceptives on horses? Because you'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 I R. So if you have this idea that this is this untouchable thing that should be allowed to live its life, and then we have no right to come in and manipulate it, Yet we're gonna come in and take away its sexual viability without asking it or consulting it. Um. 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 gas. Yeah, hs US owns the patent on the hundred microgram p z P. I mean Society, United States. Yes, yeah, and so and and they, you know, they have had great success in certain areas the Spring Spring Mountain or Spring Basin m h m A up in Colorado. Um, they're you know, they're having great success there. But it's much smaller. I mean, it's sixty eight animals, so it's and you've got somebody who lives in amongst them. The animals have become acclimated to that that person, so, you know, very special circumstances. It's a very different circumstance the prior mountain horses. There again, you've got more acclamation 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 I'm very much in supportive those kinds of things. But you look at larger, larger landscapes, larger populations, it may not be that easy. You've got some i mean, the average i'd say, and and this is certainly not scientifically proven, but a lot of people will you know, um, 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, once you see dart. So you're looking at courses that when they see a human at a quarter mile, they're like, hell, no, I'm gone. 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 gonna flee from your presence. So this example in Colorado, you know that 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. 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. I'm glad that the contraception topic came up. Could you talk a little bit about adoptions. 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 nineteen seventy one Act, it said that any horse that was over ten years of age was considered probably not adoptable. So you can sell those horses because the older horse gets, just like a human, the harder it is to change their behavior. So so horses that are that are taken off the ranges or that that are no longer free ranging horses and they're over ten years of age, they're sold. Now. Anybody that's under and especially the younger animals, they go into adoption, and so adoption is a hundred dollars. Sorry, the over ten year olds, they're taken off the range, they go to where we pay to have them graze 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 those people do exist, you know, because they make their living by taking horses to either Canada. Max Yeah, Dave phillips Um, the guy that a wild horse country. He spends quite a bit of time talking about the illegal trade, right of at times or 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 um to protect those animals is that we are not able to sell more than four horses to any one individual, and that kind of helps decreased you know, because people realize, you know, if somebody's coming in saying, yeah, I want to buy six animals, that's a that's a big flag. We go, yeah, probably not going to sell to those that person, because we 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 um for the horses that we take off of two of our wild horse and borrow 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 are instill 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 hasn't gotten a pin a key body score of like a two or a one, and and that it's you know, it's being treated humanely and everything. Because we have that responsibility um as for the ACT and the BLM does the same thing. So it's a hundred dollars. So how many like off the cars in National Force, how many horses have come off there and gone into adoption since two thousand four? Um, we've had five hundred. Shoot, Sean just gave me this number. I think it was five seven animals. And right now we're still way. We're about five or six times over our a m L five or six times. And that's so what does that number for the AM for the and the a m L. Is that that portion of carson asma for us right for for um for one of the territories. Um, we're looking at about five hundred seventy one, or it was almost five hundred animals, right around five animals, and you feel like you should have about a hundred. I was reading that into like, that's the high range of the A m L. Because A m L s 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 A m L and then a higher upper range. And we are at exceeding our higher upper range five or six times. I was reading about the ways that wild horse numbers can explode when conditions are good, that in two thousand seven there was an estimated twenty eight point five thousand, while the horses in the American West ten years later in an estimated eighty three thousand. Right, because it's given that in any given year, we we say that our reproductive rate is and so you look at in five years that population is a 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, I mean we don't have four hundred people saying like go get Me one, and the BLM actually had some numbers published from their databases UM looking back to the number of adoptions UM, so they had nine thousand, seven hundred adoptions nationally. Ten years later in two thousand five it was down from d to fifty seven hundred. Then from two thousand five to twenty six teen it went down from to and twelve. So I've heard talking maybe you could confirm it to Lonni. 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 that during these round ups when they go out and capture to try to reduce the population on the landscape closer to a m L rather than those being adopted, they're going more and more and more to the holding facilities. So a downward trend in adoption. Meanwhile an upward trend in the population both in in holding facilities and on the landscape, to the point where there's forty four thousand and holding facilities forty six thousand as of two thousand seventeen. Yeah, and and to your point about the population growth again, looking at the BLM, numbers which are readily available online. Between eighteen there was at increase on range, so not including the ones that are being held at the facilities, and that bumping population was from an estimated seventy two thousand, six hundred seventy four up to fifty one and the a m L the max a m L is twenty six thousand, six ninety so the max mL is basically being exceeded by about in order of three man. It seems like an insurmountable problem. Have you heard the argument, You're you're shaking your head, have you heard the argument? Years ago, I was working on a story about magazine story about livestock theft and and that led me into some other conversations with people in the livestock world and a in a in a stock detective guy who investigates livestock theft. I was talking about the un the unanticipated consequences of when we closed the horse slaughter facilities in the US, where when you had horror slaughter facilities in the US 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 sites that shift in particular, and he talked about in California that shift and leading to new populations of wild horses and 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. And that's that's where I was saying on 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 is because in 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 from my daughter. She really wants this horse or whatnot, and it's so cool to have a horse. And then they realize that, you know, hey, is well this year good quality horse. Alfalfa is you know, fifteen dollars of bail and Timothy is upwards of bail. 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 him, 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 um, and it's not as nice a horse is 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 two main 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, you know, 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 gonna let it go out there and eat all that free grass. Starvation camp. The same stock detective talked about that too, that you could track incidences of wild horses in relation to alf alfa prices. Yeah, the more expensive feed got, the more wild horses around the landscape because people couldn't afford to take care of him. And have you seen the movie, the seventies movie Um The Electric Horseman with Robert Redford when he goes to cut his horse loose. What does he do? He drives out until he finds some horses out on the horizon and turns his turns his loose. I don't you know, Carl, you got more? What more do you have? You 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 do my job right now of walking through this because I get it's like, 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 like 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 it's a really tough position to be in. It's there's no there's no easy solution, and a lot of a lot of really good people who care a whole heck of a lot about the well being of horses and about the well being of range conditions and about the well being 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 um, there are very disparate competing value sets at play here. So UM, you know you you're coming at this from a relatively well informed standpoint on in terms of the ecological consequences. Um, 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, we don't want anything bad to happen to the horse. If it happened from a person Diana thirst getting killed by a line, that's all cool. Yeah, But we're at a point now, I mean, and and you know, I'm recognized I'm 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 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 you know, this Act some of the language that we haven't really talked about in the Act um. You've made a couple of comments, Steve about the um. The degree to which we attribute wildness to the species is it's something that that is rooted in science, is it's 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 the Wild and Free Roaming Horses and Burrows Act states as the policy of Congress that wild free roaming horses and burrows shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death. And to accomplish this there 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, right it it's a federal law by law there to be in the American psyche at that time, I think you know, probably these issues around inhumane treatment. We're driving this. It captured the minds of America leading up to the nineteen seventy one passage of the Act. And even if you read the language here, it's none of this is is science. Frankly, it's I'll read a little bit more of it to to get the point across. Congress finds and declares that wild free roaming horses and burrows 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 burrows 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're 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, you know, so when you're trying to manage that, gunfights also kind of capture that spirit, you know. When in in the movie Hidalgo, when Vigo Mortenson after he wins the Big Arabian you know, the the race, the Endurance Race over in South Saudi Arabia, and he comes back and he takes Hidalago 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 and yes, maybe there are were limited areas where you see things like that, and it's 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 two keep the land where it is, try to keep that land so that it can be productive, so they can be beautiful. It's difficult when you're in these very arid landscapes and there's you know, a caring 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, um, a little bit of oak, which you know oak will kill a horse, but um, but you know, see, I think we we lose that sense because Hollywood has given us these images that that people see and and that's what they focus on. You know, they look at at Hidalgo and what great measures this mustang did and how he beat all the Arabian horses, you know, and everything that. You know, they see Vigo mortons and oh my gosh, that's what 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 in and a hundred and nine two 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. 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. You know, it's anybody who's willing to spend sixty seconds thinking about it will recognize that there's something in the system has to change. Right what is 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 what they want to think about it from 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 the language that they use. You know, population population is going up, adoptions are going down. There's not 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 um, there are difficult decisions ahead about what to do. You know, do we want to continue allowing our shared public lands to be dramatically impacted in some places and and the wildlife other than the horses um 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 the change, I have like 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 like wholesale reject the idea. And I think that from my perspective, the primary, our primary objective when looking at land management should be towards 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 side. 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 and addressing a problem that I feel should have been anticipated. It's it's just the 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, me like you got a couple of 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. Um, 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 as the slaughter option. No one in Congress wants to vote to turn an American symbol into sausage. That's from this Dave Phillips article, And I think that's right. You know, if you think about the political landscape, you put yourself in the shoes of an elected representative, you know 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 what proportion of America shares your perspective? Steve, I can't answer that. Yeah, you yeah, I do. One guy and he agrees, I have no idea. Man, I have no idea. There's not a quick fix. And and what a lot of people are looking for is they want they want us to do a cookbook and get 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. And and 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 so those of us that live out here and 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 you know, in a lot of 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 to face. And it's hard. Yeah, jeez. I ask just like in like a perfect world, if if you are now controller of the wild horse issue, you could legislate as you please give her the give her that you could be commander of the universe, man or of the universe, and you can point it gun to anybody and say, do as I wish, what would what would it look like? What would what would be a possible solution er? And I have to think about that because you know, as as a force service official, I have to go by what the what the federal law says. I appreciate, 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 uh 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 the deer, the antelope, you know, everybody that is supposed to be there, even down to the earthworms and the rubs that are in the ground and sub level, that they all can be there. That's what I work on. What's your method of protection is what's kind of tricky and contested. That's what's tough. You know, we remove um. I'm all about trying to find as many homes for these animals. Um. I own one myself and and I have an adoption Momo Momo, my big old may Bay Mayor. She's she's she's gone through gentling. She's now in a trainer's hands and he's working with her. And and he's told me, he said, it'll be a while before you can write her. She's a tough one, you know. She's three probably going on four UM, 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 um and and she was a purchase because she was deemed unadoptable at the Devil's Garden facilities. So we've brought thirty six animals from California to our facility on the Carson National Forest. Um. One of the animals was in very poor health than we had to euthanize a guilding. Um. We have several mayors 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 a form of like Judas Horse kind of sort of yeah. Um, and then you know we we got everybody else a permanent home. Carl, can you entertain the commander of the universe? Are you not allowed to do that? I got a couple of things I want to say, but I'm not going I'm not going to command you can't do the commander. I'm not going to take the reins on what we do from here. I think Solani's points really well taken. I mean, ultimately, our job is to um execute the law. You know, what we're told by the American people the Congress as our legal mandate is what we're here to do. I think 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 um. 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 um our programs of work. So that's one of the um 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 place to see when we had not just wild horses, but like the wildest landscape that you could imagine clearly a prey species being haunted by a whole host of incredible carnivores that I've already described, saber tooth 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 coortinary megafonal extinctions were driven by more by climate or more by people. There's a really cool fresh science paper that came out um by Felicia Smith at All titled body sized downgrading of Mammals over the Late Coortinary. When all these huge species from around around globe we're 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 coortinary. So they go through and 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, wooly rhinoceros, sabretooth tiger. List goes on, Yeah, I want to can I can I expand that just real quick first, at least jump on it. So, Yeah, there's the thing put out by someone by the last name of Martin Uh and another guy, the blitz Creek hypothesis will 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 forty or fifty thousand years ago on that continent. That's when you see the elimination of the large mega fauna. You see the elimination of the large mega faunta in Europe, which closely resembled the large mega fauna we had here, occur twenty thousand 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 mega fauna, like on Wrangle Island in the Baring Sea, where a mammoth existed until four thousand years ago, and it doesn't seem that anyone showed up there till around four thousand years ago. It winds up being it makes it paints of 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 a large mega fauna 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 gonna like this paper if you haven't already. Yeah, Okay. So they also talk about climate. They kind of 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 hominence, where these giant animals persisted through those climate changes, like like twenty some glacial episodes. 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 were on in terms of the loss of large mammals and looking at the species that are threatened with potential extinction on the horizon. You know, many of our largest mammals, as an example, Rhinoceros um African elephants, et cetera. The authors here say, thus, the largest mammal on Earth and a few hundred years may well be the domestic cow at about nine So the takeaway from this paper, though with 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 UM, talks about the ancestry of domestic and Perswolski horses, and Perswolski horses were long thought to be the last remaining truly wild horse lineage UM and these researchers did a bunch of genetic analyzes and compared modern day Preswolski horses to various potential sources and essentially came to the conclusion that even the modern Perswolski horses are the direct descendants of horse is which were maintained for agricultural purposes about four thousand years ago um by bow tie people, and this was a very different relationship to horses. They talked about these archaeological 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, leather thong production, bit related dental pathologies and equine milk fats within ceramics support pastoral husbandry involving milking and harnessing. So these were people four thousand 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 forum. 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 four thousand years ago, the descendants the ancestors of the horses that we thought were the last wild horses domestic species. So let's say for a moment that we want to 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 of 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 Tailanni and I, you know, we're public servants. We do what the people want us to do as employees of the U. S D a forest service. The condition of our shared public lands and the work being done on those public lands, whatever is being prioritized or not prioritized to me, paints are 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, You're honest, No, I can't. Dr Carl Malcolm and Dr Tilani 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