Joe Duhonik

Alpine, Arizona (CN) – On a breezy April morning, a dozen horses crossed the road into an open pasture, leaving a thick patch of pine trees behind them.

“Alpine,” said Diane Puckett, horse advocate and owner of Aspen Lodge in Alpine, Arizona, pointing to a large brown stallion leading a troop.

A few-week-old foal stood behind him to make sure the other horses kept their distance. Others crouched and chewed on the ground against a backdrop of evergreen pine trees and distant snow-capped mountains. This herd of a dozen is just one of several herds that make up the Alpine herd and is the cause of much controversy in the White Mountains.

The herd of alpine horses consists of about 500 horses and roams about 73,000 acres of the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest, known as the Black River Basin, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Advocates praise the horse as a historic and cultural landmark that has been here since the Conquistadors first set foot on North American soil, while the 2011 Wallow fires destroyed 31 miles of the Black River Basin fence. Some claim that these horses reached the Black River Valley for the first time after being burned down. Forest and Fort Apache Indian Reservation. The Forest Service considers them to be wild livestock and a hindrance to other species that call the forest home.

Some say it doesn’t matter if the horse arrived there 12 years ago or 500 years ago.in a recent broadcast PBS Special suggesting that the horse was reunited with the natives long before the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680 (the most commonly accepted chronology of the horse’s expansion from New Mexico to the entire West), but that the horse was about The scientific consensus remains that they disappeared from North America 10,000 years ago. They returned on European ships throughout the Age of Discovery.

Center for Biodiversity founder Robin Silver and other conservationists say the long absence of horses means they can no longer coexist with other species that have long evolved without them. But in some places, returning horses to their historic homes can even restore ecological balance and reduce the frequency and intensity of wildfires, some say.

So which one is it?

no matter how long they’ve been here research Whether considered wild or not, horses demonstrate that they can: harm If you do not check it, the environment will deteriorate.

“The only thing they care about is that the horses are wild and free even if local extinctions occur,” Silver said of the horse advocacy group.

The endangered New Mexico prairie jumping rat needs tall grass to hide from predators and raise its young. Apache trout require thick vegetative shade to regulate water temperature for safe spawning. But as horses and cows trample and eat riverside vegetation, these species face an additional burden to survive.

2019, Biodiversity Center sued The Forest Service cracked down on cattle and horses entering the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest. while the cows It was deletedSilver said the White Mountain Apache tribe never claimed unbranded horses, which forced the Forest Service to classify the horses as illegal livestock.

Apaches and Sitgreaves aren’t the only forests where horse debate is heating up. In Lincoln National Forest, New Mexico, the checkerspot butterflies of the Sacramento Mountains are also going extinct for the same reason, Silver said.

In the Tonto National Forest, horses appear to harm Chilean leopard frogs, yellow-billed cuckoos, Southwestern willow flies, and numerous endangered fish species. at the center in April sued The Forest Service polices a herd of forest horses known as the Salt River Herd. State law protects those horses, but not the horses along the Black River.

These horses eat and trample riverside vegetation in all forests, Silver said, to the extent that in some areas it alters the hydrology of rivers.

Horse advocates argue that cows cause more soil damage than horses because their hooves are rounder and wider than horses, which digs deeper into the ground.

“It’s like the difference between someone walking through an area in snowshoes versus someone wearing stiletto heels that stick into the ground,” says Julie Murfree, a professor of wildlife management at Arizona State University.

Simone Holland, president of Salt River Wild Horse Management Group, questions the ability of hundreds of horses to destroy tens of thousands of acres of land.

“We are also concerned about the environment, but this is the richest forest. There are 3,000, 700 bighorn sheep, 200 antelopes…wild horses make up 4% of the animals in the forest.”

With those animals, she 1.5 million cows Animals that graze on federal land each year do more damage than horses.

Quite the opposite may be true, says Eric Tucker, a wildlife science professor and habitat management expert at Utah State University.

A 1,000-pound cow eats about 25 pounds of feed a day, while a similarly sized horse eats at least 25 percent more, he said. This is because horses cannot digest as efficiently as cows, so they need to eat more to get the same amount of nutrients. Simply put, the more plants they eat, the less plants are left as both food and habitat for other species.

But because they haven’t fully digested their food, many of the seeds they excrete can germinate and be replanted, said William Simpson, a California-based animal behaviorist. So, in a way, the horse acts as a tool to reseed the forest. He argues that because horses have both upper and lower incisors, rather than cows, which only have lower teeth, horses munch on grass and leave the roots intact, while cows pluck up grass with their tongues to keep the root system intact. added that it would destroy the

After studying biology and botany at the University of Oregon, Simpson, who lived among wild horses for nine years, chose to call himself a wild horse because of how living so close to wild horses gave him an understanding of beasts. I call her “Jane Goodall the wild horse”. He said the horses don’t belong in the Black River watershed, but that’s not the reason many conservationists have cited.

“Mixing horses with livestock actually has a huge genetic impact on horses,” says Simpson. Lands like the Black River Basin were once reserved for livestock, so they usually have few predators, as ranchers hunted regularly to protect their cattle populations. Because predator numbers are low in these areas, natural selection cannot proceed naturally, eventually causing genetic decline, he said.

Rather than leave horses alone to compete with other herbivores such as cattle, deer and elk for food and space, he argues that Alpine horses and horses in similar contested areas are what he calls “important natural resources.” They think they should be relocated to what they call ‘protected areas’, areas with few herbivores. Population at high risk of wildfires. The executive director of the Wildhorse Fire Brigade says horses can offset those risks and benefit both sides of the conflict.

The extinction of large herbivores such as woolly mammoths and horses towards the end of the Ice Age caused fires across the grasslands of North America. increased. These herbivores weren’t there to mow the thick dry grass, so the increased amount of dry bush caused more intense fires. That’s why Murfree, who also serves in the Brigade, wants to use free-roaming horses to mitigate wildfires in particularly at-risk areas, primarily in Northern California and Oregon.

Simpson said between the more than 60,000 horses currently holding pens at the Bureau of Land Management and about 40,000 horses on the landscape, the brigade could defend up to 20 million acres of land. said that number could be even lower depending on location and temperature. and dry.

Simpson says the idea is already undergoing rigorous testing. He thanked the presence of free-ranging horses in mitigating the 2018 Cramerton fire in Siskiyou County, California. The fire burned 38,000 acres over 16 days before reaching Simpson’s land and surrounding communities without a fire.

In addition to protecting land from fires, horses also save money on fire insurance and forest management, he said. Perhaps most importantly, the plan will allow horses to live and serve an ecological purpose, rather than being herded and kept in pens.

“Everybody wins and it saves billions of dollars,” he said.

Arizona horse advocates want the horse to remain in Arizona, where it serves as a historical and cultural icon of the Southwest. Holland said the horses are as valuable in mitigating wildfires in the Apache Sitgreaves as they are in Northern California. But the Forest Service has no interest in managing horses within the watershed, and doesn’t embrace Simpson’s idea, regardless of what fire-fighting function the horses serve.

“We are not in the business of managing unlicensed livestock,” said Robert Lever, forest supervisor for Apache Sitgreaves National Forest. “We have endangered species laws that we need to follow.”

However, it may not need to be all or zero. Some forest scientists argue that managing a small population of as little as 100 animals can maintain environmental balance and satisfy both sides of a never-ending conflict, but that’s only possible if both sides work together. The Forest Service doesn’t seem to want to do that, but only if it does.