Tussle over mustangs and desert habitat

Wild horses, those defining icons of America's myth of the West, have always symbolized freedom and the frontier. But ranchers see them as competitors for grazing cattle across millions of acres of arid range - "hoofed locusts," as John Muir once said about sheep. And like the cougars and bears that have been showing up in residential areas, they're also competing with humans for habitat.

Recently slipped into a federal appropriations bill by Sen. Conrad Burns (R) of Montana, and signed by President Bush, was a measure allowing the slaughter and export of horse meat from thousands of animals used to running free. Horse lovers are trying to get the measure reversed.

"Wild horses" in fact are feral animals, descended from domestic stock that ran off or were turned loose on the range. The lineage of some mustangs may go back to horses brought from Europe by Spanish conquistadores five centuries ago.

But a stallion with his mares thundering across empty rangeland toward willows that mark water, or a lone horse eyeing one warily through the sagebrush, is as close as any 21st-century American is likely to get to the preindustrial West.

While the number of wild horses is far less than it was a century ago, many thousands having been killed for pet food and sport, the population, left unchecked, could grow rapidly. Except for occasional mountain lion attacks, horses in the wild have no predators. Herd populations grow about 20 percent a year, less in some years but as high as 40 percent with sufficient food supplies and the right weather.

Meanwhile, the ecologically fragile high desert - some 200,000 square miles, mostly in Nevada but encompassing parts of California, Oregon, and Utah as well - suffers encroachment from urban areas as well as grazing damage from competing domestic stock. Stacked up against suburbanites or ranchers, wild horses seem to be at a political disadvantage.

But organizations such as the American Horse Defense Fund and the Wild Horse and Burro Freedom Alliance are rallying their troops and supporters.

Their champion in Congress is Rep. Nick Rahall (D) of West Virginia, senior Democrat on the House Resources Committee. Together with a group of Republicans as well as Democrats, he's pushing a bill that would reverse the new law allowing the killing of wild horses.

"To suggest that an acceptable solution to a federal agency's management shortcomings is commercial slaughter is an irresponsible approach to our public lands and the wildlife that roam them," he says.

Preventing wild horses from being sold for slaughter would not end the sanctioned killing of horses for profit.

The United States exports some 10,000 tons of horse meat a year from about 50,000 domestic horses, according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. That makes the US the fifth largest exporter of horse meat in the world - most of which goes to France, Belgium, Mexico, Switzerland, and Japan.

"Hippophagy" (the consumption of horse meat) has a long and varied history. Some religions forbid it. Following the orders of Leviticus in the Old Testament, kosher dietary rules do not allow eating horse flesh. The Koran instructs against it. Early Christian clerics in Europe considered hippophagy to be barbaric.

Page: 1 | 2