Previews of what will be happening to us pretty soon.

But I don't think anyone likes that answer.

that old new 'multi-use' law the BLM always throws around.

The horses destroy ecosystems before they starve to death.

Including us.

Horses are not a native part of the ecosystem. They do not have natural predators. There is no check on the population other than human culling.

Pretty sure they'd eat weak and dying horses. Might take some time for the populations of the predator to recover.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar
"Reportedly, while hunting horses, a jaguar may leap onto their back, place one paw on the muzzle and another on the nape and then twist, dislocating the neck. Local people have ancedotally reported that when hunting a pair of horses bound together, the jaguar will kill one horse and then drag it while the other horse, still living, is dragged in their wake." (The animal kingdom: based upon the writings of the eminent naturalists Audubon, Wallace, Brehm, Wood, and Others, edited by Hugh Craig. Trinity College (1897), New York.)

Horses were reintroduced and found a new niche in the Great Plains ecosystem. They had plenty of predators until we killed them off. Cows and farms are the real non-native parts of the ecosystem. Humans have done incalculably more damage to that ecosystem by raising cattle and growing grain than horses ever did.

sheep and contribute to making a desert out of the high plains.
Let the BLM manage their land and remove these horses.

could have been climate change, some massive strike, fires? although DNA studies of permafrost shows pockets of equine way up north, including mammoths small ones on pacific islands up to about 5k years ago. Of course buffalo spread back across the lands pretty quick and because animals were crossing baringa land bridge plenty of equines ranged across sibera and europe.

They never went extinct. In fact horses are one of the few animals of today, along with other animals like bear, tigers, elephant..they can go back to the wild without any much problems at all adapting.

Of course even 10,000 years is nothing when one thinks about how equine and humans evolved over 50 million plus years and how little we both have changed over the past 11,000 years.

Pretty cool

There are a couple of theories on how they died out, the most likely being people ate them all, other theories being climate change (the ice ages had richer climates), or maybe that a glancing blow by an asteroid incinerated most everything in North America including the horses and whatever people there were. Nevertheless, most plants in North America "remember" the horses.

The problem with today's humans, besides taking most of the water for ourselves, is that we've killed off the bigger predators that kept horse populations at a sustainable level.

Horses are not really an invasive species in the same sense that salt ceders or industrial age humans are.

either yet many are allowed to graze on the open range on public land.

Horses - yes, modern Equus caballus - were a feature in North America's biota until hunted to extinction by early Americans ~11,000 years ago. That might seem a long time to a person, but on an ecological scale, it's a few days. The ecosystem still expects horses, just as the mojave still expects ground sloths.

The problem is not the presence of horses, then; the problem is the lack of predators. Jaguars, american lions, wolves, short-faced bears, and the like are all absent. All that's left are coyotes and cougars, neither of which are large enough to make horses a staple of their diet. And of course feral dogs, but their value as an apex predator is nil.

There are no predators because humans killed them all off to protect range livestock... who happen to be 100% non-native, unlike horses; cattle do not replace bison because they have different eating habits, and bison are migratory, and goats / sheep are just not a part of the American biota, outside of mountains. These animals cause constant, grinding harm to the ecosystem just by existing.

The real problem then, is the use of American grassland as pasture for non-native species, and the extinction of predators in order to protect that regime. When it's considered what a waste of energy meat production is, and how much carbon they release into the atmosphere, and other unpleasant facts of the industry, the ideal solution is to pare down rangeland, reintroduce predators (wolves, at first; large cats as the system expands) and depleted grazers (bison, pronghorn, and prairie dogs), and watch it grow back to as close a natural state as it'll be possible to get.

That is what this is about.

"The research panel sympathized with BLM's struggle to find middle ground between horse advocates who say the federally protected animals have a right to be on the range and livestock ranchers who see them as unwelcome competitors for forage."

Come to Phoenix - I can show you riparian habitat destroyed by wild horses where cattle grazing is not permitted.

and they would destroy it too.

i have "horsey" friends and "cattlemen" friends in the southwest/western states.

your assessment is correct, the cattlemen want everything for themselves.