Mustang Madness
How far should taxpayers go in buying birth control for untamed horses?
Montana's best known wild horse bands are in the Pryor mountains out of Billings, and this year the government is spending oodles of your money to administer birth control to the young mares there.
"Wild horses" are in the news often because their numbers continue to climb. There are tens of thousands more than are good for the land. The so called "adoption programs" don't work very well because many people can't take care of what they adopt and then there are those who "adopt" so they can sell the horses, often for slaughter by the meat packing plant in Alberta.
There are strong emotions revolving around the Mustang issue. A majority of cattle ranchers dislike the wild horses because they are not efficient hay burners, requiring three to four times as much grass as a beef steer. Most of the big ranchers I know in Montana do not tolerate wild horses on their ranges. For the same reasons, many sportsmen dislike the tremendous amount of natural vegetation wild horses and burros take away from native wild animals such as deer, elk, antelope and bighorn sheep.
The latest thing I've seen about this issue was an AP story last week that said, "The wild horse population in South Dakota is growing again. About 80 wild horses from a range in northern Nevada are being trucked to Lantry on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation." Karen Sussman of the "International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros," said it's the fourth wild horse herd the conservation group has accepted.
They will be held in holding pens for a couple of weeks and will be released after they get used to their new surrounding. The herd includes palominos, pintos, and sorrels.
Sussman said, "It is important to protect the horses. They are part of American history, and if they die out they can't ever be replaced."
This is not quite factual.
In the early 1500s, Cortez and his troops brought the first Spanish horses to Central America as they sought to exploit and settle the Yucatan. Some historians believe herds in southern California may have later derived from those first steeds; however, most of the horse herds in the American west probably came from Francisco Vasquez de Coronado who spent over two years wandering around the southwest from Mexico clear up into central Kansas in 1540 to 1542. The 30-year-old Coronado had more than 300 Spanish soldiers with him as well as several hundred Mexican-Indians. That sizable group had well over a thousand horses and we know quite a few ran away, and perhaps others were stolen.
By one way or another, within the next 200 years northern Indians had horses. Students of Blackfeet history recall how that tribe had been pushed out of former lands in the northern mid-west and out onto the great plains. They deliberately sent a party of their best warriors to the southwest for the purpose of securing horses. It was a long and dangerous trip but succeeded and within less than a hundred years the Blackfeet ruled the high plains from the Swan Hills north of Edmonton south to the Yellowstone River and from the Continental Divide in the west to the eastern boundaries of Montana. They did it with Spanish horses.
Drive around the Flathead one of these days and try to estimate how many horses people own. Never in American history have there been so many horses "tame horses", beautiful horses. Check out the horses in Blackfeet country. Maybe more than they had in 1800.
I was raised with horses, bought horses for my kids, and participated in a wild horse roundup or two. "Wild" horses may be a part of American History for the last few hundred years, but they contributed nothing, zilch. Their domesticated kin did the work. There has to be a better way to recognize the "wild horses" romantically fantasized contribution to history -than using our tax dollars for birth control programs.
G. George Ostrom is news director of KOFI Radio and a Flathead Publising Group columnist.