Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Wild Horse Controversy

Northern Nevada is horribly overrun with wild horses right now. I've already hit one with my truck one late night coming around a blind corner. At least 2 days a week when I come out my front door, they will either be horses on my street, in my yard, or just around the corner. Drive through suburban neighborhoods around me and there is horse droppings EVERYWHERE. At our local park, if the kids want to play, they have to run the horses off first.

When we setup the fields for soccer games, the fist job is to clean up all the horse droppings...and there's a LOT of them.

I like the wild horses, but this is getting very much out of hand.

Cattle do not crop grass off at the ground. They only have lower jaw front teeth, the upper is smooth gum in the front. Therefore they leave some grass where they graze. Of course they have upper and lower jaw molars once they get ready to chew the cud later. If you have enough grass for one animal and have a horse and a cow, the horse will stay fat and the cow will starve. As for cows not being native species. Well bison are, and they can successfully breed with cows. For all practical purposes they have about the same impact on grazing land which by the way is all a lot of this world's land is fit for. Considering that Latin Americans like horse meat (among others) and all of the dogs and zoo animals that have to be fed it would be a shame to euthanize and dispose of this much animal protein.

Them horses made good dog food.

Takes more pasture for a horse than it does a cow.

Shoot them all. (the horses). I have ridden a few mustangs that were actually fairly decent rides. but a pain in the ass barely covers the training. And upkeep.

Horses' teeth bite the grass off at the ground, unlike cattle. If they overgraze, the grass is severely damaged.

Back in the late 1970's several of us "adopted" some of the mustangs from the adoption center at Cross Plains, TN. We were all into breaking and training horses, and thought it would be a cool thing to do it. If I remember correctly, the adoption fee was around $150. Total and complete waste of time and money as far as I'm concerned. The horses I saw didn't compare favorably at all to the Quarter Horses we were used to dealing with, and were kicking and biting fools. Although I'm pretty sure that some people have good luck training their mustangs, I wouldn't do it again if Kate Upton was there to help me.

Cock size.

No stretching.





Dave

Humans? Really?

Cattle aren't allowed to run wild and compete with our wild game and are not protected by the government.

Horses eat short grass cows eat long grass

Really. I hadn't heard we had a feral cattle problem. Feral humans. Well that's another matter altogether. We seem to have plenty of them.

After the horses eat the long grass, they eat the rest to the ground.

Ive heard of people buying healthy young wild horses at auction for pennies/lb and turning them into damn good jerky... Id do it but my girlfriend would probably move out!

Win/win.




Dave

There's a movie on Netflix called Unbranded. Pretty good flick about wild horses and trail riding.

Part of the problem is the "old west" is gone. The one where cowboys rode and indians hunted buffalo, and there was some elbow room. Now we have people who look at the romance of wild horses, don't understand rangeland and grazing. What wild horses I have seen I enjoyed, can't say that about cattle, except some longhorns and bison that were an exception. Not to mention sheep. This does not affect my livelihood, just recreation.
Cattle do compete with game, no question.

When they allowed processing, there were too many people trying to eradicate all the horsesfor profit, now it has swung the other way.

I am sure there are some young helathy people who would ban everything except no trace walking in most areas, the rest of us be damned.

Folks in No NV who have watched the damage wild horses have done to their range land for the last half century would be happy to see you and your SoCal neighbors come and get em all.....

In other words....just like everyone else in SoCal....you don't have a f ucking clue as to what makes a good horse....


Or anything else for that matter.....

That's because you didn't pay enough attention to notice the vast damage they are doing to land they occupy. Or - you simply don't care.

More emotional politics......

They have lots of adoption rules to prevent that, like not getting title for a year. But it has happened, more than a few end up in a canadian slaughter house. As far as I'm concerned they need to slaughter the excess and sell the meat rather than feed them in a pen forever. Ship them over to Europe, use the money to fund range management.

Makes a good story but you don't just drive up to the corrals and take one home with you....
Not only is there the usual burecratic gubment BS but they also inspect your facilities and do surprise follow up visits.....

These horses aren't pets.

They aren't romantic.

They are inbred, parasite infested, very small, useless, wild feral animals. If one or two in a hundred can be broken and ridden to any extent, I would be shocked.

There don't need to be tags sold. That would lead to regulation, laws, and whatever else they can regulate.

They need to be shot on sight like coyotes.

Put a bounty on them even. That would be cheaper than dealing with a live one.