And They're Off

   It's the classic announcement as the bells rattle in alignment with the metal gates, the dirt churning as the racehorses bolt through the openings free to break away from their locked-in status and charge around the track.  The Kentucky Derby, the Belmont, the Grand National, the Dubai and the Melbourne Cups.  But I --as admitted before-- know little about that world, that world of thoroughbreds and that even more expensive world of quarter horse racing.  Dressage and English saddle riding, halters and colic, paddocks and hay, it's all foreign to me.  My wife loves horses and given the choice, would have planted me on a barn at some point and had me stacking the bales (turns out you can have the bales dropped off or pay an extra fee and have them stacked...about $9 a bale* when I had some unknown reason to check).  They're interesting animals though, breathing only through their noses and unable to throw up; block their throats or nostrils and they'll suffocate (for them, chocking is indeed life-threatening).  They are also born and die with their teeth, no replacements like us or like the masters of new teeth, sharks which grow set after set of teeth.  There are even trees that are toxic to horses (cherry and plum trees have cyanide?)...what??  And of course, horses live a good while and get old (if they're lucky).  Locally, my wife used to volunteer at the Nobel Horse Sanctuary which is still run by the feisty and dedicated owner Cathy Kirby and some of the horses she and her volunteers tend to are breezing past the 30 year mark (many have been rescued from periods of severe starvation or abuse).  All that my wife would tell me was that taking care of horses is a lot of work...

   The world of horse racing is big, as in $660 million in betting at last year's Santa Anita racetrack alone (home to the Breeders Cup and where Seabiscuit made his name in history).  You've likely seen those stories...Secretariat, Seabiscuit, Man O' War, Zenyatta, each horses with large hearts both physically and emotionally.  So is it any wonder that breeding and passing on the genes (and winning purses?) has led to DNA trading and cloning?  Already sanctioned by the Olympics and rodeos, the process is lucrative according to a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek, yielding prices of $50-250,000 per foal, colt or fillie.  Says the piece: So far, the big winner in the great clone race has been Alan Meeker, chief executive officer of Crestview Genetics.   Since 2010 the 52-year-old Texas oil heir has created close to 100 horse clones valued at $500,000 to $800,000 each, depending on how long the company’s raised them...Until recently, Crestview licensed its cloning technique, the one that yielded Dolly the sheep back in 1996, from ViaGen LC, which does a brisk business cloning livestock and pets.  That meant harvesting ovaries from slaughterhouse horses, injecting the desired DNA, then implanting the fertilized embryos in surrogate mothers, typically trying several times to produce one clone.  Hmm, a "brisk business cloning livestock and pets?"  Is that the future already here, never having to say goodbye?  But then I know little about horses or horse racing or horse breeding, and quite honestly can't afford any of it from what I've read.  So then what am I doing talking and writing about it (and apologies to those of you who might be well-versed in the world of equines)?

   Let's take that part about slaughtered horses.  Yes, horse meat is still rather prized and consumed in many parts of the world (my British father-in-law remembers using his ration coupons during WWII to purchase horse meat; a bit more gamey and a bit tougher than beef, he told me, but rather similar...and let's face it, there's a lot of meat on a horse).  The U.S. used to have many slaughter houses designed just for that of horses, a practice which became banned some years ago (shipped off to Canada & Mexico) but is likely to be revived as our Congress again brings up a bill to lift the ban.  The slaughtering is not a pretty sight.  So why would politicians want horsemeat back into pet food cans and possibly reintroduce it onto our meat counters?  Think Ford and native Americans and the wild, wild west.  Think mustangs.

   Remember that trial of Cliven Bundy and his not paying for cattle grazing rights on federal land.  Well, that's a big chunk of the issue here, that of cattle vs. wild horses, animals Smithsonian deemed "a nuisance" in a recent article.  To understand how we got to this point, you have to rewind the clock more than 500 years.  Along with dangerous diseases and firearms, the Spanish conquistadors brought horses to the New World beginning in the early 16th century.  Horses that escaped or were allowed to roam free eventually formed large herds that ranged across grasslands from modern-day Colorado to the Pacific.  Thus the name, from mestengo -- the Spanish for “stray.”  Later, many horses were tamed by Native American warriors as battle steeds.  By the early 20th century, as many as two million mustangs roamed through the West, but commercial slaughter reduced the population...Last September, a proposal to euthanize 45,000 horses that the Humane Society called “a sort of ‘Final Solution’” was halted after a public outcry.  In my local area, horse auctions are held every now and then by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the same federal agency that issues permits for grazing cattle and watches over the use of millions of acres of federal land.  Wild mustangs are often just that, wild, and the pace of BLM adoptions is not even close to the number of horses "rounded up" by BLM helicopters and other chase methods (you can read about their take on maintaining the wild horse herd). Part of our Congress has already revived and approved the slaughter of those 45,000 horses, plus another 46,000 additional horses and burros...so much for the Wild Free Roaming Horses & Burros Act that was passed 27 years ago (our president has even proposed selling captured wild horses for slaughter, says the Humane Society's publication, All Animals).

    So to look at the actual numbers, the U.S. slaughters more cattle in a single day than there are wild horses in their entire population (estimated at 72K) distributed over millions of acres.  But the cattle lobby is huge and if you're raising and feedlot-finalizing and slaughtering well over 100K cows daily, well, you have a lot more money and influence over politicians that a few animal welfare groups.  As a piece in National Geographic reported: Public land ranching today is highly regulated.  But any population of unmanaged large herbivores in an area, even if it’s a million acres, without predators can ultimately cause vegetation damage, whether its deer, elk, cows, sheep, horses, or bison.  So the helicopters and trucks head out to do the culling of wild horses, even as their earlier methods of contraceptive darts and educating breeders has proven effective in trials in North Carolina and Maryland (similar methods are used on elephants in parts of South Africa).  One catch is that the majority of the rifle-fired contraceptive darts have to be administered twice some months apart so imagine trying to find the right horse in a wild herd running at full speed to escape the sound of the an overhead helicopter.  Which brings us to zebras...

   Zebras certainly look similar to horses and genetically there are certain similarities but also many differences (they are able to breed together), says Quora.  So where does a quagga come from?  Turns out that that relatively ancient species (they went extinct just over 100 years ago) was a subspecies of the zebra, but geneticists have managed to recover 229 base pairs of the animals' DNA code, a rather complicated procedure that is simplified in graph form in a piece in Discover.   So what does this have to do with wild horses?  In remote Siberia, one plan is to repopulate the area with millions of wild horses, and possibly wild wooly mammoths (which is where the ancient DNA comes in).  The goal, says the article in The Atlantic, is to slow climate change: Pleistocene Park is named for the geological epoch that ended only 12,000 years ago, having begun 2.6 million years earlier.  Though colloquially known as the Ice Age, the Pleistocene could easily be called the Grass Age.  Even during its deepest chills, when thick, blue-veined glaciers were bearing down on the Mediterranean, huge swaths of the planet were coated in grasslands.  In Beringia, the Arctic belt that stretches across Siberia, all of Alaska, and much of Canada’s Yukon, these vast plains of green and gold gave rise to a new biome, a cold-weather version of the African savanna called the Mammoth Steppe...Every Arctic winter is an Ice Age in miniature.  In late September, the sky darkens and the ice sheet atop the North Pole expands, spreading a surface freeze across the seas of the Arctic Ocean, like a cataract dilating over a blue iris.  In October, the freeze hits Siberia’s north coast and continues into the land, sandwiching the soil between surface snowpack and subterranean frost.  When the spring sun comes, it melts the snow, but the frozen underground layer remains.  Nearly a mile thick in some places, this Siberian permafrost extends through the northern tundra moonscape and well into the taiga forest that stretches, like an evergreen stripe, across Eurasia’s midsection. Similar frozen layers lie beneath the surface in Alaska and the Yukon, and all are now beginning to thaw...Every Arctic winter is an Ice Age in miniature.  In late September, the sky darkens and the ice sheet atop the North Pole expands, spreading a surface freeze across the seas of the Arctic Ocean, like a cataract dilating over a blue iris.  In October, the freeze hits Siberia’s north coast and continues into the land, sandwiching the soil between surface snowpack and subterranean frost.  When the spring sun comes, it melts the snow, but the frozen underground layer remains.  Nearly a mile thick in some places, this Siberian permafrost extends through the northern tundra moonscape and well into the taiga forest that stretches, like an evergreen stripe, across Eurasia’s midsection.   Similar frozen layers lie beneath the surface in Alaska and the Yukon, and all are now beginning to thaw.  If this intercontinental ice block warms too quickly, its thawing will send as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere each year as do all of America’s SUVs, airliners, container ships, factories, and coal-burning plants combined...Research suggests that these grasslands will reflect more sunlight than the forests and scrub they replace, causing the Arctic to absorb less heat.  In winter, the short grass and animal-trampled snow will offer scant insulation, enabling the season’s freeze to reach deeper into the Earth’s crust, cooling the frozen soil beneath and locking one of the world’s most dangerous carbon-dioxide lodes in a thermodynamic vault.

   It's a radical idea, perhaps as radical as the thought that the BLM could charge hunters to fly with them and "shoot" the wild horses with dye-colored contraceptive darts.  Would that satisfy the ranchers and hunters, providing both the "thrill" of the hunt and the reduction in wild horse populations apparently so wanted by cattle ranchers?  And if not, well then one has to question what the real motive is for the newly-proposed culling?  Is it the elimination of the wild altogether (a human-version of this issue is taking place among some of the wealthier ranchers in Montana using their political influence to try and block public access to wild federal lands, says an interesting story in Bloomberg Businessweek, a story simply titled "This Land Is No Longer Your Land").   Much of this brings up the more complicated definition of what "the wild" really is?  Would our touristy city-version of wild meet the same definitions of a rancher gazing over thousands of acres, or a native American (which would include all the Americas, including those indiginous peoples of the Amazon and other areas.  What would the wild wooly mammoths think?  Would the indiginous populations, both human and animal, even have a definition of "wild."  As our global control spreads, we might want to step back and see just what we might be losing if we eliminate or completely fence in "the wild."  Sales of the once-popular Ford Mustang has drifted into a fraction of what they once were, a distant memory of what our culture once viewed as important...underneath the hood, says Motor Trend, is anywhere from 310 to 460 horses, a term colloquially used to describe power.  Out on our federal lands the situation might become very similar, only the horses will be buried not under the hood, but under the ground.
 
     *Whoa nellie...hay and straw, alfalfa and grass?  These are big markets here, feeding all sorts of animals and hogging (sorry for the pun) lots of acreage in our farmlands.  Why?  Because feeding horses and cattle is big business and spot prices are moving on up.  Bales are such a valuable commodity that many farmers have moved away from those rectangular and stackable bales and onto larger round bales that can weigh close to a ton, all because of dark of night theft where trucks drive up alongside a field and nab as many bales as they can.  And the cost of baling and farming in general is not cheap -- think wages and gas and equipment. Even renting all that is expensive!  Who'd have thunk? And if you wish to read more on this rather complicated definition of what is or is NOT a wild horse and its origins, you can visit a quick summary here.