The New York Times today has an article entitled Federal Agency Proposes a Euthanasia Program for Its Herd of Mustangs. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning:
The champions of wild mustangs have long portrayed them as the victims of ranchers who preferred cattle on the range, middlemen who wanted to make a buck selling them for horsemeat and misfits who shot them for sport. But the wild horse today is no longer automatically considered deserving of extensive protections.
Some environmentalists and scientists have come to see the mustangs, which run wild from Montana to California, as top-of-the-food-chain bullies, invaders whose hooves and teeth disturb the habitats of endangered tortoises and desert birds.
Even the language has shifted. In a 2006 article in Audubon magazine, wild horses lost their poetry and were reduced to “feral equids.”
The mustangs have only been on the range since, at the earliest, 1540. That’s a blink of an eye in ecological terms. It makes almost as much sense to have a herd of zebra in Nevada.
Why are the horses being maintained (at taxpayer expense) at all?