you might feel differently if you didn’t operate under the assumption i haven’t hiked through western rangeland. I don’t think the horses are a 100% slam dunk non-harmful thing at all, but it’s pretty clear in your example the cattle are more likely to be the issue. And anyhow, i’m comparing with cats, not with no horses. And you probably know too that the biggest issue in the West is cheatgrass, along with inappropriate land uses. If we solved those two somehow, the horses would be a non-issue. If we don’t, the horses will at worst be small nail in a coffin with much better nails.
It’s from this:
Erick J. Lundgren, Juraj Bergman, Jonas Trepel, Elizabeth le Roux, Sophie Monsarrat, Jeppe Aagaard Kristensen, Rasmus Østergaard Pedersen, Patricio Pereyra, Melanie Tietje and Jens-Christian Svenning (2024). Functional traits—not nativeness—shape the effects of large mammalian herbivores on plant communities , Science383 (6682):531-537 | doi:10.1126/science.adh2616
I am not particularly commenting on whether the study is correct or not but again, comparing with cats which are ubiquitously always harmful from what I can tell aside from the very specific scenario i mentioned earler. I’m not a horse person in this debate, i’m just ‘neutral’. In regards to common reed, the splitters got to that one and they aren’t even the same species any more under most metrics (surprised iNat hasn’t split those out considering the splits they do approve). I just think the horse management agenda should be set by data, not by ranchers who conflate horse damage with cattle damage or PETA members in New York City who think horses are cute but have never seen sagebrush in person. I can come here and hear people get very offended because i just said they aren’t as bad as cats, but i can also go elsehwere and talk to very informed people who look at it differently.
Anyhow i just don’t think you can compare invasive plants with invasive animals. It’s not just the magnitude it’s also how they work. Invasive animals roam around and damage habitat but invasive plants just take entire areas out of commission entirely, like making black holes in the map.
I saw destruction by horses firsthand on the Gila River Reservation in Arizona. They ate down everything except sagebrush and left the area as a lifeless monoculture. For context, this is in the Sonoran Desert where sagebrush is not supposed to be a dominant plant.
Are there cattle in that area? As charlie referred to
it is a meaningful question.
This is a different reason than I have heard some feeders say. Some people do this with the idea that trap-neuter-release, with continuing food subsidies, leads to stabilization of the cat population, because the neutered colony holds territory and does not allow new cats to come in.
This can happen, too. On the other hand, colonies often will grow with new cats and they will share the territory. Some cats don’t “fit in” sometimes and they will not join the colony.
I could clarify that the ideal goal is for all cats to be indoors. Some can’t, and will not, so TN(V)R is the best route for those cats. Those cats that can’t be homed or socialized, or that would take too much resources to get to that point, are the ones who apply to my initial statement. The leftover cats who can’t be homed can at least be kept in check, and in a localized area, so they and their damage can be managed, minimized, and at the very least, monitored.
My point though was just to say that I don’t know anybody who thinks feral cats “are great”. Even the people who work with them, like myself, are upset about their existence. I know a lot of people are crazy cat people but I’ve yet to meet somebody who is a crazy cat person enough that they adore the idea of cats being feral. It’s sad for the cats. I don’t think any lover of cats would love cats being stray or feral, if they knew all the downsides it includes for the cats.
That may be why you feed them, but that’s not what I was referring to. Plenty of people feed feral cats because they like feral cats. There is also a misconception that fed cats no longer hunt because they are full, which has been proven inaccurate as the instinct to hunt isn’t driven by hunger in cats.
I don’t feed them. That’s why almost everybody I’ve encountered through rescues and organizations will feed them, other than people who simply feel bad for them. A lot of cat lovers start out this way. They just need to be educated. I’ve never encountered somebody who loves specifically feral cats and I think if I did, I’d assume they’re uneducated and misguided in their affection. Many people who do rescue will feed them as a way to follow through with TNR and keeping them in check and manage the colonies. It’s easy to make sure everybody is vaccinated and neutered when they’re being lured to a certain area. It’s also much easier to try socializing them with humans.
That being said, if you know people who love feral cats and think they’re great, I really recommend suggesting they read up on what work rescues do to combat feral and stray cat’s growing populations. It’s nice that their hearts in the right place but next comes the mind. Feral cats are an epidemic and something needs to be done about them. Just feeding them and bumbling over them is not sufficient.
I honestly can’t tell the difference between a cat that enters my back yard and a carpenter bee that does the same. I’m not sure bees or cats are cultivated, but some are certainly wild. I introduce donated garter snakes to my yard (people give them to me instead of killing them). Are they wild or cultivated? I don’t know them, but I don’t know most of the cats that are in my back yard, either, except my own 3. The fact that I’m familiar or not with an organism I identify means little.
I think an important aspect of this discussion is that horses and other large herbivores used to be part of the North American landscape before they were driven to extinction by people just a few thousand years ago, so what we view as “natural” in the area - often, no large herbivores at all, or just pronghorn and deer - actually is not. There may be a population level of large herbivores that is appropriate in different locations, but needs to be managed through predation and hunting.
There is no solid evidence that it was mostly because of the environment and not humans. For most of the megafauna that were driven to extinction, we 1. have evidence of Clovis people killing and eating them and 2. they were extinct within 300 years of the Clovis people arriving in their habitat. Also, there are many parallels there to the extinction fo megafauna following human arrival in North America. The same things happened in Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, and other locations where megafauna existed until people arrived.
In keeping with my earlier post: do people say this about other feral animals? Are feral hogs, for instance, referred to as an “epidemic” (i.e., disease)?
Before the post you quoted, I had never of any vertebrate referred to as an epidemic or disease before (except that line the The Matrix, I guess). But personally, I would call Feral Hogs that.
Maybe! I can’t speak on it, though. I use that word to evoke emotion and draw attention to the direness of it. I don’t do work with any other type of feral animals, though.
In the American Southeast, feral hogs are managed as an invasive species. So, with not nearly enough resources to solve the problem. But cats at least have the privilege of being cute and cuddly enough not to get hunted down with helicopters or trapped in groups of 30 at a time for removal to hunting grounds. They don’t seem as contentious a topic to me because they have far fewer defenders.
I don’t think cats are being unfairly singled out is what I’m trying to say.
This was well addressed in my comment. Feral horses don’t fill the same role as Pleistocene megafauna.
Historically, the assumption was that humans were the primary drivers of decline. While this topic is still somewhat debated, the overall consensus is that megafauna were facing serious declines due to climate and humans were just the final nail in the coffin. In any case, it’s certainly is not true to say there is “no solid evidence” when tons has been published on this.
Feralized cattle here are commonly called a ‘plague’ or a ‘bane’… for they frequently devastate footpaths and gardens, cause traffic collisions, and even gore unsuspecting people. However, they play a key (positive) role in various habitats - whereas the free-roaming (non-feral) pigs and horses they coexist with are largely detrimental (…but “owww so funny/pretty/picturesque the little poneys/piggies”…)