The Grass Remembers the Horses: A land management design approach to incorporating free-roaming American mustangs (Equus caballus) on Western rangelands
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Date
2021-06-13
Authors
Koonce, Elizabeth
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Abstract
The United States currently faces a range crisis on it’s public lands.
Federally protected mustangs (Equus caballus) share a degraded
range with millions of grazing livestock. Mustangs’ contentious status
as an alleged invasive species is at odds with their protective status.
Not managed as wildlife yet not classified as livestock, mustangs are
removed from the range in the thousands only to live out their lives in
costly government holding facilities which eat up most of the Bureau
of Land Management’s wild horse and burro budget. The BLM faces
heavy opposition to mustangs from ranchers and political lobbyists.
The entire public rangeland situation is a tangled web of public outcry,
bureaucratic mismanagement, and dueling interests.
This project seeks to untangle the issues within the rangeland crisis
through a “Land Management Design” approach. It presents a
thorough background in the natural, cultural, and ecological history
of the wild horse in North America, and focuses on the current
management approaches utilized in the United States. Through
the lens of several precedent studies, a strategic management
framework is proposed. This framework is then applied to three Herd
Management Areas (HMAs) in the state of Oregon. These three case
studies are explored in depth and drone photography and mapping
show the current status of these sites. Photoshop renderings present
alternatives for how the sites could evolve when the proposed strategic
management framework is applied.
It is possible for all parties with stake in the rangeland crisis to benefit
from a land management design approach. The conclusion of the
project discusses this at length, and further delves into the sociopolitical
changes that must take place for our public lands and our
wild horses to be saved.
Description
64 pages. Committee chair: Kory Russel
Keywords
Horses, Mustangs, Rangelands, Wild horses, Range management, Public lands