Caballo: The Wild Horses Of North America (Wildlife Documentary) | Real Wild

[Music] [Music] i just thought horses were domesticated animals this is a remnant bunch this is what the millions look like that roam the west these are incredible creatures and i find that they fit where we where we see them out there i'm not going to live long enough to learn half the things that i would like to know about wild horses we have a few wild horse herds around the united states the prior mountain horses have genetic markers in them that are unique to those particular horses clearly linking them to the old spanish horse then you have other wild horse herds where the link is much much closer to the morgan horse or draft horse in them if you took let's say 30 or 40 domestic horses of a variety of breeds turn them loose and come back in 300 years and see what you have they all pretty much look the same natural selection in a harsh environment really slashes hard and leaves you with what we call a primitive horse that shouldn't be meant in a deleterious way biologically they're fit they're much more fit for their environment than the horse that they evolved from over those 300 years and we seem to always get to the same place a small tough horse that has some unique characteristics immunologically nutritionally when you spend some time with these horses they're so different they're so unique from domesticated animals i can go out there and and watch an old stall you know hurting a bunch of mares and things like that or seeing two stallions fight it's very very unique not too many people have ever seen that in our country i find going out and watching these wild horses to be every bit as interesting more interesting from a behavioral standpoint you start to name them bison elk deer antelope go ahead name it you can't find anything out there with as complex a social organization and social structure as the wild horse we have the harem band a sexually mature stallion in charge of a group of mares that could be anywhere from one mayor to 20 some mayors within the harem band you have social hierarchies there's a stallion but that stallion has only two purposes to keep other stallions away during the breeding season and to breed those mares he makes no decision about when to feed where to feed there's a lead mayor and she makes those decisions and then you have at age three young stallions are drummed out of the band they're not allowed to stay there anymore and horses are very gregarious one of the cruelest things you can do to a horse is keep one alone they must have other horses with them and in no time at all they seek one another out you have bachelor bands and the bachelor bands are great they're just like a bunch of teenagers and they're essentially checking out the action where are the mayors what's happening what's going on and then you have the old lone stallions which are drummed out they lose they're finally too old and the younger stallion and they go off pretty much by themselves and they don't generally live very long after that happens and i've always attributed to the stress of being alone for the first time in their in their lives so you have both a social behavioral and even physiological change as we domesticate these these animals and that may be part of the reason some people don't like to look at the wild horse as a wildlife species because they keep seeing a domestic horse what have we bred domestic horses for we bred them for their size and their confirmation and their color virtually everything that's useless to a horse what we have done is to take a wild animal and we have bred it in the image that we've created in our own mind for a whole bunch of different reasons to run fast around an oval track or to jump over a bunch of sticks or to whatever whatever we breed horses for wild horses are out there trying to survive and reproduction being able to get by sickness on their own uh nutrition being able to live on substandard nutrition those are the important things to them and once you see what they're all about you'll never be the same when it comes to when it comes to wild horses to a lot of people louisiana of course is a horse but you have to have a sense of history to appreciate something like that [Music] [Music] i like to take sort of the long view of history that long duare view and to me horses are actually native species to north america that's an unpopular view in a lot of circles i've had people tell me that you know horses are nothing more than just like turning cows loose in a pasture that's all they are there's just another exotic it is very clear that the origin of of the ecwids was right here in north america colorado kansas wyoming western nebraska that particular region and of course we go through 60 million years of evolution with the ecwids horses originated here in north america and then later went to other continents and that starts about 55 million years ago so we have a long history of horse evolution here in north america and then about 3.7 million years ago the great diversity of horses that we had here in north america declined down to three but one of the three horses included this skeleton right here which is the earliest representative of equus which is the group that all modern horses belong to what we have here in hagerman is the earliest known representative of our modern horse the horse family is a is a really a great example of long-term evolution the small horse eohippus or hierarchatherium which was the first horse the size of a small dog it had four toes on the front three toes on the back legs as environmental changes came about its legs got longer it drops the side toes becomes a one-toed horse or hoof this is a modern horse hoof the modern horse hoof has a much larger hoof than our hagerman horse does the hagerman horse is so closely related to today's horse and also they believe to the modern grevy's zebra that lives in africa as it continues to evolve this animal gets much bigger in size it also changed its eating habits from being a browser to being a grazer at some point in their evolution they they appear to have disappeared from north america and prior to that some of them migrated to eurasia presumably over the bering land bridge meanwhile what happened to the american stock the north american stock is pretty much a mystery the big question is this business of what happened to the horses the fossil record tells us that around 11 000 years ago they disappear along with them disappear our native camels mammoths mastodons ground sloths sabercats dire wolves and another 20 kinds of large animals that i won't have time to mention what happens around 11 000 years ago the climate is changing and for the first time people are coming into the new world in large numbers those two possibilities are the basis of a really interesting debate i mean horses constituted in some areas as much as a third of the biomass of the pleistocene fauna and so it's kind of hard to wrap your mind around the idea of that many animals going belly up so fast of course the bottom line is no one knows for sure the most widely accepted theory is that the only apocalypse that coincided with the disappearance of the horse was the arrival of man on the continent and just as with the mammoth the theory is that they were simply hunted to extinction in a relatively short period of time i think it's a remote one but there's certainly a possibility that something people were accompanied by perhaps diseases is involved in the disappearance of the horses the reason i have to say that is because there are no kill sites there are no archaeological associations of clovis points or other artifacts with horses they disappear around the same time that we first see the fluted points of the clovis hunters uh that's all we can say it's hard to imagine if you just consider a human overkill hypothesis that people might have extinguished these large herds of horses that were quite widely dispersed it's hard to imagine this at least it is for me the surroundings the grasslands were still a great environment for horse survival this is one reason i find it difficult to believe that all the horses of this vintage died out around 10 000 years ago as the received knowledge says i sometimes think that we have one or two ways of solving a problem nature has umpteen ways of solving that problem so we've got to be a bit humble when we're stating these hypotheses we know that there was a glacial glacial refuge in alaska in which moose survived the wisconsin glacial period so it's possible the horses survived up there it's possible that some survive somewhere else i've been told there's fragmentary evidence that maybe they did make it but i think that in general you can't prove it one way or another yes it is possible that some horses i suppose survived the so-called extinction they would have probably survived in little pockets and then with the arrival of the reintroduced horse in very short order been diluted genetically very possible with horses but i don't make that argument simply because you shouldn't go around and make arguments like that unless you have something to back them up with i have something to back me up with when i say equus cabalis was here 1.7 million years ago it originated in north america and it co-evolved with its habitat here and it was the same species that was brought back by man a reintroduced wildlife species and i've always thought that when they returned they really had come home [Music] with the reintroduction of wild horses do we treat them as an exotic species or have we merely returned a native to its homeland the wild horses come from the cabolins they represent a distinct group within modern horses we're not sure if there were true cataline horses here in north america some people who work on fossil horses think yeah they were here other uh people say no they weren't the cavalene horse is an old world form certainly if we say caboline horses were here and then became extinct then a reintroduction of a cavalene horse makes a little bit more sense ecologically that probably they're close enough if we don't have any strong evidence that the cataline horses the domestic horse lineage group was here then you're a step closer to saying it's probably more of an exotic species and not exactly an ecological equivalent of something that disappeared 10 000 years ago certainly when you get up into the yukon where we've gotten frozen specimens you actually have something that you can extract dna from and and do a match up this is one of the best complete skulls we have of equus lami this is the pleistocene or ice age yukon horse the radiocarbon dates on these average around 25 or 26 000 years ago so it's almost exactly the same age as this carcass and they both are of the same species it's a cabloid horse in other words it's very close to the modern horse there are specimens of this kind of horse throughout alaska into the yukon and right along the adjacent northwest territories coasts so it's all over uh northwestern north america and there were quite a number of herds and they're probably fairly large herds according to the number of bones we find in the yukon in alaska the most common remains of ice age vertebrates are a bison and horses these specimens here these are some of the bits of horse here that were found with this pelt and there were a few remains of skin also these are remains of the skin that were found with this animal and uh perhaps most interesting to a lot of people would be this which is just a horse turd or dropping and that gives us a lot of information on what they were actually feeding on and this consists almost entirely of grass remains so it suggests that the ancient environment in this region was a grassland you know at least there were large tracts of grassland horses basically evolved with the stipa grasses the cool season needle and thread type grasses needle grasses spread across the west horses basically co-evolve with those grasses wildlife doesn't evolve independent of its habitat it evolves to what it is because of that habitat wildlife shapes the land and the land shapes the wildlife and and that is co-evolution a good definition of of a native species is one that has co-evolved with its habitat and you wouldn't have to go any further with the horse it co-evolved with its habitat yes there was a ten thousand year gap but from the standpoint of evolution of habitat that didn't make a difference at all the major argument that's that's used that the horse is not a native species is that the species that went extinct ten thousand years ago was not the same species that cortes uh brought back in 1519 one could argue breeds but one can't argue species the molecular biology evidence shows that the cabaloid horse was here in north america 1.7 million years ago this is a species called equiscodi this specimen from rock creek in texas is about a million years old this basic kind of horse is a cabloid type it's not far away from the modern domestic [Music] horse the horse originated in north america it evolved to the cabaloid horse 1.7 million years ago which means the horse that left us 10 000 years ago was the cavaloid horse and it was simply returned by the hand of man to its native habitat so what you have is a bunch of arguments over over breeds rather than species but that's convenient for those who would like to keep the exotic label on it and out of that sort of thing comes policy whether or not the policy has any scientific veracity behind it isn't important to a state agency or a government agency they can put the label exotic on it that means they can manage it in ways that they couldn't manage it if it was a native species you know the idea that horses are native uh species to north america is unpopular with a lot of people because of our our assumptions that what we we want the wilderness of north america to be is this landscape as it was seen at the moment of first european contact and that was a landscape without horses in it we've for a very long time had this notion that if animals weren't on the scene at the time when europeans saw the place they don't deserve a place in the native taxon but that's no that's no magical time you know that's just one of the snapshots and a very long continuum [Music] whether the spaniards brought them back or whether they came across on an ice floe doesn't really matter to me all that much the fact is they did get back here the pueblo revolt of 1680 was the event that spread horses across the west uh the spaniards that founded new mexico the colonies in northern new mexico in the first decade of the 1600s and by 1680 or so the pueblo indians had gotten sick of spanish domination especially religious domination and so they they rose up and chased them out of new mexico for 12 years in the process of doing that they basically managed to capture liberate all the stock animals that were found in northern new mexico all that had to happen was for a few horses to get loose and and overnight terms they multiplied into the millions they reoccupied the niche that had been sitting there waiting for them for 10 000 years and almost by five year increments after 1680 you can chart the acquisition of horses northward up the rocky mountains the navajos get horses the youths get horses the shoshones get horses the bannocks get horses the salish get horses and this is by about 1710 or so from that avenue of diffusion uh horses are funneled from new mexico all the way into what is now saskatchewan and alberta and they spread eastward across the plains too probably within about a decade i mean there are there are european accounts that indicate that within a decade after 1680 uh the tribes of what's now oklahoma and texas all have horses and all know how to ride horses some of the historical accounts in the 1800s of what travelers saw as they went west were that the most common and wildest of the native animals were the horses think of the horse historically in north america it gave rise to a whole new culture the the northern plains horse culture you know it only survived for 200 years but but it it caused a whole new culture to erupt and flourish and then of course it disappeared we took care of that the first attack on wild horses was to dismount native americans so that they'd be easier to conquer and there was a huge program of shooting wild horses in the thousands in the united states and it's been well documented so then we go from that which was a utilitarian means for attacking horses to another an economic means horses were shot by the hundreds of thousands for dog meat um you'd get several hundred dollars for a horse up until fairly recently and so then we have this economic incentive to get rid of them they were basically vermin we de-buffaloed the plains everybody knows that but we de-wolfed the planes we wiped out the prairie dogs we made war on magpies even and one of the animals that ended up being decimated in the 19th century was the the horse one estimate is that there were probably two million of them south of the arkansas river on the great plains by 1800 nobody's really made an effort to try to estimate how many were in the west by 1850 but however many there were basically were wiped out by the process of a commercial trade that essentially targeted the wild horses of the west as stock and domestic animals for the advancing american frontier so there was a horse trade economy in parts of the west it was the major economy for as long as a couple of decades it went on through the latter part of the 19th century into the 20th century in fact something like 300 000 horses were rounded up in the west between the boer war in 1898 and the end of world war one there was also by the end of the 19th century and especially the beginning of the 20th century there was a market for horse meat in the united states and slaughter houses were set up down on the texas gulf coast so that what you get is is really kind of a remarkable thing and it's analogous to the buffalo story uh image of the planes that in the 1850s were swarming with horses and buffalo and by 1915 1920 had neither animal an absolutely empty landscape except for at that time a few prairie dogs from a historical point of view the u.s grazing service was merged with the general land office in 1946 to form the bureau of land management previous to that merger the u.s grazing service had a unspoken policy to actually shoot wild horses on site and they were considered vermin pests to be eliminated competition with cattle and sheep basically wow horses on the public lands are driven down to anywhere from 10 to 17 000 by the early 1970s velma b johnson who was dubbed wild horse annie when she saw some very uh cruelly treated wild horses in a truck mustangers were driving the truck to apparently uh slaughter and horses had been very severely injured and were bleeding and she was following this truck that had blood dripping from it and that was part of the the beginnings of her movement to save wild horses from being so cruelly treated the waffle rooming horses and burrows act has been amended several times but the basic premise of it has never been altered and that is to protect wild horses on lands that are managed by the u.s forest service and by the bureau of land management congress in 1971 passed the wild free roaming horse and burro act which basically said horses are to be managed as an integral part of the ecosystem on the lands that they are currently found i think the bureau of land management before the wildfire roaming horses and burrows act was passed had pretty free reign on how they managed wild horses and it was an intrusion on their their ability to manage as they so pleased and if there were horses that they felt were competing with a rancher's livestock or a rancher felt that horses were competing with their sheep then they could be removed so strangely enough the agency that has been mandated to protect them has historically not protected them in fact had the view that they should be eliminated and i think unfortunately that historical view has carried through [Music] [Music] ah [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] [Applause] uh i've read a lot of accounts of the capture of wild horses in the 1700s and 1800s and those accounts are are pretty evocative the spaniards for example had a whole vocabulary to describe why so many horses died after being herded into pins and and being captured they had a term called despacio which referred to the death of horses from nervous rage over capture the mustangers in texas and new mexico in the 18th century had a term sentimental which referred to horses that died from heartbreak at capture those kinds of of uh historical accounts make me think of horses as you know truly wild animals i think they probably reacted the way elk uh or bison or most most wild animals would have reacted hey that maybe sounds silly to some people because they don't think of wild horses as a natural species but when you break up a family they're undergoing a tremendous amount of stress and sometimes injury and sometimes death even over the last 30 years the blm has determined where the animals should be managed and that's what we do today we manage wild horses and burrows in herd management areas to be a wild free-roaming horse and borough the animal needs to live on or come from one of those herd management areas the desire is that the blm would manage these horses so that they are living on healthy rangelands it's very important that the range be healthy because there are not only wild horses but there are cattle livestock such as sheep other animals out there wildlife so to have healthy horses you really need a healthy range land nevada has about 24 to 25 000 wild horses right now this next year they're trying to increase the numbers that they want to remove and i believe it's up to over six thousand it's an attempt to remove a larger number of animals to make a difference we manage cattle on blm land by when they go on and off the land they go on at certain times of the year and they come off at certain times of the year wild horses and burrows are on all year long and they're managed mostly by removing the excess and leaving a population on the land that is sufficient to take care of the you know where there's enough water and vegetation to take care of that population you leave behind the blm has repeatedly sacrificed the interests of wild horses for livestock interests in fact they have bent over backwards to accommodate livestock and while they are supposed to manage these ranges primarily for horses as the 1971 wild horse and burro act says they are they still very much manage these areas for cattle we have a few thousand wild horses on literally millions of acres of public land and on those same lands we have millions of cows and sheep and the blm will say we're having some damage it's from horses we need to get the horses off and they will keep the cattle on that range while lowering the number of forces people tend to think of this as a single issue and it's not it's really a multiple use issue congress says we're going to have wild horses and burros out there that they're part of the legacy of our our western heritage but it's not exclusively managed for wild horses and burros with rare exception it's managed for all these different uses we consider personally that we are in a partnership with the federal agencies where we lease land from the federal government either the forest service or the blm and we try to work closely with them in a partnership capacity to protect the resource and to enhance the resource and not to degrade it there is a tremendous amount of subsidy going on right now to encourage livestock grazing on public lands it probably cost a child more to feed a hamster on a monthly basis than it does to sustain a cow and a calf on public lands there's a lot of deference i believe from authority agencies to livestock permittees who have more influence a lot less livestock permittees are the smaller ranching families we're seeing large corporations in there they control the majority of public land interest when it comes to livestock grazing there's still the myth in the west that cowboy is king and unfortunately that myth is being sustained at the health of our public land we have one property of blm land that we have a number of wild horses and they are quite a problem to the range they have a tendency to go to the same area and they over graze tremendously and they absolutely destroy the range and yet we are out there trying to implement the most sophisticated and modern range management policies relative to livestock grazing the horse can't even get in the same ballpark with domestic livestock when it comes to destroying range now that's not an indictment of all ranchers many ranchers manage their range very well many don't if it's competition for grass and it's public lands well i'm not sure that the horse is always the culprit there particularly when the cattle and the sheep outnumber the horses so greatly but we're moving now from the topic of horses into the new west versus the old west [Music] as far as i know everything that's been studied has tried to look at what the detrimental impact of horses are but not what their functioning role is in an ecosystem how do they fit into the ecosystem do they play a role and are the integral components of that ecosystem in which they live through eons of time in this area wild horses were part of the ecology of the landscape horses are hurting animal their characteristic is to move into an area do their thing whether it's water or feed and then move a little bit inherent like the bison you know used to rumble into an area and water up and and when they leave it was obvious that they were there and they left their impact but they would not return to that location for some time and so that gives your your resources a chance to recover grazing animals uh that's how a lot of these rangelands develop over time is through because of animal impact to our soil surface as far as damage in the range any kind of species of animal can damage their resources for a short period of time but we tend to think in short terms of two or three years if you look at at a 30 to 40 year period i would bet that that it's a least sustaining level of resource because back to the herding they'll they'll do something to a piece of ground and move on sportsmen raise this issue all the time they say that if you allow wild horses in deer range pretty soon we're not going to have any deer so we'll get rid of the horses but you know it's one of these gut feelings that they get because it looks as though they should be competing and but the studies that i'm aware of indicates that that in fact isn't the case the colorado state studies and the priors have shown that there's no overlap or not any significant overlap and even diet the competition between bighorn sheep and horses is not a reality and the competition between mule deer and horses is not a reality it's really more of a perception than the fact that they have any any bearing on on wildlife populations if horses were allowed to range freely across the land as they really should be they would be able to spread out that impact and they would certainly move from area to area the problem is that they are fenced in they are constrained to particular areas they have literally constructed hundreds of thousands of miles of fences on our public lands at taxpayer expense to create for all intents and purposes nothing more than livestock pastures to control livestock but not only are they controlling and confining livestock they're also confining wild horses and that's impeding the free movement of these animals what we have done for the most part we have forced wild horses into some of the most inhospitable places that you can find simply because there was desired land use for these other areas so we have artificially shoved large concentrations of horses into places where they obviously were never in large concentrations seems like the the horse is losing out to all kind of special interests i think the developers are moving in those areas and moving up to the hilltops and as the feed gets less and less they do come down into the communities and therefore everybody starts griping and they start gathering these horses and then creating a bigger problem with supposedly excess horses in 1971 when they passed the act there were many many areas with wild horses the blm has arbitrarily decided whether those ranges should be removed or not and they have removed many of them what's happening is they're zeroing out the herd management areas and they have not as far as i know counted been counted for a very long time so i don't think we're going to know when we're getting dangerously close to not having any more wild horses there's a feeling for stomping out a piece of history the risk isn't you get down to the last animal the risk is you get down to a critical threshold whereby the population becomes inbred and then if you get a very severe environmental event the whole bunch could go they're certainly not an endangered species but they do have some characteristics that they've developed that are you know make them a great horse for especially something like endurance riding this facility is set up to prepare horses for adoption and they are animals that are brought in here they're aged checked over by the veterinarian and we freeze mark them and inoculate them for all the major equine diseases the younger horses are then shipped out for adoption events all across the country now minimum bid on any horse is 125 dollars the main method we have of placing excess wild horses and burros is in our adopt a horse program and we have well over 170 000 adopters in the united states since this program began they're rounding up wild horses and putting them in holding facilities sometimes for months and even years at a time because the pipeline that the blm has is full of horses at times and they can't adopt all the horses out that they've gathered so you know it's not only bad for the taxpayers to be paying all this money for feeding and taking care of horses and holding facilities waiting for them to eventually be adopted but it's bad for the animals themselves they're withering away and it's driven by supply it's not we have 50 qualified adopters who want to adopt a horse who can give a horse a good a good home it's that we have in wyoming they're saying 2 000 surplus horses so they remove them from their natural habitat and then try to generate enough people to absorb those horses so it's kind of a backwards adoption program the marketing now is to adopt adopt adopt and that's creating the funnel for them to take more horses off of the [Music] [Applause] [Music] lands congratulations you've just joined thousands of americans who've adopted wild horses through blm's adopt a horse program blm and the forest service manage these federal lands for a balance among all the animals that use them livestock wildlife and wild horses to sustain a thriving natural ecological balance and maintain healthy herds these agencies gather wild horses from the range and give united states residents like yourself the opportunity to adopt a horse for saddle and pleasure riding reigning competition endurance riding or using your horse as a pack animal and since the inception of the adopt a horse program in 1973 over 100 000 wild horses have been successfully adopted by americans by blm some people fall in love with these noble creatures others like their surefooted adaptive nature when you feed and care for your animal properly you'll see the signs of a healthy horse a sleek glossy coat alert eyes and a smooth body line with no bony protrusions adopting a wild horse can be highly satisfying and an adventure in itself remember the more humanely you treat your horse the more rewarding the experience will be enjoy your living legend [Music] people are are fascinated when they find out about this program it's one of the greatest things that many of our western states have going for them there's nothing like the spirit of the american west and they see it in the wild horse we adopted seven of them only to get them out of the range and we don't we don't even plan on using them they're so worthless they're they're coarse they're heavy footed and they're they're just something that you would not want really to break so they're basically worthless you don't want to put the investment into breaking a 17 year old stud that that is required to make a decent horse at him so what you do is just end up adopting him to get him off the range and that's what we did until something changes i think adoption is going to remain our primary method of of taking good care of the excess animals adopt the horse has been a fascinating lesson in biology as you reduce the densities of ungulates reproduction becomes more efficient animals breed at a younger age they breed more often the survival of the young is greater than it was before so as we gather these horses and then gather all the young it's like throwing an on switch for those mares that we turn back on the range they are now going to come into estrus and they're going to breed and they're going to breed successfully and adopt a horse if it has done nothing else except except cost the taxpayer an immense amount of money has proven the textbooks right there is compensatory reproduction and as you reduce the density reproduction speeds up they don't have any desire to live with humans they don't have any desire to see humans or be fed by humans or cared by humans they have an interest in maintaining their freedom and maintaining their wild free-roaming nature so i certainly do not think it would be okay to take i i don't agree that it's okay to take a wild animal and take away their freedom even if we provide the best home on earth for them that's better than mistreating them but still it takes away that the most important thing to that animal which is their freedom we do get a lot of people that come in and look and think you know it's kind of like getting a puppy from the pound and it's not these horses are totally wild we do not work with them here we don't have a program where we can gentlemen down at our facility so most of the horses probably going through the adoption program have never been handled we ask these animals to become domesticated in many cases some never do it's very difficult to try to keep these animals and to train them and domesticate them it is not as simple as it appears many of these animals end up in sale barns and the only people who purchase these animals at sale barns or slaughter buyers blm has still has ownership of these animals for one year and then title passes to the person who adopted these animals and there has been evidence where these horses have been sold to slaughterhouses a day or two after titles passed one could theoretically adopt a horse from blm for 125 keep the horse for at least a year before title passes and then sell that horse for six or seven hundred dollars and there is a market for not only wild horses but horses being slaughtered for meat and the market is overseas in foreign countries there's a tremendous horse meat market unfortunately the government does not believe that they have any responsibility or authority over these animals after that adoption period because they believe it's perfectly legal for these animals to be sold and they do go for commercial uses maybe our failure with so many of these animals going to slaughter is that we are attempting to domesticate a wild animal and the adoption pipeline is a direct consequence of the authority agency refusing to manage and protect these horses on the range where they belong being in conservation biology i don't see any biological issues anymore in conservation they're political or economic or social or cultural and these poor animals like wolves and bison and horses are just symbols for the different sides to rally around if you have a natural aversion to something it's pretty easy to drum up a case uh whether it's horses or anything else that makes what you have an aversion to look bad and everything else look good and here we have a case where a whole group of animals that that was very successful in the millions in north america at one time has been castigated and blemished for reasons that are basically unfounded very hard to bring something back when it's gone and i think that that would diminish the richness of life that you and me and everybody else has and i think it applies to everything not just horses but everything else that that we would have the chance to keep and and for one reason or another we obliterate and they should be venerated by the management agencies the blm or whoever as something more important than an unfortunate accident if we wrote them off would we understand that they came from a lineage that not only was native in the new world but had evolved in the new world for millions of years north america is their home their heartland i firmly do think that wild horses belong in north america horses are a wildlife species that ought to be out there on the landscape you

Channel: Real Wild

Views: 168,701

Rating: 4.7829638 out of 5

Keywords: full documentary, wildlife documentary, wild animal, real wild, animal documentary, animals, wild horses, wild horse (organism classification), horse (domesticated animal), el caballo, caballo, horse documentary full, horse documentary national geographic, horse documentary uk, horse documentary youtube, wild horse documentary, american wild horse, wild horses of america, america wild horse, american wild horse documentary

Id: tmqE0kl6haY

Length: 52min 49sec (3169 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021