One man is on a mission to promote the grazing habits of feral herds as a way to stop extreme blazes from starting and spreading
Since moving to a remote mountain region just south of Interstate 5 on the Oregon-California border in 2014, William Simpson, 70, has assumed responsibility for the care of 120 wild horses that roam his land. He has also adopted 60 more as part of an effort to study the effect that grazing has on managing grass, brush and other fuel for wildfires in the face of increasingly extreme blazes.
“I started watching the horses and seeing what they were doing,” says Simpson. “They were managing the fuel.”
He calls the project the Wild Horse Fire Brigade, and hopes the discoveries he makes from living among the animals will contribute to the debate around the role herbivores can play in wildfire mitigation.
Simpson argues that the steep decline of herbivores in the region – the deer population in California has shrunk to less than 500,000 from an estimated peak of about 2m in 1960 – is a factor in the state’s overgrown forests and grasslands, which in turn feeds increasingly extreme wildfires.
“We’ve lost our herbivory so now we have abundant, abnormally high levels of vegetative materials – that is what’s driving the fires,” says Simpson.
Read more
***
Wild Horse Fire Brigade TM
https://www.wildhorsefirebrigade.org/
Native Species American Wild Horses
‘Wild Horse Fire Brigade’
The ‘Natural Wildfire Abatement and Forest Protection Plan’, commonly called ‘Wild Horse Fire Brigade’ (WHFB) helps mitigate wildfire and toxic smoke by restoring native wild horses as keystone herbivores into privately-owned and public wilderness areas where they reduce and maintain grass and brush wildfire fuels to nominal natural levels.
America has hundreds of millions of acres (privately-owned and public lands) of forests that are rich with forage and water. There are approximately 353-million acres of privately-owned forests at risk for catastrophic wildfire. And there is approximately 115-million acres of publicly-owned designated wilderness, containing forests of old growth conifers and the last bastions of wildlife species and their habitat.
Prior to the arrival of Columbus in 1492, scientists estimate there were as many as 50-million bison, 20-million wild horses and approximately 100-million cervids (deer, elk, pronghorn, etc.) on the North American landscape. Today, we find these large-bodied herbivore populations have been decimated via mismanagement and human meddling.
Extensively published scientific studies show that this collapsed herbivore (loss of large herbivores) results in abnormally excessive grass and brush wildfire fuels. The same published scientific research shows that on every continent, when the herbivory collapsed, catastrophic wildfires evolved. (See our ‘Resources’ page for links to the published science)
Wild Horse Fire Brigade is the name of our nonprofit and also that of our Nature-Based solution for the plight of American wild horses. In its essence the Plan is very simple; rewild and relocate wild horses away-from areas of conflict and confinement and locate them into wilderness areas where they benefit flora and fauna as they reduce and maintain grass and brush wildfire fuels.
America contains hundreds of millions of acres of wilderness (public and privately-owned) where wild horses can live wild and free beyond conflicts with livestock and other public land uses.
Wild Horse Fire Brigade helps saves native species American wild horses by rewilding them from government holding facilities, and/or relocating them away from areas of contention with livestock production, and humanely placing them as family units into carefully selected designated wilderness areas that are economically and ecologically appropriate.
There is approximately 353-million acres of privately-owned forest lands at risk of catastrophic wildfire. There is also 110-million acres of public-owned designated wilderness area in America, primarily in the western United States. Most of these wilderness areas have abundant forage and water resources but are manifestly unsuited for livestock grazing due to existing law, existing populations of apex predators and excessive logistics and transport costs due to the difficult terrain and remoteness of such locations.
In such wilderness areas, wild horses that are restored back into their evolutionary roles as keystone herbivores naturally protect forests, wildlife, watersheds and wilderness ecosystems.
Wilderness areas benefit through the symbiotic grazing by wild horses that naturally maintain wildfire fuels (grass and brush) to nominal levels, thereby reducing the frequency, size and intensity of wildfire, as well as deadly toxic wildfire SMOKE (greenhouse gas) that is harming human health and accelerating climate change.
The goal of Wild Horse Fire Brigade is to naturally and sustainably save America’s remaining native species wild horses and their genetic diversity by establishing several large-scale wilderness wildfire-grazing pilot programs using wild horses that are sourced from excess Native American horses, and government agencies (BLM, USFS) using existing law (Humane Transfer of Excess Animals).
Another goal is to also support the amendment of Section 1339 of the 1971 Free-Roaming Wild Burro and Horse Protection Act, to allow federal managers to also directly rewild horses into designated wilderness areas outside existing herd areas.
***
Op-Ed: Let wild horses do their part to save the West
America’s wild horses are in crisis. Throughout the West, they are being rounded up and kept by the government in what amount to prisons before being sterilized or auctioned off — some to owners who will treasure them, but others to middlemen who will ship these beautiful animals to the slaughterhouses of Canada and Mexico.
It is a horrific crime against a noble species, and few Americans even know it is happening.
At the same time, we are watching as our world dries out and burns up. Californians know better than anyone the cost we are paying for climate change. Furnace-like temperatures. Deeper floods. Longer droughts. No one can doubt that we are at a moment of profound and scary change.
But what if we could take action on both these challenges at the same time? Because horses can once again come to the rescue of the human race, at least a little bit, and work as our allies in the war against global warming. It sounds crazy, but there’s good reason to think that wounds to our fragile ecosystem will heal more quickly if we allow modern wild horses to roam the West as equines once did thousands of years ago, returning to the role of a “keystone” species keeping nature in balance.
First, the facts.
Read more
