Every day, I drive by miles and miles of pastures full of horses. At first, I thought some obviously insane animal collector was randomly breeding them. My farrier disabused me of this notion by telling me that these were mustangs. The pastures are "holding areas" where they stash all the mustangs that were never adopted. The ranchers that feed them get paid a goodly sum to do absolutely nothing with them, other than make sure they don't starve, and report any that die. There are literally thousands of them standing around eating their heads off. Some of them are quite nicely built, and easy on the eyes. They will remain in the holding areas until they die, and we have the priviledge of paying for it. This really bothers me. I understand people wanting to see them running wild, but these horses are not running wild. They are housed in sex segregated herds, and I have yet to see a single one run. In the winter when the ranchers supplement their hay, they line up like a herd of cattle, eating the cubes the trucks trail out.
Why, pray tell, are we paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for this? It's not as if they do tours where people could take pictures, or just look at the horses, rather, they are off limits to the public. I wish all the people who are so adamant about mustangs being part of our history would have to pay for keeping these herds. I love horses as much as the next person, but this seems an unreasonable waste to me.
Sorry for the crappy pics. If you get out of the car they run away....
2 comments:
we pay for it because of the uproar when they were being slaughtered.
I honestly don't know how I feel about this. On one hand, it's a lot of money for something that eats and poops. On the other hand, what else to do? What got them here to begin with? Slaughter them?
I think what irritates me the most is all the bleeding hearts who squall bloody murder about the "wild horses". They are *not* wild. They are feral, the product of horses turned loose or escaping over a long period of time. They are in fact an invasive species. I will probably be blasted for this, but I think they should be culled, the same as any other species that becomes overpopulated.
I love my horses, but I don't think they are any better (deserve more "rights") than any other livestock. All the blather about them being our "partners" to me is just ridiculous anthropomorphizing. I have no problem with equine slaughter. There are people starving to death who could greatly benefit from them.
The whole thing really annoys me. I bet if those whiners had to solely support all the "wild" horses, there wouldn't be thousands of them standing around looking stupid.
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