WILD, WILD HORSES... COULDN'T DRAG ME AWAY

From my true love, you ask?? NO! From U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) actual wild horses of which according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, there are some 55,000 herding and roaming and eating their way around the current Wild West!

The above title, by the way, is from an older Rolling Stones song. Ranchers and farmers, of course, vie for the grazing feed for their animals with these wild stallions. And they're not happy about it.

So the BLM has people going around hunting these wild mustangs... shooting them with darts containing - are you ready for this - contraceptives. The contraceptive darts are shot into the behinds of wild females... horses, of course! There's even a 78 year old woman in Cody, Wyoming who's such a good shot that they have her zooming in on them up there.

While I've lived in Colorado for 37 years, I can't say I've ever seen any wild mustangs, because... well, I think because if I have, I could have never told them apart from regular stock animals. Go figure that. Horses are horses to me.

But there's certainly some romance behind the fact that these critters still can roam unhindered (except for an occasional dart in the rear end) around the great wide open areas of Colorado, Kansas, Nevada and Wyoming. From what I understand they have done so since the conquistadores of Spain left numbers of them go free in the a from the time of Coronado and the 7 Cities of Gold expeditions - during the 15 or 1600's.

Now the bad news, for the female horses at least: the contraceptive medicine only lasts about a year and so they need another dose right after that so as not to increase the already burgeoning 55,000 strong herd. Maybe the BLM people better try a different contraceptive method, however, because according to the WSJ article, the number of lusty steeds is expected to double in the next four years.

Already the government will pay over $1 billion to care for and feed some 46,000 of them which have been rescued and penned up for their own good - when grass gets scarce, the horses are liable to starve if left alone in the wild.

Westerners are not willing to adopt enough of these stallions to help the matter either. I think the reasons may be that since they are wild, they may have diseases, many are undernourished, and it takes time and money to break and train a wild horse.

But some prison inmates in the aforementioned four states are recruited to train the (read low labor charges but good therapy for the inmates). But again, this is not enough to stem the tide.

So why the explosion in wild horse population now and not 100 or more years ago? Simply because there are not enough wolves and mountain lions any more to hunt and eat them for us like they did in the past.

Finally, the solution one wildlife advocate proposes is to give these beasts and others like them more area to do their roaming wild thing. Now, he says, without the predators to spur them on, the horses just hang out and reproduce. Sounds kind of like what I wanted to do when I was a bored teenager!

The only other thing, besides putting them down, that I can think of is: I remember not too long ago some folks tried to promote horse meat as a substitute for beef, etc. It didn’t catch on. Our palates now are too refined. But if fast food restaurants can mix their hamburger meat with who knows what now (read pink slime, rat feces, and whatever else gets in), why not use a little horse flesh? It would be tons healthier than the aforementioned.

If we could realize this and get over our bourgeois tastes, I think horse meat would probably be a lot healthier than the fatty hamburger meat we’re accustomed to. And animal rights people wouldn’t be able to complain about ill-treatment, caging, and confined spaces for the animals furnishing this meat we would eat!!!!! What do you think?

May not fly, huh?...