Pony burger, anyone?
See, here's the thing: I bet most of us think wild horses are romantic,
all-American, beautiful, proud and free…. you can picture the herd on the high
plains, rippling muscles, with the floating manes, the precious ponies, the
endangered hallmark of the American West….
Ooops. Science magazine says we're just about this close to a
"serious wild horse crisis." There are just too many of those
beautiful critters. They're destroying rangeland and disrupting the ecosystem,
and some of the horses are starving to death. An adult horse needs 20-40 pounds
of forage every day.
There are roughly 33,000 wild horses roaming free in the American West.
The Bureau of Land Management has a legal mandate to maintain the herds at a
total of 23,622 horses—much easier said than done. Those pesky stallions keep
doing their thing, you know?....the BLM estimates that we could have 100,000
wild horses in a half dozen years.
And here's the other thing: the BLM spent $75 million last year in its
failing attempts to manage the size and health of the herds. If nothing
changes, the government could spend $1.1 billion over the next decade-plus just
to keep the horses alive.
That's a billion dollars that should be spent on other policy initiatives:
education, health care, climate change, you name it.
People regularly eat horse steaks and pony burgers in France, China,
Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Germany, Belgium, Japan, Switzerland and Scotland.
And it is legal in the U.S. to sell horse meat for human consumption.
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