The other night on the local news, some guy from some environmental outfit was yapping about "wild horses", equating them "with other wild animals like deer and elk", and suggesting that cattle need to be removed from the range.
One of the things he brought up about cattle were their numbers, in comparison to "wild" horses.
His argument was intellectually bereft, but then arguments in this area often are.
Winslow Homer painting of a (fairly thin looking) plow horse. Lots of "chunks" were let go in the 30s when their owners droughted out, their descendants still roaming the range today.
There are no wild horses in North America at all.
None, nada, zippo, "0".
There are a little over 64,000 feral horses, all in the West, in the Western United States. If we include burros, which at least nobody pretends are a wild animal, there are 82,000 feral equines.
All wild equines stem, at the very oldest, from animals that were brought on to the continent in 1519. Quite a few probably don't really have any Spanish blood in their veins at all, and hail from horses much more recently brought in. There's fairly good evidence that in the upper West horses came down out of Canada, not up from Mexico.
Some poor coureur des bois awakened one morning, in other words, and thought "Chu dans marde! Mon cheval est parti!"
"Bourgeois" W---r, and His Squaw" by Alfred Jacob Miller, depicting a coureur des bois and his Native American spouse. This is a famous painting, but we're not supposed to like it now. One art museum notes about it: "These words, which shaped how Miller's contemporaries viewed the watercolors, reveal the racism and sexism embedded in 19th-century exploration and colonization of the western part of what is today the United States." Oh, horse crap. Most trappers were culturally French, and the French had intermixed with the native population from day one. This could just as easily be "guy and his wife." The comment itself imposed an Anglo-American view on a Franco-American and Native American landscape.
Moreover, the introduction date to the Native Americans, at least on the Northern Plains, is much more recent than supposed, and even then, they didn't take them right up. Indeed, among the Shoshone it produced a big argument, with the arguers, mostly young men, taking off and acquiring the name "The Arguers", i.e., Comanche.
In the 1930s, a lot of farmers in the West droughted out and simply let their horses go, including stocky draft horses, i.e., "chunks". Then again, in the 1970s the numbers of wild horses expanded as recent imports abandoned pasture pets out on the range and went back to their homes in Port Arthur, or wherever, and even now some of that happens. The majestic broom tail of the range today may have been Little Becky's 4H project before she left for UW, died her hair purple, and started protesting for Hamas.
Okay, so what about cows?
Long horn in a herd of Angus or Black Baldies. I'm not really sure how this bovine ended up in this herd.
They came in at just about the same time, or earlier. Cattle were brought to the Caribbean as early as 1493 by Columbus, which is really early. "In 1492 Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue", but in 1493 the livestock truck, basically, pulled up to the dock. Cows can and do go wild, but nobody gets very romantic about it, and there isn't a Wild and Free Ranging Cow Act. Nobody goes by the moniker "Wild Cow Annie". A wild cow we had went rogue and recruited other cows to her rogue wild cow band, which shows how wild they can get. A neighboring rancher, caught her and shipped her as a menace. We got the check, and were happy for that end.
There are about 90,000,000 head of cattle in the United States as of this past summer, down from 100,000,000 in 1998.
Okay, that's a lot of cows.
Which bring back our ignorant protagonist's point. Before Columbus came and said "let's stock this range and lose some horses doing it", he seems to argue, the rangeland was empty of large ungulates.
Um, nope.
There were something like 50,000,0000 to 75,000,000 buffalo.
But, gee, Yeoman, that would mean that the entire ungulate supporting range of North America has always had a lot of large ungulates on it. . .
Yep, that's what it means.
Currently, there are about 20,500 Plains bison in wild herds and an additional 420,000 in commercial herds, which we are supposed to pretend are wild herds.
Given our inability to accurately state how many head of anything were on the Pre Columbian landmass, what this basically tells you is the ungulate population hasn't changed very much. Overall populations of large wild animals, i.e., "big game" are way up, however, due to water projects and farmed fields.
So the entire Cow Bad/Horse Good argument is pretty flawed.
Now, the line of last defense on this is that cows cause global warming. That's because cows fart.
Buffalo don't.
Umm. . .
Well, buffalo do, but only Febreeze.
Well, no, they fart methane too.
In reality, all mammals fart, but some fart more than they otherwise would due to diet. You already know this due to your coworker who has, every day, the Lumberjack Special at Hefty Portions for breakfast, followed by the Ejército del Norte special at El Grande Conquistador for lunch, a quart of scotch around 2:00 p.m., and goes home and has his spouse's Roast Wildebeest Surprise for dinner (all Keto approved, of course). The only real argument here, therefore, is that maybe cattle ought not to be finished off on corn, which they probably wouldn't normally do unless somebody left a gate down. That likely makes them gassy.
Lascaux painting of aurochs, approximately 36,000 years ago. Note also the deer/roebucks and horse depicted.
Taking this out worldwide, I'd note, cattle are native to the entire rest of the planet in some form, save for Australia. Wild cattle ranged Europe, Asia and Africa. They aren't new here, and they've been wondering around chewing their cuts and farting for longer than we've been a species.
So back to environmental destruction.
The first real notable example of it was Cottonwood bottoms in the American West. During the winter, buffalo hang out in them. Feral horses took it up. And mounted Native Americans, who previously had a pretty limited impact on the environment, did too.
But you can't really say anything about that.
