Riding Herd “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
December 15, 2019 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 61 • No. 11
Loving Them To Death BY LEE PITTS
I
If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around.
t’s a cruel heart that doesn’t love a horse. And therein lies the rub. We are loving America’s “wild horses” to death.
Mongrels And Mutts
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
First of all, let’s get something straight. Only three to five percent of the horses we call mustangs or “wild horses” have unique genetics and can trace their heritage back to the Spanish horses the conquistadores brought to the Americas. The rest are, by definition, mongrels. The equivalent of a crossbred mutt. I realize that is a dangerous thing to say in the supercharged atmosphere that surrounds the debate about what to do with the exploding population of America’s wild horses. After all, three years ago Ben Masters wrote basically the same thing in an article for National Geographic and he received death threats for saying so. But Ben Masters had done his research, after all, he’d adopted seven wild horses himself and spent years studying the problem. Masters quoted Bob Garrot, director of the Fish and Wildlife Ecology and Management Program at Montana State University, who’d researched wild horse population dynamics since the 1980s. According to Garrott, “Before 1971, they were feral livestock and anyone could go out, gather them, do whatever they wanted. The vast majority of the wild horses we have come from standard saddle stock like thoroughbreds and farm horses, and their genetics are commonly found domestically. A lot of these horses originated in the Dust Bowl when people just turned them loose when they
couldn’t afford them; that still happens today. “It’s akin to dogs,” said Garrott. “Dogs came from domesticated wolves, but through a long history of artificial selection by people, we have all these different breeds which all trace back to wolves. But are they native? Are they the same critters that were there 10,000 years ago? Well, no they aren’t. Those horses are not the same horses that were here in the Pleistocene. The Western landscapes are not the same landscapes, neither are the plant and animal communities. So the question now is, how many do we need to have, where do we need to have those animals, and how do we manage them to get to that number?” Masters also interviewed Gus Cothran, a professor and equine geneticist at Texas A & M who has genetically tested 70,000 horses, 12,000 of which
were BLM wild horse and burros. Cothran told Masters, “The vast majority of herds living on the BLM’s lands are basically mongrel, mixed-breed horses that probably have not been living wild for many generations.”
Worth Preserving There are 179 wild horse Herd Management areas in America covering 31.6 million acres in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. Each Management Area is different in size, geography, and bloodlines. Cothran says that the true wild horses are primarily found in just 10 of these 179 herds. According to Cothran, “these herds do have unique bloodlines and are worth preserving and treating as special populations, managed differently, to grow that unique genetic pool. The vast majority
of the mustangs, I refer to it as the mongrel population, you can take a general management strategy on them because their genetics are commonly found in domestic breeds. In fact, if you took individuals from different breeds and turned them loose in the wild, after a few generations you would have the mustangs we have today. Because that’s exactly what happened.” It may surprise you to learn that the horse actually originated in North America. But those horses crossed the Bering Land Bridge back into Siberia from Alaska 53 million years ago and any semblance of those horses is long gone. So even the three to five percent of the horses that we call “wild” descended from horses brought to the Americas by the Spanish. They are actually a reintroduced native species of horses and the rest are nothing more than feral horses whose genetics are no different than the horses in your pasture right now.
Walking Hamburger Factories When William Perry Pendley, was asked on one of his first outings as the new acting chief of the Bureau of Land Management at an environmental gathering in Fort Collins, Colorado, continued on page two
America’s Cattle Ranchers Are Fighting Back Against Fake Meat Beef producers and their allies are marshalling food scientists and lobbyists as they defend their turf against meatless burgers BY JACOB BUNGE & HEATHER HADDON / WALL STREET JOURNAL
O
n a rainy September morning, a pair of cattle ranchers browsed the refrigerated meat cases at a Walmart Inc. store in Mandan, N.D., snapping cellphone photos of an unwelcome invader among the shrink-wrapped ground beef: Beyond Meat Inc. patties, made from pea protein and coconut oil. After a separate check at a nearby local supermarket, the ranchers headed to the North Dakota Department of Health. They showed officials the photos and warned of food-safety risks from mixing plant burgers with the traditional beef kind. Their message: Meatless burgers don’t belong on beef’s turf. The impromptu inspection by the ranchers—one of whom was Kenny Graner, president of the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association—is just one front in a growing war against their plantbased rivals. Cattle ranchers and their allies are pushing regulators to scrutinize alternative meat-makers, recruiting food scientists to test plant-based products for potential health risks, and ramping up countercampaigns to highlight beef’s nutritional benefits while comparing their
rivals to dog food. They’ve even created a digital assistant, available on voice-activated Google and Amazon devices, that can answer consumers’ questions about beef and, when pressed, beef alternatives.
“The best alternative to beef,” it says,“is more beef.” Over the past two years, the beef industry has pushed legislation that restricts terms like “beef” and “meat” to the kind raised on the hoof, not products derived from plants or future ones developed using animal cells in labs. Various labeling laws are now are on the books in 12 states and were considered this year in 15 others, with a federal bill introduced in October. For restaurants and grocery stores, growth is coming not from the real thing, but from a new generation of meatless products that combine proteins from soy or yellow peas with potato starch, beet juice and other ingredients to more closely mimic beef’s sizzle and juiciness. U.S. retail meat sales fell 0.4 percent in the past 12 months through October, while sales of alternative meat grew 8 percent, according to market-research firm Nielsen. In the 12 months before that, meat sales fell 0.8 percent while sales of alternatives rose 21 percent. Plant-based alternatives amount to the continued on page four
I
by LEE PITTS
vacillate between being a traditionalist afraid of the future and being an early adopter of technology. I bought the first model of Apple Macintosh computer ever sold but I don’t have a cell phone. I’m a writer, not a talker. I’m not on Facebook, don’t know how to tweet and I have no idea what Instagram is. I don’t do my banking online, have never got a dime out of an ATM machine and I know the names of every teller in the bank we’ve been loyal to through four ownership changes. I feel guilty because I’ve bought a few things on Amazon that I could have purchased from local merchants but I shouldn’t feel that way because the hardware store in town practically begs you to shop on their web page. You can’t be like me any more and I should know better. I got a good lesson on what happens to people and companies who refuse to periodically overhaul and remodel. I was 21 years old and got a job as the “manager” of a registered Angus herd. Actually, I was just a hired hand. The man I worked for refused to be receptive to new ideas. His cattle were terrible and he was still breeding the type that were really short and low set, so much so that if he would have ever won a class at a cattle show and a photo would have been in the livestock press you would have been able to see all the belt buckles of the big shots standing behind the animal. But he didn’t have to worry about that because the odds of his cattle winning anything in a showring were the same odds the bull has in a Tijuana bullring. I tried to convince the owner that he should make use of my talents as an artificial inseminator but “By, God, my daddy bought his herd bulls out of a range bull sale and if it was good enough for him then it’s good enough for me.” I almost got killed on numerous occasions because I had to feed a big pen full of bulls that ranged in age from yearlings to four year old bulls we couldn’t sell. I had to feed them with numerous fifty pound sacks of feed in open troughs in the middle of the pen. And did I mention the bulls had a wicked strain of blood that made them man killers. I asked if I couldn’t build some feed bunks like they have in feedlots so I could feed from outside the pen but the owner said, “No. We’ve never done it that way before and it would cost too
continued on page four