Symbols of freedom, relics of the past

November 9, 2025
"Skye" Anoush began, "do you ever wish you lived somewhere a little more hospitable?"

"Like a place with dirt instead of rocks, and green grass and flat ground and water?  Yeah, I dream about it sometimes!  But then I love this place too.  This place is...wild."

The wind was fixing to tear Dude's hat from his head again. 

"Is that why you don't ride when it's windy?"  Dude asked.

"Is what why?"

"The landscape."

"Yes, that's a lot of it.  Some of our horses are perfectly fine in the wind, but if things get sideways, if they spook or you spook and you fall or they fall or you both fall, you're probably going to get hurt."

Dude pressed on across the steep terrain, navigating a narrow, near vertical crevice.  There were no wild horses to see.  Dude was looking, instead, for a place to set up a feeding trap...a funnel-shaped temporary enclosure that would hopefully allow him to draw in the wild horses, close the funnel behind them, and move them forward, to the small end of the funnel, which would terminate into a stock trailer.                               

Skye and Anoush, substantially shorter in the leg, shuffled down a bit more slowly.

"This is good"  Dude said.  "We don't have to go any further."

Skye could envision the funnel trap.  It could work.  But there were so many risks.  So much possible mayhem.  And what if he caught some of their favorite horses?  What if he caught Petrichor?

"So let's say this works and you trap some horses.  Then what Dude?"  Skye implored.

"We take them back to the reserve.  And then we take stock of what we've got.  There's another wild horse sanctuary not too far away.  They have four thousand acres.  If we come up with a head count that's not sustainable, they will take on some of our horses."

"Will they take stallions?" 

"They will"  Dude said, and then paused.  There was an awkward piece of silence.

"It's okay" Skye said, "I know how baby horses are made.  Will the stallions get to stay stallions?"

"No."

Skye brought Cookie and Mischief down to the indoor arena to let them stretch their legs.  They were eager to do so.

"Geeze ladies!  Don't run me over!"

"You know" Skye said aloud, more or less to Dude, "the whole thing...the way we manage wild horses, and all these private sanctuaries saving wild horses from auctions and holding facilities and adopters...the whole thing, it's not right.  The whole management program is wrong.  First the genetic isolation of managing herds and then the whole thing of sanctuaries that are basically retirement homes for mares and geldings..."

"I agree with you"  Dude responded.  "But the private sanctuaries are really the only safety net for the horses that don't get adopted, or don't work out for people."

Anoush brought Dani Girl and Luna down.

"I'm not saying sanctuaries are bad, it's just the whole thing is skewed"  Skye continued. "You know, there's talk about how restoring animals to the landscape, like buffalo, help the environment recover, help plant diversity, reduce fire risk...why can't we think about horses like that?  Horses were here up until what, ten or eleven thousand years ago?  And we humans might have wiped them out in the first place."

Skye brought down Angel and his Paso Fino sidekick.

"The other thing is genetic diversity"  Skye paused for a moment.  "You know, not just with wild horses but we need to think like this with buffalo too.  We manage populations without allowing or encouraging or facilitating genetic diversity and the result isn't good.  We need to be making sure that isolated populations don't become inbred.  We need to be actively mixing it up.  Why don't we do that?"

Blondie was the final horse to come down.  Dude tried to answer Skye's sweeping questions truthfully, but without any more negativity than the truth already owned.

"Bringing back the buffalo...the predator species, moving toward seeing whole ecosystems management across human boundaries...it's all good, and at the same time very difficult because the interests of most people in those ecosystems are in conflict with natural restoration.  They are livestock ranchers and farmers.  Wild species are viewed as competition for food or as a threat to their animals.  And wild horses in particular suffer because they are broadly considered an introduced species, as you know, but more importantly, we don't need them any more.  We don't eat them, they have no monetary value, and fewer and fewer people own horses.  They are a luxury item." 
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"Wild horses are a relic of our past. Symbols of freedom, they are called."  Dude paused for a moment.  "Symbols of freedom. We'll have that discussion some other time.  You are fundamentally right Skye.  The way we manage the land is out of balance.  And trying to get it right again...whatever that means...that's going to be a complicated mission."
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The horses moved up the arena together.  They watched for a moment in silence, taking in the indescribable essence of equus.  The power, the energy, the spirt, the willingness to give their lives into the hands of humans.  To know of these things was to hold a treasure.  It was soul-wealth.  
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"I want to figure it out"  Skye said.  "I know it's complicated, but there has to be solutions.  There has to be."
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It was barely 5 PM.  The day's last light was caught in the trees for a moment.  A warm wind rustled the land.  
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