[00:00:00] Speaker A: The American west is a land of sweeping grasslands, rugged mountains, and boundless skies. But today, much of this landscape is under siege, threatened by overgrazing, resource extraction, and mismanagement.
What if we could change that story with wild horses?
Welcome back to Rewildology, the nature podcast that explores the human side of conservation, travel, and rewilding the planet. I am your host, Brooke Mitchell, conservation biologist and adventure traveler.
In today's Thanksgiving special, we're taking a deep dive into an ambitious and groundbreaking project with Rewilding America Now. My guest, Mana Kalamian, founder, and Dr. Ross MacPhee, science director, are at the forefront of efforts to restore the American west by reintroducing wild horses onto public lands.
Together, they're tackling the challenges of outdated policies, degraded ecosystems, and the misconceptions surrounding one of North America's most iconic animals.
In this conversation, we'll explore the evolutionary history of horses, the essential role they play in maintaining grassland ecosystems, and the obstacles Manda and Ross are navigating to bring this vision to life. We'll also dive into a controversial discussion about lithium mining, electric cars, and the unintended consequences of some green initiatives. So I recommend coming into this with an open mind and maybe even analyzing and thinking about your beliefs through a little further.
You will also hear about their innovative strategies to turn public lands into thriving habitats for wildlife, supporting not just biodiversity, but also the communities who depend on these landscapes.
Before we dive in, if you love what we're doing here at Rewildology, please subscribe, leave a rating and review and share this episode with someone who needs a little inspiration today. Your support helps us continue spreading the message of hope and rewilding.
All right, let's get into it. Here's my conversation with Manda and Ross of Rewilding America Now.
Well, hi, Amanda and Ross. I have been looking forward to this conversation for a while now. Ross, you and I have been in communication for months and so I'm so stoked this is finally coming together. So first, though, before we. Oh, we have so much to cover today and we will definitely get there, but I want everybody listening to know who you two are. So, um, yeah, Amanda, I'll start with you. How did you get to today and how did rewilding of all things into your life.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Well, Brooke, first I want to say what an honor and pleasure it is to meet you and thank you so much for having me here today. Ross and I and the work that you do, of course, is so important. Bringing the rewilding concept and conversations from all the Varying places and people all around forward because it is such a key and critical initiative that we really need to understand better and mainstream America needs to understand. So my journey is just like. Well, I don't know, I would say like anybody's journey when they decide to do something. And I got to rewilding and I got to here because I've been an animal person and a horse person and specifically my whole life. I've ridden horses my whole Life. And about 16, 17 years ago, I was shocked to see that horses were still being slaughtered here, because I knew we had. In 2007, we had closed the last slaughter facilities here in the States. There were three remaining. And slaughter was banned. Right. The government had defunded USDA inspectors for horse slaughter plants, so there was no funding for them, which made them. They had to close the facilities.
And I kept hearing and getting emails about slaughter, slaughter, slaughter and horses being slaughtered. So when I took a deeper dive into that, I realized that horses now were being transported over the borders to Canada and Mexico, being sold to kill buyers. So as I journeyed deeper into trying to figure out what was happening and how this was going on, I realized that the wild horses that rode free here on the American rangeland were being rounded up and oftentimes sent to slaughter. So that is how I discovered, well, I have to do something. Well, how can we save those horses? And I realized that environmental rewilding, the horses, as a mega herbivore and a keystone species, are a component to helping grow grass, sequester carbon, greenhouse gases, and build biodiversity.
And set out to figure out how to bring that message forward and along the path and the journey. I connected with Dr. Ross McPhee, my good friend, and we met and chatted, and here we are today, building rewilding systems and advocating for wild horses as a component to that.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Beautiful story. And that was a perfect lob over to Ross. Ross.
[00:05:45] Speaker C: Well, my story is far more prosaic. I've been an academic my whole life, and how I got to horses is as follows. One of the things that I pursued in my career quite a bit was the causes and consequences of the big mammal extinctions that occurred all over the planet, but particularly in the new world about 10,000 years ago. And you can't get interested in mega mammals without loving them dearly. So since we have so few left, I'm very concerned that the remaining species are protected. And just by accident, I ended up on a panel at New York University Law School that was concerned with horses, the management of horses by the BLM and what the future held. And before that, I really knew nothing. And that kind of radicalized me in the sense that I. I found that I have something to say that most people don't have the background to say. And that has everything to do with evolutionary biology. The horses that we have today, the domestic horses, it's called, its evolutionary history, goes directly back to this continent.
And the idea that we would somehow consider horses to be invasive as outsiders, as non belongers, it just struck me as ridiculous. So I started talking about it and publishing a bit about it.
At that time, which was 15 years ago, ancient DNA, which I've also dabbled in, hadn't taken off. And my arguments were all based on the anatomy of, of horses as they existed here back in the pleistocene, more than 10,000 years ago, versus horses that live today. They're like peas in a pod for all intents and purposes.
Well, the ancient DNA tells a slightly different story. There's no argument, once again, that horses, like the domestic horse, their ancestry goes directly back to North America. However, they spent long enough after getting over the Bering Land bridge, when that existed in Eurasia, starting at least a million years ago, that they have differentiated enough for taxonomists to consider the domestic horse different from, at the species level, different from any of the horses that existed in North America.
Now, I know I've already spoken overlong on this part, but it's kind of critical that anybody listening to this who's not a professional taxonomist is going to think, well, that's the last part of the story, right? The taxonomists have spoken. How can there be any further discussion? Well, it isn't that simple. And the reason why it isn't that simple is because taxonomy is saddled with a method of defining species and giving them names that is as literally as old as this country. It's more than 250 years, and although there have been improvements and adjustments and refashionings and all of that kind of thing, we still refer to species by their individual name. So in the case of the domestic horse, it's Equus caballus.
And if you give a different name to the species that used to live here, that became extinct here, then that's like a wall that divides them. And it's not the case they have an immediate ancestry in common. Regrettably, taxonomic language, as it exists now, does not give you that. You have to dive for it. You have to make what amounts to a special study in order to understand how taxonomists have viewed these relationships over time. And where I am right now is that I respect and recognize the results of the DNA work. And I am not asserting anymore that the domestic horse is the same as the horses that used to live here up until a few thousand years ago. However, I am underlining the fact that they have the same origin. And that is what's critical when we get to talking about how we propose to do rewilding, trophic rewilding in particular. It really doesn't matter that the horses are considered different species. They have the same ecological roles. Fortunately enough, we still have Equus caballis with us. It has a job to do, if only we would permit it.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: And that alone, I think, helps answer a big question that a lot of us have, and that is our horses native to North America. And just as you said, they started here. Like, their evolutionary history comes all the way back here. So could you maybe fast forward a little bit in time, since the idea of wild horses seems odd or weird, even though we know that they were here?
You know, like, I've. I just listened to the incredible book Empire of the Summer Moon by S.E. gwynn, talking about the amazing horse tribes and just the relationship that especially like Comanches and Apaches had with the horse. So they were here. I mean, the horse came here. So could you maybe talk a little bit about that, too, so we could have a better understanding of the ecological role? How did horses get back to North America and then become a part of the megafauna that was just part of the natural landscape in the plains? How did that happen? How did they come back?
[00:11:44] Speaker C: When Europeans arrived here 500 years ago, there were no horses to be seen. At least that's the story. There are many parts of north and South America that have never been studied for this kind of thing, for fossils and so on. So we don't know the full story, but at least the official account, let's put it that way, is that when Europeans arrived, there were no horses. Very shortly thereafter, however, because the Europeans were very keen on exploiting as much as possible, they brought in horses to further their ambitions. Some of those horses escaped, and some of those horses were taken over by indigenous people in at least North America, which is what I'm going to concentrate on. And they did that very early. The record now, thanks to recent research, suggests that that began well before the Pueblo rebellion, so early 16th century.
And thereafter, as you said, Brooke, there were some groups, some indigenous groups that became very serious horse groups, horse tribes, and stayed that way up until, say, the most recent century or two.
And there they have different stories, they have different understandings of their relationship with horses. One of them being. And one of them that Rewalding America now is very interested in is the idea that some of these late surviving horses could have had interactions with people. That doesn't mean that they rode the horses. It doesn't mean anything like that. What it does mean, however, is that these oral traditions may have substance in a way that scientists up until recently have just ignored that it's not the kind of data that they think you can do anything with. Well, that is possibly true in one sense, but it's not true in other senses. And if you have corroboration from other kinds of evidence that is considered more scientifically acceptable, then you have the beginnings of a hypothesis, which is what science is all about.
The idea that horses survived into much later times gives us a view of what that period was like, which is radically different from what we think now and suggests that the horses, in this case, wherever they survived, were doing the job that evolution designed. And what was that job?
The preservation and restoration of grasslands.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Wow, thank you. Honestly, like this been such a big debate. You know, clearly horses were a part of this ecosystem. They had their role, they were here for a reason and they fit in like just a puzzle piece that was meant to be here. And then. And then, of course, the great extirpation of everything in the 1800s and including horses. And so I would then like to bring it up a little bit up to now. So horses are gone and they're only in. Wild horses are in a few places that, you know, that are managed on, you know, whatever public lands and stuff like that that we'll get into now. So maybe, Amanda, could you just explain a little bit further? How did this idea come to you that we need to restore wild horse populations in general and then on public land. How did all of those series of ideas come to you that this is something that we should pursue?
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Well, I have to ask or highlight so the. Your listeners. So let's just go back to just understand what wild horses are of the lands today.
Right. Or what the government, how the government categorizes today's wild horses. Before we step that way, I think that would be sort of the gray area that, you know, is sort of between Ross's scientific explanation of horse research. Right. Paleontology and today. So the government says that the horses, the wild. I only refer to them as wild horses. The rest of the world knows them because the government refers to Them as this way as mustangs. And mustang, it means feral horse in Spanish.
So the horses that the conquistador brought over, that Ross discussed at the end in the hulls of their ships, right.
Were mustangs, feral, what they called feral horses that they captured and domesticated, and that's what they used. So our government here says that those horses on the range are mustangs. They're all derivatives of the horses brought back by the conquistador in 1492 or thereabouts. I believe that there were pockets of horses stored away or hidden somewhere and that the conquistador wasn't the, you know, the broad horses over here, when there were absolutely none. That's our hope, is to find something along the way that speaks to the date and the timing. But however we are today in this. Of scientific circumstances, and it presents itself in this fashion. So those horses on the range, the government says, are the ancestors to the mustangs. So they are just feral horses.
We at Rewilding America now say those are horses, and the horses belong here in North America. They are the mega herbivore. They evolved here. And Ross and I have had many conversations over the word species, and it's a complicated word and how he explained all of that. So to me, they're wild horses that evolved in North America, took a little trip around the globe and came back home as if any kind of, you know, with some genetic divergence or change. But they perhaps are the same. I believe they are the same.
I know species is the scary word if you're a scientist, because then it lends itself to so much interpretation, but they're wild horses. So in trying to find a solution to how to help the wild horses, it occurred to me that if we don't use horses the way we used to, right. We needed them for everything from the beginning of time, right? That's how we hunted. That's how, you know, we became nomadic. That's how we ate. That's how we built cities, laid railroad tracks. I mean, the truth of the matter is there isn't a minute of the world that we live in today that isn't from the auspices of the relationship between horses and humans, because that's how people traveled. That's how we brought and carried bricks and in carts and laid railroad tracks. And everything about our world today is only from the horse helping us create that. So now people think we don't have a need for them that way. We used to. Right, that you couldn't survive without your horse. Right. Back in the west, and in any of these times, if you had no horse before the car, you had no way to get anywhere and do anything. So their role in our lives have changed so much over the time. So now people, they're sport, right? People use them for riding and for racing, and they become a commodity, a disposable commodity that people make money on.
But they do have a role for us. They've always played a key role in our life as humans with horses in some capacity. And now in this time of climate breakdown, they play the most important role as a mega herbivore that can help us as landscape architects, create and build biodiversity and grasslands of any kind. So if we don't think they have relevance in our life, I say they have more relevance today than as much relevance today as they had back in the beginning of time when we domesticated them and they helped us to become who we are today. And it was through that thinking that I realized that that environmental rewilding is the path and the lane forward to help save these wild horses and have those wild horses once again help us.
[00:21:16] Speaker A: So at this point then, is this when the idea for Rewilding America now came to you? Because, I mean, that's pretty revolutionary. The rewilding movement isn't here, which is wild. Like, why is the rewilding movement not here? So, like, when I heard about your organization, I got really, really excited. I'm like, oh my gosh, somebody here is doing rewilding. So at that point, and before we started recording, you said, you've been working on this for like 15 years now. So what was that timeline or transition.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: To that through that 10, a little more than 10 years ago that I decided, you know, I first started out, for the first four or five years, I was like, save the horses. Our horses are going to slaughter. Can you believe that? And after all the years I spent with all these people at horse shows and riding and nobody cared, and now I'm learning that it's not just show horses, it's ponies at camp. It's anybody who doesn't want to support or pay for the horses at any time, that they just send them off to the kill pension and then get new ones in the spring. So, you know, that's how I learned that the wild horses were getting sent to slaughter as well, and all of these things were going on. And when I realized I wasn't getting anywhere, there had to be some solution. And it occurred to me, I understood what rewilding was, why and how it came about, that I understood and knew about the concept. But, but I said, you know, Native American communities have a lot of land. They've had the relationship with horses from the get go and they're suffering, they're in trouble. We need to put wild horses back to native communities on their lands so they can help those communities bring back tradition, reconnect, heal those people. And in doing so, work to heal the land and bring opportunities and jobs and all kinds of things. And this is how that grew. From there. I met the first congressman, Congressman, former Congressman Steve Israel now, who has been an advisor to the foundation for the last eight, nine years since he left Washington and ten years now maybe. And while he was still in Washington, I approached him with this idea for this wild horse crisis, as they say in Washington, that we should connect wild horses and native communities that have a lot of land and work to rewild, to help rebuild environmental systems. And when you can rebuild environmental systems and you have healthy opportunities environmentally, there are socioeconomic opportunities for, for the community that you can, you can parlay along with that. And he was the first person, he said, this is incredible. And so we started talking and lobbying and that was the evolution of the thought of rewilding. And you know, why it's so critically important. Our public rangelands are destroyed. The government has destroyed them with mining and ranching and agricultural farming and fracking and drilling. I mean, I don't know where to go with it, you know, and the horses have been the scapegoat. The horses have been the excuse that the government uses as a shield so the American people don't understand that it's a giant Ponzi scheme and we and our federal taxes are paying all this money that other large corporate entities are valuing and getting the advantage of. Our land is destroyed and our horses with it. And our horses, not only do they belong here, but they hold our history. They are the key. They trace back their lineage, their being on that land. I mean, our history is connected to those animals and we need them now. What, once again, to help us in this time of climate breakdown.
[00:25:35] Speaker A: And for those of us who. Because this is quite an international audience and maybe even people living in the United States don't quite understand how the like, livestock lease, rangeland tax credit thing works between, you know, ranchers and government bodies, especially out West. So could either one of you. I'll lob it to whichever one of you would like to answer. Could you give an explanation behind that? How did this work historically and how is that still working today? Because I think that'll really Set up the work that you all are trying to do today. But yeah, history lesson, how do these like permits or leases or whatever the word says that you'll soon tell us work for on the public lands?
[00:26:24] Speaker C: I think there's actually two sides to this, Brooke. I want Manda to describe, to answer your specific question. The other part of this however is exactly what do we mean at Rand when we say that horses are going to save the land?
Let's start here with grasslands. The word grasslands, everybody's got a sense of what that means. Of course, in this continent we are particularly lucky because of the millions and millions of acres that qualify as grassland. But what does that mean in a sort of biological sense? What's the significance of grasslands? Well, grasslands are made up of plant species that are able to deal with continental style climates like we have obviously. And what that generally means is that there is sufficient water for growth, that kind of thing. It's not desert as such, but it tends to come in batches and the plants have to be able to deal with that.
One of the things that grasses can do is because they're not investing a great deal of their substance in above ground tissues, they can survive in ways that tree type species cannot.
And where we have grasslands today, just say in North America, there's a tension between the grasslands as such and the forests as such. There's in effect a bit of an ecological competition because the forests, just like the grasses, would like to expand.
Is that a good thing? Well, people would probably say yes, we need more trees, it's going to take care of our carbon problem. Well, no, it first of all isn't. And secondly, you have to have respect for grasslands just as much as you do for forests as ecological centers of diversity. Grasslands have been in existence for about 30 million years and they characteristically have a very wide array of species that have ended up or lineages that have ended up becoming adapted to them. Not just mammals, not just vertebrates, but invertebrates of all kinds, microorganisms of all kinds are strongly adapted to grassland conditions.
And why would that be important? Well, if you erase them and you erase that part of your biological heritage, then you'd better have something useful to replace it with. And that's the nub of the problem with grasslands in the US right now.
In addition to climate change, just talking now about human usage, agriculture and ranching put extremely heavy debt loads on grasslands for agriculture. Of course you want the grasslands out of there because you're growing cash crops, you don't need them, you think and you want to replace them. Okay, you do that. And guess what? The microorganisms, which I like to say have all the hard jobs in any ecological system, no longer have their host species. If you've gotten rid of the natives and now you've got soy or wheat or barley, whatever it is, you're growing as monoculture. So there's no diversity and there's nobody who used to live there to give you the opportunity you, as a microorganism used to have. Is that a bad thing? Well, it can be, because especially under circumstances like right now, where a very large part of the country, as we're talking in November of 2024, is in a drought. I don't say it's an unprecedented drought, but it is a huge drought that is principally affecting the central part of the country and is going to have a very pronounced effect on agricultural production. What does that, in the end, mean? Well, it may well mean that agricultural production is less and less possible in those areas where it used to be. So then what do you do? You've killed all the grasses and the perennials that used to live there that are native. Agriculture is fundamentally extremely water demanding and attention demanding.
You're going to end up with wasteland. Wasteland that is not as productive as it should be, can't be, for the reasons that I just outlined.
Now enters the herbivores.
The reason why the grasslands were so productive in eons past was because you had these machines, these biological machines, the really big herbivores coming in at twelve hundred pounds or better, who had to eat a commensurate amount of food every day just to get the organism in good shape. And what that meant was that you had a vast capacity to overturn nutrients, to add nutrients back to the soil instead of just extracting them.
What that meant was perfect conditions for not only the species that were already there, but any species that wanted to make an introduction and come in and take over. And that's in fact what has happened in the past with invasive species in many of our grasslands, ones that we brought in because we thought they were better for our purposes, which means getting those cows fattered as quickly as possible before you take them off the land with all their nutrients and send them to slaughter.
Now, if you take the view that megaherbivores have this role, then the next question is, well, can any mega herbivore do the role? And the answer to that is pretty well yes, but it may come with some baggage. Let's just look at the two most important species that we can talk about in this context. One is cows, Bos taurus, and the other one is the horus equus caballus.
Cows are very good at processing. They're adapted to it. This is their thing.
And one of the ways in which they are so efficient is because they ferment the plant food that they're bringing into their bodies and therefore extracting the maximum amount of energy that they can from this material. They do that in their complicated system of stomachs, which probably people have heard about. But all I'm going to say is that that's called foregut fermentation, and that's what they do. And that's a very good thing from the point of view of what I was just talking about, the recycling of nutrients.
A downside for cows and for other members of its particular family, the bovedae, is that they're also methanogenic as part of the fermentation process. So they give off extraordinary quantities of methane, which is a greenhouse gas, which has all of the issues connected with greenhouse gases that we've all heard heard about.
So that's a deficit in addition to the positive.
Now, about horses.
Horses have much more primitive guts. They're much like us. They don't have this complicated series of stomachs, but they do do a certain amount of fermentation. But they do it in a specialized part of the small intestine called the cecum, which is equivalent to our appendix. And you don't have methanogenic bacteria there to cause the problem that cows do. So horses process the food, turn it over. In a sense, that is similar to cows, but without that particular downer represented by the release of greenhouse gases.
What has been suggested by people who study this in great detail, and there's some very authoritative papers that have come out in the last couple of years on this, who've looked at every kind herbivore of size, the big ones, and have said, you know, it really makes no difference, really.
It may from a management point of view and from many other points of view, but they're doing the same job and at rewilding America. Now, the argument we're making is that we are not against cows. There is no point in being against cows. We don't need to have that fight. What we want recognized is that horses have their own value, a different value from that of cows, of course, but they can do the job as well. And that's what leads to the argument that I'm now going to turn back to Amanda.
What Ran is doing that is Unprecedented is to think in terms of having mixed herds of horses and in our case bison on the lands that we have permitted to us to raise livestock in this kind of way. And we see this not as a solution to everything, but as a way forward that, that nobody else has tried.
Amanda, thank you. Take it away.
[00:36:27] Speaker B: Okay, well, I want to add a couple of things which is part of the, you know, Ross and I have our own little contra back and forth over things. I'm always pushing the boundary. So thank you for that detailed explanation. So everybody understands.
As a layperson, I think I'm a good in. In between because I try to learn enough and then dissect it and share it as a layperson can understand it. So the issue isn't cows per se, for the cow itself. It's just a cow. Right. They just do what cows do. It's the way the people manage the cows on the land. Right. So when people are against cows against over grazing, against this, against that for the cow, but it's not the cow. Right. It's how the cow is being managed in itself. Right. The only thing I will, you know, my little push and pull here about the horses are, you know, I think they process faster than cows and I think there are also little other components how the varying two mega herbivores, how they eat grass. Horses eat grass one way, cows eat grass another. Do cattle pull out more of the root of the grass when they're eating than to the horse? I mean, there are small details that are. Are to differentiate the two. Right. Horses have longer legs, they can travel a little differently. Ross and I have had conversation. They would succeed in varying locations that they could travel up a little higher elevations and planes. So, you know, cattle as much as in mat properly managed, could help grow grass as well. The horses have a different component to being able to grow grass with more diversity. I think from an outside perspective and a lay perspective, without getting into the detail of the minutia, there's more of an over. You know, they can survive in different kinds of terrain, you know, different kinds of temperatures. They're very hardy.
You know, we work with somebody that says they are the quintessential essential ice age mammal. I don't know if that's true or not true, you know, because they evolved from here. So, so, you know, they're. They're different, yet the same, yet, you know, less methane emissions. Right. I think that's the thing. Isn't that the thing? So it's, it's how the government manages our lands. So to circle back. We want to just give everyone a broad strokes, understanding and overview of permits and what's happening with Derangeland and how that works. Is that what we're doing? Okay?
[00:39:33] Speaker C: Yes, please.
[00:39:34] Speaker B: But I just think it's important that people understand because it's always cattle against horses. That's always what if you know nothing? That's the only thing you will know.
So we need to be clear on, you know, it's not cattle, it's the management of the cattle, right? And then the horses get in the way of the land. So basically, I mean, there are.
Oh my God, it's something like 600 and 600 million acres of public rangeland that belongs to the American people. Right. All over here. And this is why, you know, I think you talked about Europe briefly. You touched on people in Europe and rewilding. They don't understand this because they don't have. Europe doesn't have public land the way we do here in the States. Right. Most of the land used for rewilding were farms that were privately owned, that were abandoned or that they leased. Today we, the American people, own. We do. The public rangeland belongs to the public, and the government is tasked to manage it. So the Department of the Interior has an agency under it called the Bureau of Land Management, and upon the Taylor Grazing act that was created to manage the land because people, there was no management of the land prior to this. People were just using the land, right? It was just bathed bath land separate from the native reservations and it was being destroyed. So the government decided they should come and industrialize it. Right? Well, we'll manage it and then we'll make business out of it. Right. And money out of it. So it is now managed. And in 1971, when the government created the American Wild Horse and Burrow act, which said that horses can roam free here in the American west, they created herd management areas, specific locations in every state, all around the state that they determined could sustain 200 horses here, 100 head over here, 3, 300 over there. But they, they created that with the vastness of the land, right? The multitude of millions, hundreds of millions of acres that we have to maintain 25 or 26,000 horses in its entirety.
And they then said, okay, this land that the Bureau of Land Management manages is going to be used. We'll have it for multi use for the American people. Multi use means it can be used for cattle grazing, hard rock mining, fracking, drilling of fossil fuels. It can be used for recreation, for ATV riding around, and for hunting, for The American people to come and hunt. So with all of the multi use that the government has determined that this land can be used for, you can get leases.
If you are cattle rancher or you are a large corporation or the cattle lobby or the cattleman's association, you have first hand again getting all the leases to the land right in these varying states all across the western range.
And it was created back in a time where ranching was the way people ranching and farming and cattle was a mainstay here. And everybody ate meat, that was all we ate. And they invited people from Europe to come over and they came and they homesteaded. That's how homesteading began. And they said, you come over here, we'll give you some land to homestead and you can have a permit to some of this land and make business out of it and we'll build business here in the West. And that's how it all began.
And like everything in our government, it is owned by the lobbies, the cattlemen's association, the energy resource lobby.
All of these large lobbies control the land. And it's all created our system. Now for this is created to sustain the lobbying to sustain the lobbies. And how that works is that you have a lease and you have 10,000 acres.
And there is a formula that was created back in the 1800s, 19, early 1900s, that determines how much forage, how much grass or brush, depending on the location. Right. We have a project right now that is in a location that doesn't have grass as we know it, it has sage brush, which is what we consider that to be the same equivalent, right. As we think of in grass in the Dakotas, wouldn't you say, Ross? That kind of thing. There are different forages around.
So they determined how much forage a cow and her calf could eat a day.
And based on that formula from the early 1900s, they determined how many cattle calf pair can live on the land the land can hold or sustain.
But these formulas have never changed over all the years. They've not changed, but what has changed is the volume of use of the land, the volume of drilling, the volume of hard rock mining, the volume of cattle. Right. And industrial cattle lobby.
So and now cattle. And this was shown to me, I didn't know this until recently, cattle back when we first started all of this, they were smaller and they weighed less.
Today, with hormones and technology and a cow that was 400 pounds back in the late 1800s, 1900s, now today they're 800 to 1200 pounds based on breeding and hormones.
So a larger cow, of course, eats two and three times what the cows that the formula was created from back in the beginning eat eight. So really the system, it's the system of how everything is working here. It's just the system has never changed because it doesn't want to change. It wants to keep the lobbies happy. There are all kinds of farm subsidies, tax subsidies. Everything is geared to maintaining a ranching lifestyle, a ranching industry.
And these small mom and pop ranchers that the homesteading people came over, they are suffering, they are going out of business and have been for years and years and years. It's the large industrial lobbies that are have all the land, get all the tax benefits, get all the farm subsidies and are flourishing.
Most of the cattle that is ranched and farmed here in the American West. So much of it doesn't even feed the American people. It's exported, right? And the American people are paying, we pay our federal taxes to maintain these lands and nobody's getting any advantage of it, but these industrial lobbies.
So I say, and we here at RAND say, let us let the wild horses that belong to the American people and let's let the public rangeland that belonged to the American people work for all of the American people in their entirety.
Let us let those horses act as a mega herbivore the way Ross described them. Let us let them roam the American West. Let us let them help to sequester carbon, build grasslands of wherever location they are at. However, the grassland brush, land ecology references and build biodiversity, build other, bring other animals back, build the Forbes, the microorganisms, all the things that we need for a healthy landscape, which in turn becomes healthy lifestyle for the people.
It's a cycle and a system. I am not suggesting that we should not use our range for ranching and that cattle should not be an industry. I am suggesting, suggesting that we find a way to find some balance and let the American people benefit through carbon sequestration, through socioeconomic opportunities in locations where small mom and pop ranchers have gone out. We are out west all over and you see small communities, small communities that are left over that have become depopulated, locations that were once thriving, homesteaded areas because of the situation. Let us turn a key to a new day and a new time and use our public rangelands and the wild horses to our benefit, working alongside our cattle. But it's not all about cattle. It's not all about mining. It's not all about, it's for the money that these corporate lobbies work with the government and have control of our public rangelands.
It's unfortunate the way the circumstances have arised for this election.
The land now is at tremendous jeopardy. It's, I mean, fossil fuel and mining, I mean everything, all of the environmental work that was done over the last four years is in danger of being repealed. And this nice picture that I painted for us is now going to take. It's going to be harder and more fight to keep moving to use some of our public lands for that value.
But that is what our work is and that is what we fight for.
[00:51:08] Speaker A: So how do you do this then? How does one acquire, I'm assuming that's how you're going about this. How does one acquire one of these leases that are either owned, previously owned or can be acquired? The process of this, that was previously used for like ranging, you know, ranging livestock or whatever the use of it was before. How the, how do we. Then Iran gets it, American people acquires this lease to then put wild horses on it. What is that process and then how is the management after that?
[00:51:44] Speaker B: Well, first of all, the management after that is how you manage it, right? That's, that's your management of your permitted land. So right now I can share my experience. Experience because I have four grazing permits.
One is on land at the Forest Service and the other three are through the Bureau of Land Management. Right. These are the two government agencies, one of court. They're not connected in any way.
So the process is different for both agencies, yet relatively the same concept.
All the permits I was able, somebody wanted was willing, a permittee was willing to sell their permits. They didn't want to use their, didn't want to cattle graze anymore.
This family had homesteaded two, three generations and they were ready to move, move on. And they had, I don't think they had children to pass it down to who wanted to stay. And this too is an issue, right? A lot of younger people today don't want to stay in these rural communities and live that lifestyle any longer. They want to go to cities and technology. And I know this is also similar in Europe as well, I've heard. So I came along at the right time. I was able to purchase her permits from her. And I want to be clear, purchasing her permits does not guarantee you anything.
I now, she signed over her permits to me. So now I have four permits that are now in my name. I had four permits made out for cattle, but I now have to go to the local Bureau of Land Management office in this state and say I now own these. These permits are now in my name.
I would like to graze cattle. I would like to graze horses here. So if I want to just graze cattle, they have to approve me for that. And the likelihood of being approved for that is very high, where there would be no issue. And they would now start the clock. The clock of my permit ownership would start. You own your permits for about 10 years, and then they keep renewing over time.
I want to change the use to horses. Well, the permits allow you horses, cattle, sheep or bison.
Those are the four mega herbivores, the four animals that you can use on public land.
So now I said, well, I would like to convert my permit to horses.
So now I have to go through a very long process which most people do not I have to do. They require a rangeland health process and then what they call an ea, which is an environmental assessment. So this is a process that it takes a year where I have to hire a science team, a scientist or however that go to do research on the condition of my land, have to send out what they call a scoping packet, which is I have to ask the community, what is your feeling that I want? What is the community's feedback? I'm changing my permits from horses, from cattle to horses.
And the bureau is apprised and part of this process for the year. After about a year, when the process is completed, they will decide and determine. They'll say, okay, we're going to convert your permit, or we're not. And this comes the politics and the lobbying and, you know, do you need a lawyer? And you know, there I am within my rights. I have rights. Every permittee has rights to convert their permit as long as, you know, the range is in good health. And remember, though, all of the criteria for the range is based on data and statistics. That is only cows and cattle, and it's from hundreds of years ago.
So it is a dysfunctional system. It is not a fair and equal system. It has no current science connected to the system. And it is a system that is geared towards only cattle and sheep.
And in today's day and age, with these droughts. And I understand when Ross said, you know, the drought today may not be unique in and of itself, but I would ask Ross, this drought, but is it not the number of droughts that we are having consistently perhaps make it a little unique in its sense, the varying climate. I'm in the Northeast. We.
I mean, it's spring and summer here, eight months of the year, right? There's we Do. I mean, we don't have snow or winters the way we did. We don't have a fall. Isn't that true? We don't have fall. All of a sudden, it's just one day going to be winter. We're losing a season. Everything's evolving. And I understand there is the natural evolution of a planet, but my understanding through this climate breakdown is it's just sped up so much that we are. It's happening so much faster and we're losing so many more species at an accelerated rate. I mean, Ross will speak to that, but.
So it is a complicated system because of the horse. And it is complicated because it is really just a political thing that people don't want to see horses on the range and that they round up all these horses on our public rangelands in locations just to make room to give more leases to cattle ranching and more leases to drilling and mining. And all of that, though it's not the horses creating the degradation on the land as the government would like you to think. It is them.
It is them and the initiatives that they support through these lobbies, these political lobbies that is destroying your land. It is not the cows specific. It is not the horses.
It is the government.
[00:59:10] Speaker C: I'd like to give a concrete example for everybody because it's something that is literally come up this year thanks to the presidential election and how that took place.
Nevada has more horse management areas than any other state. Many more. Well over 80. It has something like 16 million acres that are devoted to horse management areas, which sounds like a lot, right?
But this is the Great Basin.
This is the Upper Sonoran Desert.
It is not a lush kind of place at all. And in fact, the reason why there are so many horse management areas there is because clearly this was a good place to dump wanted back when the HMAs were being.
[01:00:01] Speaker B: Because then they would fail. They would fail. They would fail.
[01:00:04] Speaker C: And that is what we have now. Here's my point.
Lithium has suddenly become the mineral that everybody's interested in because you can make batteries with it. Lithium is rare, but there are places where it occurs.
One of them is in Nevada.
And there is no question in my mind to go back to Amanda's point about mining, there is no question in my mind that a certain owner of an electric vehicle company is very keen to make sure that the existing usage for public lands in Nevada gets radically changed so that open cast mining for lithium takes over. Now, why is that a big problem? It's because lithium is rare, which means that you have to Haul out an enormous quantity of material to go after the substance that you're actually interested in. There's several ways of doing that. They all involve a great deal of water.
Again, we're talking about the Great Basin, which has none.
Now, is this what we want? It's not just the mining. It's sort of the aftermath of the mining. Because what happens with these techniques is that you extract the lithium in the form of salts, but the only salt you're interested in is one that has lithium in it. The rest are just left on the landscape. So you've already got a landscape where very little grows, and now you're killing it further with the tailings from the lithium extraction industry.
That kind of issue can be replicated in many different ways on many different subjects. But it boils down to exactly what Amanda was underlining, that the game is tilted. It's not fair use. It's not any kind of use except for those who can get up to the table and make their demands and have them listened to. And where it makes a difference is ultimately for the condition of the lands over time.
If we reopen western lands to extractive mining on this kind of scale, then future generations are going to pay for it in the sense that those lands will be desecrated, they will not be productive, they will not be anything other than the moonscapes that we have left over.
And that we shouldn't permit. That we just really should not permit. I'm not against, obviously I'm not against the idea that you need, you need to provide for economic interest. Those are jobs, for example.
But you have to do it on a scale and in places where you're not making these disastrous trade offs to just get what you want now, you don't really care what happens thereafter. That's the, the fundamental problem.
[01:03:11] Speaker B: Ross, thank you for doing that and saying that. And Ross is always so much more politically correct than I. But yes, Elon Musk is going. They, you know, his lithium interests along with the new administration and everything else. I think the American people need to see what it looks like when mining comes to town. You need to see the tens of thousands of acres that are decimated. The size of the crater, the moon crater size, location that they dig, where all the chemicalized waters backflow flow into that they need to blast through the rocks.
How the horses are removed from these locations for the mining, primarily because they don't want them around. When the trucks, they've made roads for trucks, the trucks come and go. It's simply because it's a nuisance to have them. Should one be crossing one of the roads that they've built, they have to put nets on top of the backwash of the carcinogen water that they've created because animals come to drink and they're all dying. We didn't even discuss the hundreds of millions of animals on the public rangelands that die every year simply because Wildlife Services, which is a government agency, a secretive government agency that most people don't know about, come and kill hundreds of millions of animals every year. From birds to wolves to mountain lions to bears to anything that is an impediment to the permittee for whatever they're doing, whether it be ranching or farming, there is literally going to be no wildlife left.
From Rand's perspective, reappropriating funding to help support. Don't use the 120 million to round up these horses and keep them in holding facilities. Let them work for the American taxpayer. Put them on these lands and through their physiological function as a mega herbivore, let them help create some rangeland, grasses, brush, whichever it be, which will bring birds, insects and the whole process back to help balance out what we're losing and what we won't ever have again before it's all gone and along with it, our health. And we will have a new way of life that will be fake and not natural and fighting off pandemics and diseases and everything else because the balance of nature and this planet is gone.
[01:06:25] Speaker A: Yeah. I love that you. Well, I don't know. Love isn't the right term, but I appreciate you bringing up the mining issue because this is something I haven't talked at depth on this show about. I've had mining episodes on, but I will be fully honest, I'm not fully on board with electric cars and that's probably like a demonic thing to say in this and doing what? It, it's. It's the mining. It's. It's mining.
And like, I, I feel.
I also think this also might be something that might get me in trouble. But we can't have our cake and eat it too. Like, I understand there's so many green initiatives that are going on right now to try to help climate change, and they're all on these different umbrellas. It's all good for the planet. If we do this every. We have to get completely away from fossil fuels. And it's like, well, let's think about this. I understand why you're saying that, but at the same time, what is the alternative? The alternative. Alternative is mining in precious landscapes around the world to get very rare minerals that are going to then make our, and produce our cars like for these electric cars and all other, all kinds of stuff too. Is that the most efficient way to go about this? Is that the most efficient way to attack climate change? I don't know. You know, so I'm not, I'm not fully on board with like everything going electric and then all of these big pendulum swings one way or the other and it's like, well, I talked to so many people on the ground that have seen mining. I had an incredible guest on not too long ago that it's now finding the Johnson Track mine in Lake Clark National Park. And it's, you know, that's the exact same thing. It's like so all how much give and take can we have in this? What, what is the big thing that we need to put our head on hat on. I personally hate the destruction of our lands. I hate that what it's happening to our biodiversity. But I also understand that if some of these initiatives are going to be reached, that is what's going to have to happen. So what is the give or take look what. And I think that's where science comes in. Good science that hopefully isn't corrupted by different lobbyists, by different agendas one way or the other.
[01:08:45] Speaker B: That's not happening in this country in anytime soon. To your point Brooke, we are still spending billions of tax paying dollars on some fancy machine that's going to suck the carbon out of the air and put it into a metal tank that's in the ground.
And the BLM on the website you can find that they passed a bill, of course all of this is going to be completely gone right in a few months that if you're a permittee and you want to be part of the Climate act, you can lease your land to having some container in it that they're going to suck the carbon out of the air and store it in the tank in the ground. And it's billions of tax paying dollars to do this. We as people are so dumb. Grow grass. It is not complicated. You know, we're so busy reinventing the wheel all the time for some financial opportunity or gain.
Just let us grow some grass. Let nature fix itself as it can. Let the horses be free, let them eat the grass, let them pass the manure to the other side, let them fertilize and bring nourishments. Let the natural process occur. Predation to help manage some of these herds. Right there's a Whole environmental system around that, around death.
Just if we just stayed out of it, we would be fine.
[01:10:34] Speaker A: So then going back to the current state of this project and moving forward, what is the future of turning these permits into horse range permits and then hopefully, maybe even extending it to where these, like, greater herd areas of wild horses acting like wild horses to sequester carbon and rehabilitate the land. So where is that now? And what is the long term goal of it? And do you guys have a goal of when you might be able to reach those?
[01:11:04] Speaker B: So the focus is to take our permits. And we are in the process. We are working our way through the process, right? We. Our Forest Service permit is now for wild horses. And we're working through the process with the Bureau of Land Management to accommodate the process. Process, right, the way the government expects us to, while we are carefully being monitored to make sure that, you know, we receive equal treatment, right, as any permittee. And the hope is that we will, in the next year, receive our permits converted from cattle to horses for horse use. And then we will be releasing our allotted number of horses on our permits. Right, which will total about 70,000 grazing acres.
And the way we have set the system up based on where the permits the land is, it can mimic migratory patterns. One of the permits is high up. So that is more of a warm weather, summer kind of, you know, animals traverse in different locations, and then they come down to lower elevations in the winter and the cold because it's not as windy. And there's usually more forage, for all the reasons Ross could explain to you. But so our permits help us to mimic some migratory patterns. So we are very excited and looking forward to, hopefully within the year, being able. Able to start the process, all the science that we will, and the data will be able to monitor and watch and see and how many animals come back to the range. What kinds of other forage will present itself from the horses grazing in a different capacity than the cattle that had been there. That land had only been grazed by sheep and cattle for 100 years. So we are so excited to see what surprises lay waiting for us underneath the soil that will remember.
We have a native friend, and he said something once, and I think it stuck with all of us.
The grass remembers the horse.
So back to Ross's original story of the horse evolution from, you know, North America. The grass here remembers the horse. And so we are excited to see and collect the data and the study and have our work be a model and a blueprint, whether it be for this Administration, or whichever administration moving forward, and any other people and science and get people motivated to in a movement to save land. The horses. We're not just saving the horses. We are saving our land from degradation.
And all the animals, imagine the wolves are in terrible jeopardy and all the other animals that wildlife service and every other lobby fights to eradicate, they will be able to survive on our lands. We will be a refugia, a refuge, a rewilding refugia.
So we are looking forward to being that example and just working together with the government and showing the American people why horses have value other than what we know. They're pretty, we ride them, but they are key component. You know, we always say over here, we are people saving horses, horses saving humanity.
[01:15:11] Speaker C: I want to underline one of the things that Amanda just brought up, which is about the science. That's my end of the stick, as it were.
And we have science collaborators. We're adding to the number of people who are able to contribute in that regard, because within the next five years, I want to be able to demonstrate the following that we have, how we have started out.
Measurements of the amount of plant cover species indices, the amount of moisture that's collected in the soil. All of these kinds of factors are critically important, not just because they're important for that patch, but to show that over time, with the proper management, they can be increased, their value can be increased so that there's more cover, more species, better entrapment of water in these arid areas. All of these kinds of things that are desperately important to convince people that there are natural mechanisms that we can utilize to change things. It doesn't all have to be synthetics and fertilizers and so on. To try and suck out as much value as you can from the land, you have to observe and recognize how it takes care of itself and amplify those processes to the degree possible. So over time, what we're looking for is to have a network of rangeland scientists who are collaborating with us, doing their own kinds of studies, not just what we're specifically interested in, but doing their own kinds of studies to show that there's ways of dealing with the environment that we've inherited to make it not like it was in the Pleistocene. That's not the point of this. It's to make it as robust to the challenges that it's now facing and will continue to face for the next century or more in ways that ordinary people doing ordinary things can understand and appreciate and adapt.
[01:17:21] Speaker A: Beautiful. I'm so motivated and excited by both of your project. This project, like so just as a little bit of backstory, how I even heard about this was at a global Rewilding alliance meeting and Ross raised his hand and said that we are hopefully going to be releasing the first wild horses onto public lands. And then I know after that a whole you guys ran into a whole bunch of things after that that pushed things back and just it seems that you're running in a challenge after challenge but somebody has to be the first person you know. Like it's unfortunately or fortunately, however way you want to look at it, it's you all that are taking on this massive idea of rewilding America's rangelands. And it takes a while for movements to get any traction. But the first time I heard this I freaked out. I legit freaked out. I was like, what is this project? Hi Ross, can we please chat? I need to learn more about this project and so I am so appreciative of both of your guys work and I hope I probably don't get told that enough. But keep doing what you're doing and if anybody listening would like to learn more about what you're doing, how to follow, stay up to date if they want to contribute in any way. What are some of the best ways that people can follow Rewilding America now and maybe contact either of you or one of you if they want more.
[01:18:47] Speaker B: The website, right? RewildingAmericanow.org you can always reach us at info@
[email protected] and we welcome questions and suggestions and we have a whole social media platform. Check out our tick tocks. I have to say I've recruited have some young people now doing our videos.
[01:19:16] Speaker A: Because I had a. I could talk to you forever. We didn't even get to half my questions, by the way. That is awesome. So that means we'll just have to do a part two in the future or maybe even come out and do some episodes from the field. So yes. But thank you both. Thank you, Ross. Thank you, Amanda. Thank you for what you're doing, this big task that you're tackling and for taking the time to sit down with me and celebrate what we have here, our beautiful country, our beautiful lands and what we have, our rights as American people.
So thank you for taking this on because it takes strong people to be the first and you're the first. So thanks again for all that you.
[01:19:56] Speaker C: Do and thank you Brooke for having us on your very impressive podcast series. It really means a lot to us to be able to talk to people like you and have you broadcast our truth?
[01:20:10] Speaker A: Absolutely.
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