How And Why To Make Your Voice Heard On Whether Wild Horses Belong In Theodore Roosevelt National Park
In the course of his adventures at the Elkhorn Ranch, Teddy Roosevelt wrote of seeing wild horses.
In 1884, a 25-year-old Theodore Roosevelt marked a dark X in his diary and wrote the words, “The light has gone out of my life.” His mother, and his young wife, had just died hours apart.
Roosevelt went west. In the Dakota Territory he rode, he hunted, and he chased outlaws. Roosevelt gradually earned the respect of the other cowboys and ranchers who’d all been initially suspicious of this bespectacled gentleman from the East.
Roosevelt trampled his grief under so many hooves. He built his body, healed his mind, and came to love the diverse cast of characters who populated America’s rapidly shrinking frontier. In the course of his adventures at the Elkhorn Ranch, Roosevelt wrote of seeing wild horses.
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Today, the descendants of those horses still roam what has become Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota. According to some park officials, who brand the wild horses as “livestock,” this is a problem.
Now, it’s true that every horse roaming free in North America today is descended from Eurasian stock. Nonetheless, I have a bone to pick with brushing aside North America’s proudly self-sustaining free horse herds as merely another invasive species.
Horses are native to North America. As a matter of fact, the very first members of the horse family tree originally evolved in North America.
It was only about 10,000 years ago when North America was sterilized of its native equine occupants. While we do not know definitively why horses went extinct in North America, they departed along with many other examples of charismatic megafauna as part of a quadruped apocalypse that suspiciously coincided with the first expansion of terrifyingly efficient human hunters across the continent. North American game at the end of the Pleistocene had not lived long enough with humans to develop a healthy fear of them.
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So, just to make sure we are getting this straight, horses sprang into existence right here in North America. Then, after millions of years in residence, they went away for barely a blip on the geological time scale, probably because we killed them. We brought horses back quickly enough to ensure future geologists will not even be able to discern their absence in the fossil record, accidentally set a few of them free to wander the plains as they were always meant to, and now might be getting rid of them again from one of the few wild places we’ve bothered to adequately protect.
The National Park Service released a draft environmental assessment that said removal of the wild horses from Theodore Roosevelt National Park would benefit “native” wildlife and vegetation but could lessen the experience of park visitors. First of all, what vegetation? I was in Theodore Roosevelt National Park a month ago, and they’re called the Badlands for a reason: any grazer that can eke out a year-round living in that landscape deserves its own national holiday. Second, what a hubristic, anthropocentric line of hogwash to portray horses as invaders edging out more deserving lifeforms in a park where fossilized horse bones rest inches beneath the topsoil.
A 30-day public comment period on whether the wild horses should be removed from Theodore Roosevelt National Park ends on October 25. In the past, the public has been overwhelmingly supportive of leaving the wild horses be.
Of course, they don’t make it really easy to find where you go to actually submit a comment yourself, but I will. If you want to submit a comment on this issue, click this link, then click the green button on the left labeled “Comment Now” and follow the onscreen instructions.
I do encourage you to submit a comment yourself. It doesn’t matter if you live anywhere near Theodore Roosevelt National Park, it doesn’t matter if you have plans to visit anytime in the near future: these are our parks, these are our horses, and this is part of the American legacy Theodore Roosevelt sought to preserve when he vastly expanded our National Park System. Every American, north, south, east, and west, deserves to have a voice in this process.
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If you’ve gotten this far in this article, it’s probably not a mystery how I’m going to comment. I think it’s what Theodore Roosevelt would have wanted.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
