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Q: What is a freeze mark?A: The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) uses freeze marking to identify captured wild horses and burros. Freeze marking is a permanent and unalterable way to identify each horse and burro as an individual. It is applied on the left side of the neck and follows the International Alpha Angle System, which uses a series of angles and alpha symbols. Freeze marks contain the Registering Organization (U.S. Government), year of birth, and registration number. The technique is said to be painless to the animal. First, the left side of the neck is shaved and washed with alcohol, then the mark is applied with an iron chilled in liquid nitrogen. The hair at the site of the mark grows back white to show the mark.
Q: Why are wild horses and burros being taken off the range?The official answers have all been shown to be either factually incorrect or due to problems caused by poor management on the part of the federal agencies (Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service) that were charged with managing these animals on the range. These include concerns about the animals starving or dying of thirst due to lack of wild forage or available water. However, when this is the case, it has been shown that this is either due to competition from private or corporate ranchers grazing their livestock on the same rangelands that were allocated for the protection of wild horses and burros under the Wild Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971, or to these animals being pushed into a smaller and smaller fraction of that land. In the last 50 years, around 80% of the habitat that was originally designated for their natural habitat has been leased off to extractive industries, including livestock grazing, oil and natural gas (fracking) projects, and copper, gold, and lithium mining. Cattle currently outnumber wild horses and burros on the range by 125:1. In addition, many other factors impact rangeland health that are rarely mentioned by these, and other federal agencies, including off road vehicles, climate change caused drought, the spread of invasive species, and wildfire, all of which could be mitigated by the presence of the wild horses and burros in their native lands, being both ecosystem engineers and a keystone species.
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Q: What is a wild horse/mustang or burro?A: Wild horses/mustangs or burros, as defined by federal law, are wild free-roaming horses or burros found on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or U.S. Forest Service (USFS) administered public rangelands in the western United States. They are mostly considered to be descendants of animals released by or escaped from Spanish explorers, ranchers, miners, or the U.S. Cavalry, though new evidence suggests that horses were here long before the Spanish. Wild horses and burros are generally officially referred to as feral, rather than wild, but there is contention around this also as equids are indigenous to the Americas and the modern horse is now known to be a direct descendant of Equus Caballus, the most recent genus of the Equus species. Read more on our page Native Species. Wild free roaming donkeys are generally called burros, which is simply the Spanish name for donkey.
Q: What is regenerative agriculture?Regenerative agriculture is a land management philosophy that has its roots in indigenous and native ways of living on and with the land. Its main focus is on implementing practices that are designed to improve soil health by reversing degradation and building up the soil microbiome. Regenerative agriculture strives to work with nature rather than against it and is more than just being sustainable. It does not have a specific or rigid set of practices but is more of a mindset or philosophy around working regeneratively. To be successful, regenerative land management practices must be adaptive to each unique operation and area of land being managed. Regenerative agricultural practices are in complete contrast to the extractive approach of modern industrial agriculture. Although regenerative agriculture doesn’t have a specific recipe, many regenerative farmers and ranchers adopt some or all of the following practices: Planting crops using no-till, to minimize disturbance to the soil Incorporating cover crops and other diverse mixtures of forage species into monoculture crops and perennial introduced grasses Decreasing the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides Using adaptive multi-paddock grazing (AMP, or adaptive grazing) by moving pastured animals (sheep, goats, turkeys, bison, cows, horses, donkeys, pigs) through smaller sections of the overall land and allowing grazed land adequate rest and recovery. While they may not have always called it “regenerative agriculture,” people have been practicing this type of management for centuries. In fact, regenerative agriculture asks agricultural producers to manage the land in a way that more closely mimics nature. Why? Nature already provides the necessary foundations (soil, water and sunshine) for agriculture. We just need to understand how to work with nature to maximize ecosystem processes.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
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