These aren’t good times for horses

The other day some of us laughed and joked around and used ‘horse talk’ as we issued political commentary. It was all in good fun at least if you weren’t the recipient of some of the jabbing and poking.  Horses, these days, really aren’t a laughing matter.  All over the west and midwest horses are in great peril because of the drought.

People can no longer afford to keep horses if the drought has reduced their income.  Many horses have simply been turned loose to forage on the open  range for food.  Horses are dying of starvation and thirst.

According to the New York Times:

Forage “has shriveled and died on the range,” Kimberly Johnson, the acting supervisor of the tribe’s grazing management program, said from the headquarters of the Navajo Nation’s agriculture department in Window Rock, Ariz., near the New Mexico border. Ms. Johnson said that only 30 percent of the tribe’s livestock owners care for their animals on a daily basis, based on an informal survey this year.

So the horses have been searching for water wherever they can: in mills and troughs meant to supply the families that live around them, as well as the animals they own, and in lakes the drought has turned into puddles.

Stallions fight one another for food and water, their bites drawing flesh and blood. Atop a mesa near Many Farms, Ariz., in the heart of Navajo territory, horses were stomping the ground one recent afternoon, as if trying to draw water from a pond that is now just cracked dirt. Tribal rangers said carcasses dot the arid landscape.

Navajo Territory is certainly not the only place horses are dying.  We have been fairly protected from drought here in the east.

And still the drought rages on. The most recent federal assessment is that parts of at least 33 states, mostly in the West and the Midwest, are experiencing drought conditions that are severe or worse. It is affecting 87 percent of the land dedicated to growing corn, 63 percent of the land for hay and 72 percent of the land used for cattle.

With water tables falling, fields are crusting and cracking, creeks are running dry. Water holes first shrink, then vanish altogether. And dozens of wildfires are consuming forests and grassland across the West.

Once the summer bounty goes away, we will feel the impact of the suffering that west and midwest has faced.  We will especially feel it at the grocery store.  But meanwhile, those sad parts of drought that we are protected from seeing here on the east coast are very much alive in the west.  I have this eerie feeling of the dust bowl and Grapes of Wrath as I wind down this post.  Have we been here before?  Does financial crash always lead to drought and famine?

Many rescue societies are mentioned in the article entitled “Horses Fall Victim to Hard Times and Dry Times on the Range” in the New York Times if you choose to contribute to the plight of these animals.  A bale of hay feeds a horse for 3 days.  Now a bale costs  $8- $12 and is approximately 60 pounds of food.  That’s a pretty hefty price to pay if you yourself are out of work and have fallen on hard times, like many have in drought-ridden localities.

There are roughly 180,000 feral or displaced horses in the United States at present, according to the Unwanted Horse Coalition in Washington DC.  My question now becomes, do I donate there or to one of the more local horse rescue groups in the west.  I worry that my donation would go for administrative costs if I donate to the Unwanted Horse Coalition and that nary a horse would see my meager pittance.  Hopefully the New York Times article will give these organizations a bump to help them through the last of the heat spell.