Wild Horse Mesa is a 1925 American silent Western film directed by George B. Seitz and starring Jack Holt, Noah Beery Sr., Billie Dove, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.[1][2] Based on the novel Wild Horse Mesa by Zane Grey, the film is about a rancher who, desperate for money, decides to trap and sell wild horses using barbed wire. The local Navajo tribe tries to persuade him not to do it. The film was produced by Famous Players-Lasky and released by Paramount Pictures. Wild Horse Mesa was filmed on location in Colorado. Prints of the film have survived.[3][4]
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The BLM offers wild horses and burros for adoption or purchase at events across the country throughout the year. The most current adoption and sale event schedule is provided below. All times are in local time and subject to change without notice. Please contact the National Information Center or the relevant BLM office for more information about a specific event.
Wild horses have roamed the banks of the lower Salt River since long before the Tonto National Forest was created in 1902. It is thought that these wild horses have descended from a herd brought to the area by a Spanish missionary in the 1600's.
In 2015 the United States Forest Service had put out a notice of intent to remove all free-range horses from the area. This notice provoked strong public outrage that resulted in thousands of people and businesses speaking out in protest over the removal of the horses. Even Arizona's elected officials in Congress and the House or Representatives wrote letters to the USFS in an effort to protect the horses. As a result the Salt River Horse Act was put into place to protect the horses for future generations to come. Today the horses are managed by the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group and can be seen roaming freely along the river.
The Salt River wild horses are often seen roaming freely through the mesquite trees and in the river near Coon Bluff. This is a popular river access point along the lower Salt River at the end of Coon Bluff Road. A Tonto Pass or America The Beautiful Pass is required for parking.
On a Friday afternoon, in a dusty desert area known as Coon Bluff, students hiked through a maze of mesquite trees to the Lower Salt River in Mesa, Arizona. There, in the distance, was a group of wild horses.
She said the outings give students a chance to observe the behavior of wild horses, understand fertility plans that are in place and by the end of the day hopefully gain more clarity about their career path.
Over the years, without adequate numbers of large predators such as mountain lions or wolves, the wild horse population has rapidly grown, doubling over each five-year period. And the fenced-in area has limited the space available for more horses.
Historically, the perceived overabundance of wild horses was handled with major roundups that caused concern and conflict over the fate of the animals. In 2016, the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group helped establish the Salt River Wild Horse Act, which states that the horses that are part of the Salt River horse herd are not livestock and are protected by law.
You can experience these wild horses thanks to Congress passing the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act in 1971, a program initially designed to protect wild horses from being taken for commercial purposes that today works to preserve and manage these same herds.
Legend has it that the free-roaming horses here are descendants of a herd brought to the area a century ago by a rancher from Montana who hoped to sell them. When the locals discovered he had actually stolen the horses, he fled town and the ranchers of the area took over his herd.
The landscape here is also worth a visit, with hilly terrain, rugged mountain scenery, and pinyon-juniper woodland on the slopes and higher elevations. The herd management area itself is 21,932 acres, making it the smallest on our list but still plenty spacious enough for the wild horses to roam freely.
In the Piceance-East Douglas HMA, located in northwest Colorado to the southwest of the town of Meeker, you can see many horses that are similar to quarter horses in size and behavior. The wild horses here are also a range of colors and patterns, including bay, gray, black, and sorrel.
While viewing wild horses is an incredible adventure, you can also experience horses and nature in a different way on a horseback ride. Download the Grand Junction Visitors Guide and check out page 6 for horseback riding adventures!
In the eastern hemisphere, on the European, Asian, and African continents, wild horses, or Equus ferus, and their counterparts, wild asses such as Equus africanus, continued to thrive on arid grassy plains despite significant pressure from human hunters. Between the fourth and the second millennium BCE, most equine anthropologists and historians think that humans domesticated the wild horse and its smaller counterpart, the wild ass on the Eurasian steppes.
The domestic horse, Equus ferus caballus, and the domesticated wild ass or donkey, Equus africanus asinus, transformed human mobility (3). For several millennia, humans bred and distributed domestic horses and donkeys widely across Europe, Asia, and North African.
Spanish horses and burros populated the western half of North America in the seventeenth century as Spanish conquistadores made their way north from Tenochtitlán into the arid reaches of the North American deserts. American settlers came to call the horses running wild in the region mustangs, derived from the Spanish term mesteño. Throughout their expansion, the Spanish conquerors captured and enslaved Indigenous peoples and taught them European equine traditions. Later European colonists from France, England, and elsewhere also brought horses to the colonies on the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts, bringing similar traditions (5).
In Colorado, wild horse herds on the Western Slope that had begun with Núuchiu(Ute) horses, evolved as additional horses from American settlers, many with pedigreed European bloodlines, populated the herds.
The government began limiting the number of ranchers who could use public rangelands and the number of livestock allowed on the range, and started charging ranchers for the use of grazing resources on public lands in an effort to reduce overuse (20). Wild horses and burros competed with privately-owned livestock for the same grazing resources. This competition had always been there, but it mattered less when grazing on public rangelands was free (21).
The second change was the emergence of the pet food industry. During the agricultural depressions that followed both world wars, ranchers let many horses they could not feed loose onto public rangelands. Mustangers found ample opportunity rounding up wild horses and burros and selling them not only for meat for human consumption, which was desperately needed during these economic crises, but also to pet food processors. The new pet food industry organized around suburban middle-class American families who owned dogs and cats. Rather than feed them messy table scraps, these pet owners bought tidy, easily stored canned and dried pet food made from horse meat. This industry created huge demand for cheap meat (22).
The final change was the use of mechanized vehicles and aircraft in rounding up wild horses and burros. Trucks and airplanes made spotting and moving wild horses and burros much faster and less dangerous for mustangers chasing them at full speed on horseback. However, the speed at which trucks and airplanes pursued wild horses and burros caused panic in the animals and often led to fatal injuries. The increased efficiency these new technologies brought to roundups meant more and more wild horses and burros were going to slaughterhouses. By the 1950s, it seemed to many Americans that wild horses and burros might disappear from public lands (23).
She helped create the first wild horse protection law in Nevada in 1955, pushed for a national ban on mechanized roundups in 1959, and helped secure federal protection for wild horses and burros in 1971 with the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act (24)
Since 1971, the BLM, and to a lesser degree the Forest Service, have assumed responsibility for the management of wild horses and burros on federal lands. Likewise, Indigenous tribal governments oversee protections of these animals on their sovereign lands, though most Indigenous groups do not treat them as animals to be managed but rather as relatives who can manage themselves (25). Subsequent federal laws have added further protective measures and prescribed how federal agencies manage wild horses and burros. In 1976, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) permitted the use of helicopters, which move slower than airplanes but are more efficient than ground vehicles in gathering wild horses and burros. The Public Rangelands Improvement Act (PRIA) of 1978 required the BLM to inventory and improve rangeland resources for all the animals that rely on them, including wildlife, livestock, and wild horses and burros, and allowed for the removal of wild horse and burro populations that the BLM deemed to be more than what those resources can support. In addition, several court cases have ensured that the federal government can regulate and protect wild horses and burros and that wild horses and burros cannot be sold to meat packing houses for slaughter and use in the pet food industry. Similarly, tribal governments determine the parameters of management practices towards wild horses and burros on the lands they oversee (26).
In Colorado, the BLM manages wild horses at Spring Creek Basin, Sand Wash Basin, and Piceance-East Douglas herd management areas and the Little Book Cliffs Wild Horse Range herd management area. The agency often works with volunteer groups such as the Friends of the Mustang in Grand Junction and the Piceance Mustangs group in Meeker to help with this management (27). 2ff7e9595c
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