RUNNING WILD

Page dence over all other species, then you’re going to have some major problems.”

The Arizona Deer Association spends tens of thousands of dollars a year installing watering systems to aid wildlife, but Koleszar said horses soon take them over.

Koleszar co-hosts a weekly Phoenix radio show for hunters and anglers. At times, he has used it to pitch a potentially inflammatory solution that he thinks could improve the land and eliminate millions of dollars in taxpayer costs that pile up when the government rounds up and holds horses indefinitely.

He suggests exporting wild-horse meat to Europe and putting the proceeds into land restoration.

“It’s an incredible protein asset,” Koleszar said. “While we find it appalling to eat horse meat, other countries consider it a delicacy.”

To prove it, he brought a $15 tin of imported German horse meat to the station one Sunday morning last summer and cracked it open on air. He ate it with Wheat Thins and smoked provolone slices.

“It looks an awful lot like Spam,” he said.

“It’s pretty good. tastes like meatloaf.”

Predators and hunters don’t keep horse numbers in check the way they do with deer, he told listeners. Overseas markets could, if the government would allow it. It

The Salt River horses

The Salt River band lives a long day’s saunter southwest of the Hebers.

Last summer, Tice Supplee of Audubon Arizona strode between the mesquites overlooking the Salt River on the eastern edge of metro Phoenix, unhindered in a sparsely forested plain where horse manure had replaced tall grass and shrubs. Supplee’s hunch is that cattle first nibbled the native plants to the ground, but horses are now keeping them down.

It’s a problem because riverside thickets, rare in the arid Southwest, are crucial for migrant species of songbirds such as the endangered Southwest willow flycatcher or yellow-billed cuckoo.

The river needs all the help Arizona can muster to return it to a birdfriendly stretch of native willows and cottonwoods.

Supplee likes horses — she’s an owner herself — but fears permanent, free-roaming residence in and around the river will strip away other life and even leave the horses vulnerable to starvation. bottoms seasonally they’re not here 24/7.”

In 2015, Tonto National Forest officials wanted to round up a band of about 100 horses that frequent the river. They announced their intentions based primarily on the safety hazard the animals posed to highway motorists, though some wildlife advocates applauded because they said the horses were mowing down critical bird habitat.

Thousands more horse backers objected online. Dozens took their protest to the state Capitol. Much of Arizona’s congressional delegation wrote to the Forest Service, asking why it wasn’t instead working with Arizonans to produce a herd management plan.

The agency isn’t required to write such a plan, because these horses and this herd zone weren’t enshrined in the 1971 federal act protecting wild horses.

accounts, that’s because most of them likely were released from farms or simply wandered into the area long after that legislation.

Horse advocate Simone Netherlands and her Salt River Wild Horse Management Group argue forcefully that the horses belong. They contend the horses improve habitat by fertilizing the soil.

“These wild horses have been here for centuries,” she insisted, “and this is the most abundant habitat all along the Salt River.”

The outcry worked. The Salt River horses remain. so

‘A national treasure’

Robert Hutchison’s proclamation that “we own the forest” echoes doctrine oft-repeated by horse lovers across the West.

The horses, they say, are a national treasure that would get along fine if not for some “greedy” ranchers leasing federal grazing lands. That’s why Congress adopted the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Protection Act of 1971, he said.

The Heber Herd, unlike the desert-dwelling Salt River Herd east of Mesa, run in and around a zone of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests that Congress intended for horses. They’re officially protected, but also subject to the agency’s management. It’s not always clear, at least to the Forest Service, how many deserve to roam.

The herd has drawn scrutiny as it grew to about 400 after the mas-