Dates and details as Ohio’s hunting seasons for squirrel and some birds set to begin
Reply
Bear Baiting
With dove season right around the corner, don’t forget to get your new licenses
Wild horses that roam Theodore Roosevelt National Park may be removed. Many oppose the plan
The National Park Service has proposed removing wild horses from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota, as the park looks to revise its livestock plans
- By JACK DURA – Associated Press
- Aug 26, 2023 Updated Aug 26, 2023
- https://www.kentuckytoday.com/news/national/beloved-wild-horses-that-roam-theodore-roosevelt-national-park-may-be-removed-many-oppose-the/article_0cac2a63-fab5-5994-8389-1580a3957124.html
1 of 3
Wild horses graze on a hillside by the boundary fence of Theodore Roosevelt National Park near Medora, N.D., on Saturday, May 20, 2023. About 200 horses roam the park’s South Unit. The National Park Service has proposed removing the horses. The horses are popular with park visitors, and have found allies such as Gov. Doug Burgum and U.S. Sen. John Hoeven, who oppose their removal.
- Jack Dura – staff, ASSOCIATED PRESS
A wild horse stands near Peaceful Valley Ranch in Theodore Roosevelt National Park near Medora, N.D., on Saturday, May 20, 2023. About 200 horses roam the park’s South Unit. The National Park Service has proposed removing the horses. The horses are popular with park visitors, and have found allies such as Gov. Doug Burgum and U.S. Sen. John Hoeven, who oppose their removal.
- Jack Dura – staff, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Chris, left, and Gary Kman, of Chasing Horses Wild Horse Advocates, stand in Centennial Grove on the North Dakota Capitol Grounds in Bismarck, N.D., on Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023. Chris Kman is president of the advocacy group that is seeking to preserve genetically viable wild horses in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota. The National Park Service has proposed removing the park’s wild horses. The park has about 200 free-roaming horses.
- Jack Dura – staff, ASSOCIATED PRESS
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — The beloved wild horses that roam freely in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park could be removed under a National Park Service proposal that worries advocates who say the horses are a cultural link to the past.
Visitors who drive the scenic park road can often see bands of horses, a symbol of the West and sight that delights tourists. Advocates want to see the horses continue to roam the Badlands, and disagree with park officials who have branded the horses as “livestock.”
The Park Service is revising its livestock plans and writing an environmental assessment to examine the impacts of taking no new action — or to remove the horses altogether.
Removal would entail capturing horses and giving some of them first to tribes, and later auctioning the animals or giving them to other entities. Another approach would include techniques to prevent future reproduction and would allow those horses to live out the rest of their lives in the park.
The horses have allies in government leaders and advocacy groups. One advocate says the horses’ popularity won’t stop park officials from removing them from the landscape of North Dakota’s top tourist attraction.
“At the end of the day, that’s our national park paid for by our tax dollars, and those are our horses. We have a right to say what happens in our park and to the animals that live there,” Chasing Horses Wild Horse Advocates President Chris Kman told The Associated Press.
Last year, Park Superintendent Angie Richman told The Bismarck Tribune that the park has no law or requirement for the horses to be in the park. Regardless of what decision is ultimately made, the park will have to reduce its roughly 200 horses to 35-60 animals under a 1978 environmental assessment’s population objective, she previously said.
Kman said she would like the park “to use science” to “properly manage the horses,” including a minimum of 150-200 reproductive horses for genetic viability. Impacts of the park’s use of a contraceptive on mares are unclear, she added.
Ousting the horse population “would have a detrimental impact on the park as an ecosystem,” Kman said. The horses are a historical fixture, while the park reintroduced bison and elk, she said.
A couple bands of wild horses were accidentally fenced into the park after it was established in 1947, said Castle McLaughlin, who in the 1980s researched the history and origins of the horses while working as a graduate student for the Park Service in North Dakota.
Park officials in the early years sought to eradicate the horses, shooting them on sight and hiring local cowboys to round them up and remove them, she said. The park even sold horses to a local zoo at one point to be food for large cats.
Around 1970, a new superintendent discovered Roosevelt had written about the presence of wild horses in the Badlands during his time there. Park officials decided to retain the horses as a historic demonstration herd to interpret the open-range ranching era. “However, the Park Service still wasn’t thrilled about them,” McLaughlin told the AP.
“Basically they’re like cultural artifacts almost because they reflect several generations of western North Dakota ranchers and Native people. They were part of those communities,” and might have ties to Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull, she said.
In the 1880s, Theodore Roosevelt hunted and ranched as a young man in the Badlands of what is now western North Dakota. The Western tourist town of Medora is at the gates of the national park that bears his name.
Roosevelt looms large in North Dakota, where a presidential library in his honor is under construction near the park — a legislative push in 2019 that was championed by Republican Gov. Doug Burgum.
Burgum has offered for the state to collaborate with the Park Service to manage the horses. Earlier this year, North Dakota’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a resolution in support of preserving the horses.
Republican U.S. Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota has included legislation in the U.S. Interior Department’s appropriations bill that he told the AP “would direct them to keep horses in the park in line with what was there at the time that Teddy Roosevelt was out in Medora.”
“Most all of the input we’ve got is that people want to retain horses. We’ve been clear we think (the park) should retain horses,” Hoeven said. He’s pressing the park to keep more than 35-60 horses for genetics reasons.
The senator said he expects the environmental review to be completed soon, which will provide an opportunity for public comment. Richman told the AP the park plans to release the assessment this summer. A timeline for a final decision is unclear.
The environmental review will look at the impact of each of the three proposals in a variety of areas, Maureen McGee-Ballinger, the park’s deputy superintendent, told the AP.
There were thousands of responses during the previous public comment period on the park’s proposals — the vast majority of which opposed “complete livestock removal.”
Kman’s group has been active in gathering support for the horses, including drafting government resolutions and contacting congressional offices, tribal leaders, similar advocacy groups and “pretty much anyone that would listen to me,” she said.
McLaughlin said the park’s effort carries “a stronger possibility that they’ll succeed this time than has ever been the case in the past. I mean, they have never been this determined and publicly open about their intentions, but I’ve also never seen the state fight for the horses like they are now.”
The park’s North Unit, about 70 miles (112.65 kilometers) from Medora, has about nine longhorn cattle. The proposals would affect the longhorns, too, though the horses are the greater concern. Hoeven said his legislation doesn’t address the longhorns. The cattle are managed under a 1970 plan.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park “is one of very few national parks that does have horses, and that sets it apart,” North Dakota Commerce Tourism and Marketing Director Sara Otte Coleman said in January at a press conference with Burgum and lawmakers.
Wild horses also roam in Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland and Virginia.
The horses’ economic impact on tourism is impossible to delineate, but their popularity is high among media, photographers, travel writers and social media influencers who tout them, Otte Coleman said.
“Removal of the horses really eliminates a feature that our park guests are accustomed to seeing,” she said.
‘Like a bomb has gone off’: Ancient humans may have set megafires that turned Southern California into an uninhabitable ‘wasteland’ for 1,000 years
published 1 day ago
Ice-age humans may have set fires that led to the extinction of large mammals across what is now Southern California.
- https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/like-a-bomb-has-gone-off-ancient-humans-may-have-set-megafires-that-turned-southern-california-into-an-uninhabitable-wasteland-for-1000-years
Fossils from the La Brea tar pits suggest wildfires played a major role in megafauna extinction. (Image credit: Cullen Townsend, Natural History Museum)
Ice-age humans may have set megafires in what is now Southern California, making the region uninhabitable for a thousand years, new research suggests.
These massive wildfires may have been a major contributor to the extinction of megafauna in the area, fossils from the La Brea tar pits suggest. The findings were published Aug. 18 in the journal Science.
“When fires like this happen, it’s almost like a bomb has gone off. It was like a wasteland for 1,000 years,” study lead author F. Robin O’Keefe, a biologist at Marshall University in West Virginia, told Live Science.
Do This Before Bed, Watch Your Body Fat Melt Like Crazy! (Try Tonight)Burn Belly Fat
O’Keefe and colleagues used a complex array of data to model the changing ecosystem in California following the retreat of glaciers in North America during the late Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), which included the last ice age. Key to their analysis was the carbon dating of fossils deposited in the La Brea tar pits, a paleontological research site in Los Angeles. The bones of numerous large mammals have been extracted from these asphalt seeps, providing an extensive record of the animals that once inhabited the region.
“This is really fascinating because we have a sample size that’s biologically meaningful,” O’Keefe said. Such massive deposits of large mammal fossils are rare.
The team focused on the eight most common mammals hauled from the oily depths of the pits: American lions (Panthera atrox), ancient bison (Bison antiquus), coyotes (Canis latrans), dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus), Harlan’s ground sloths (Paramylodon harlani), saber-toothed cats (Smilodon fatalis), western horses (Equus occidentalis) and yesterday’s camels (Camelops hesternus).
The team extracted the protein collagen from 172 preserved bones and then used radiocarbon dating to ascertain when each animal died. The fossils dated to between 15,600 and 10,000 years ago.
The researchers compared the frequency of these fossils over time with existing data from Lake Elsinore, southeast of Los Angeles, on pollen deposits — which indicate the diversity of plant life — and the estimated time period in which charcoal from wildfires was deposited in the region’s sediment layers. Shifts in all three records correlated tightly to estimated increases in human settlement. Computer modeling suggested that human populations rapidly expanded in the region starting 13,200 years ago.
Around 13,500 years ago, charcoal deposition increased exponentially, pointing to an extended period of wildfires. The overlap in pollen and charcoal shifts suggested that human activities may have triggered these fires.
“We don’t know if these were started by campfires or if they were actually lighting fires in order to drive the game,” O’Keefe said.
Evidence for humans in the area during this period is scant. However, O’Keefe said this doesn’t weaken the team’s hypothesis. In fact, the fires may have made the region inhospitable for humans.
All of the species analyzed, aside from coyotes, vanished from the region by 12,900 years ago.
“That was really an aha moment,” O’Keefe said. “The megafauna record just stops. They weren’t getting caught [in the tar pits] because they weren’t there anymore.”
The study suggests massive mammals in the region died out at the end of the Pleistocene due to a confluence of factors. A warming climate and periods of drought left vegetation susceptible to fire. Southern California transitioned from a moist woodland environment to a dry chaparral, or shrubland, priming the region for fires.
RELATED STORIES
—Dire wolves and saber-toothed cats may have gotten arthritis as they inbred themselves to extinction
—What’s the first species humans drove to extinction?
—Frozen mammoths, bog men and tar wolves: Here’s how nature preserves prehistoric creatures
At the same time, human populations grew. Their fires swept through drying forests and accelerated massive ecosystem shifts.
The giant animals that had once comfortably grazed on lush plant matter now struggled to find food at the same time as humans began hunting them. And then their world burned to the ground.
“We see deep parallels between the situation that we’re facing today in this extinction 13,000 years ago,” O’Keefe said, referring to the wildfires currently raging in North America and other regions.
Early Canada goose season starts Sept. 1
Another Human Infected with Bird Flu in China
As young conservatives try to get climate on the agenda in 2024, denial takes the spotlight instead
Yellowstone presents alternative bison strategies in draft plan
What You Can Do
Small Families
Human population growth underlies the climate change, deforestation, desertification, pollution and other factors responsible for the ongoing sixth mass extinction.
Vegetarian and Vegan Diets
Vegetarians and vegans greatly reduce the suffering of farm animals and environmental damage done by the agriculture industry.
Meat, Egg and Dairy Alternatives
Soy milk, veggie burgers and other faux products available for sale in many supermarkets and convenience stores.
Energy Usage
Greenhouse gasses greatly contribute to habitat loss.
Consumption and Recycling
Reduced use of natural resources and increased recycling decrease forest destruction, occean pollution, etc. and thereby benefit wild animals.
Guide to Compassionate Clothing
Stores that sell clothing not made with fur, leather or other animal products.
Companies that Don’t Test on Animals
Firms that don’t test finished products, formulations or ingredients on animals and do not do business with suppliers that do.
Animal-Friendly Tourism
Make sure that your vacation plans don’t include causing animals to suffer.
Alternatives to Classroom Dissection
Computer simulations, clay models and other means of teaching anatomy that do not involve the use of animals.
Animal Welfare Organizations
There are thousands of animal welfare organizations throughout the world almost all of which rely heavily on donations and volunteers.
Petitions
There are numerous online petitions intended to promote animal welfare.
Legislation
Contacting elected officials at all levels of government in order to urge them to ban retail sales of dogs obtained from puppy mills, oppose efforts to criminalize undercover investigations at slaughterhouses, prohibit use of wild animals in circuses, etc. can be very helpful in promoting animal welfare.
Companion Animal Adoption
Adopting a cat or dog or some other animal from a shelter or rescue group helps to reduce animal homelessness.
Spaying and Neutering
Spaying and neutering yield a variety of benefits.
Humane Wildlife Control
A variety of nonlethal methods can be employed to help prevent conflicts with wild animals.
Humane Rodent Control
A number of nonlethal methods of preventing rodents from entering homes are available.
Events
Events throughout the world that are held to promote animal welfare.
Spreading the Word
Increasing awareness of wildlife poaching, factory farm practices, the treatment of animals in laboratories, homeless cats and dogs and related issues helps to improve the well-being of animals.
Exposing the Big Game 