Tulcea forestry

[simon lenihan]

The Tulcea forestry and danube biosphere reserve asked locals to gather wild horses because they were eating bark and damaging the forest. [ This i have no problem with ]. The horses were then taken and put in pens and tortured before sending to the slaughter house, 20 of the horses for slaughter were foals. 10000 bc or what?

[fogish]

Will they get in trouble with the EU?

[simon lenihan]

Probably not.

[Andy Carson]

I thought there was more to this story than might first appear… After all, why does that “wild” horse have a brand on it??? And what is with the supposed “horse tormentors” who are closely inspecting and thinking about the horses that are running around? They look more like they are at an action or a sale, not a torture festival. So I checked up…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danube_Delta_horse

It seems a lot of these horses are feral and belonged, at one point, to locals. This explains the brand on the one in the photo. It is somewhat debatable whether the horses are causing a lot of damage to the forest, but removing feral animals from a fragile forest ecosystem is a very “2012 AD” thing to do. OK, so you remove them, now what??? That’s a lot of horses to just sit around and feed… You could slaughter them and get some value out of them, but many of these horses have equine infectious anemia so are quarantined and can’t be sold to countries that eat a lot of horse. So, then what??? If it were me, I would see if any of the branded ones remembered how to work. If so, they could be sold to locals and possibly stand a chance of having a useful (and longer) life. The sale price might pay for the training and leave a little profit for whoever caught the horses too. I would clearly not do this in the way illustrated, but I probably wouldn’t have to cash to hire a real professional to break the horses either… Especially because the horses aren’t going to be worth a whole lots after they are broke anyway. So, the most logical course of action migth be to see if any of the horses can be broke (or remember thier previous training) with minimal effort. Next, sell those horses locally and slaughter the rest. It is wholely possible this is exactly what we are looking at, with a poor trainer what works cheap. Not an exciting story, but I think it makes a whole lot more sense than a story that somehow Romanians are bloodthirsty barbarians who have nothing better to do than torture horses for no gain whatsoever. This modern headline media needs fact-checked all the time!

[karl t pfister]

A related thought to the breaking the older wild horse or perhaps even older gone feral horse . Randy Bird of Ontario Ca. a very experienced trainer of driving horses did an experiment a few years ago with older 12yo + to see if the they could be useful “workers”. He chose the calmest people friendliest one of 10 head ,and after 90 days in captivity and 60 days of work he got one drive done of about 20 minutes. He concluded it was not at all worth it to try and break the older wild horse. Not what one would call an in depth study , but he is a very motivated and thoro trainer for what it ‘s worth besides being off topic .

[simon lenihan]

my gripe is with the forestry department, i think it is their resposibility to follow through to a satisfactory conclusion.

[fogish]

Resource management is a great thing and I’m glad they are actually trying to do it. What I am not able to figure out is what are they doing to the horse that is tied to the post? I know the bridle doesn’t fit well, but in the limited photos it looks like they are just pulling on the bit. Is anyone familiar with a training technique close to what they are doing?

Karl, the good news is we know that younger wild horses have no problems with training. The U.S. Border Patrol trains wild caught mustangs up to 5 years old for riding and as pack animals in areas that vehicles have limited access. It would be nice to know the age where you get diminishing returns, maybe the government already figured that out and stops at 5 years old.

[karl t pfister]

Wow 5 year olds that’s great ! Or maybe the management of border patrol wants it agents really mad by the time they catch up to
border crashers. That’s what happens when ya ride rank stock, ha ha

[Andy Carson]

@simon lenihan 36264 wrote:

my gripe is with the forestry department, i think it is their resposibility to follow through to a satisfactory conclusion.

I hear you, and I am not saying I have a better solution or saying what is being done is the best solution. I mostly wanted to point out that this is a complex problem without an easy solution (or at least one that I can see) and the “best” solution is probably going to be the “least bad” solution. I wonder if locals were asked to gather horses because many were origionally owned by locals. If a horse is turned out into the forest, does the horse immediately become the property of the state? It not immediately, how long does the horse have to be abandoned before the oriognal owner looses rights? If there is indeed a defined period of time, can anyone prove when each horse was adandoned? Also, it seems that this area has been used for extra pasture for a while, and I think the people using the pasture should get ample warning and time to gather thier animals before thier livestock gets nationalized. Perhaps having locals collect the livestock is a way of avoiding these sort of legal entanglements? Really, this situation gets more and more complicated ever time I think about it. I’m glad I don’t have to decide how to handle it, because every potential solution seems to have problems with it. I am hesitant to criticize someones solution to a problem when I don’t have a solution that seems better.

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