People Realize That WILD HORSE Herbivory helped CALFIRE
In 2024, Oregon suffered its worse wildfire year to date with 1.9-million acres incinerated. California had a terrible year as well, and 2025 is off to a horrific start with over $100-billion in losses just from the January 2025 wildfires.
Over the past 2 1/2 years, since we founded our 501-c-3 nonprofit WILD HORSE FIRE BRIGADE to protect and genetically reestablish our heritage horse herd on the OR-CA border to maintain common-sense genetic stability and sustainability, we’ve seen donations from landowners/homeowners who witnessed the KLAMATHON FIRE and it’s suppression.
These same land and homeowners see the positive environmental impacts of our local heritage horses, now protected by our Nonprofit Org. WILD HORSE FIRE BRIGADE
Seeing the vast destruction from grass & brush fuels wildfires, most Americans are now starting to ask the Right Question: Why so much grass & brush fuels?
Recently, a critical thinker and screenwriter and documentarian, Heidi Hornbacher spoke about our 7X award-winning documentary, HORSE of NATURE, which addresses the scientifically-proven connection between the collapsed herbivory and the evolution of catastrophic wildfires:
40-second comment on YouTube:
Trailer for the 7X award-winning documentary HORSE of NATURE:
There is a mountain of published peer-reviewed science by noted PhDs and others that agree with our position: In wild-lands economically unsuited for livestock herbivory, a healthy herbivory reduces the frequency, size and intensity of catastrophic wildfire.
BELOW is a donation report we received just today with an important message from a landowner in the Greensprings area of Jackson County OR just to the east of Ashland, OR and north of Pilot Rock in Oregon. This is an area joined by the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.
The ‘message’ included is one we’ve seen many times, which is why we are sharing this.Sadly, many citizens don’t bother to reach-out to their elected officials because most don’t have time and many feel it’s ‘a waste of time’.
I disagree with that sentiment, with the understanding that the wildfires & deadly toxic smoke kill and destroy indiscriminately and at some point, even elected officials will learn some of the hard lessons some of us already suffered.
We pray that more of our elected-officials and legislators will wake-up to the only genuine solution to managing wildfires and deadly toxic smoke that is now killing tens of thousands of people in Oregon and California, based upon the data from the recent 11-year Study by UCLA.
As good as logging is with its economic and healthy forest benefits, some people are still trying to sell ‘logging’ as the silver bullet to reduce catastrophic wildfires. But that is simply not the case and flies in the face of empirical experience and peer-reviewed published science; here’s why:
1) 66% of all wildfires are fueled by grass & brush, not forests… (SEE GRAPH BELOW) and this article:
2) Grass & brush fueled wildfires account for approx. 98% of all wildfire related deaths over the past 10-years….. not forest fires according to insurance industry data and UCLA’s study
3) FACT: You can cut down the entire forest to the ground, and then the first thing that grows back is grass and brush! … Look at the Kalmiopsis Wilderness area (Curry County, OR)...formerly a forest, now a massive grass & brush tinder box that ignites and carries wildfire to remaining trees and toxic smoke to distant towns and communities.
4) Any logger knows that when you open-up the forest canopy by thinning a forest, the understory plants and grasses grow like crazy, adding the most flammable fuels (kindling for heavy fuels) to line the forest floor and given our COLLAPSED HERBIVORY, these rocket fuels pile up and then burn hotter than the forest.
The collapsed herbivory is the reason for the accumulation of the deadly grass and brush fuels across 300-million acres of western states, and livestock grazing in remote wilderness is NOT the answer.. nor is it economically feasible due to logistics costs (fuel, manpower, etc.) related to attempting to mange livestock in remote rugged terrain as well as depredation of livestock by Apex predators, who will happily eat livestock and pets because their natural prey (deer-elk) have been decimated and populations in the western states are Collapsed! Here again, mismanagement is at the root of this core problem.
Deer populations in California (and in Oregon) are collapsed and are now BELOW the level (500k deer) seen in 1917 when a moratorium on hunting was started to repopulate deer… As the GRAPH above shows, it took ten years to bring deer populations back up over 2-million.
Today, we are below 400k deer in CA, and CA Fish & Wildlife are still selling deer tags… Oregon deer herds are also down. Mismanagement, driven by GREED & CORRUPTION will likely push western blacktail deer into genetic bottlenecking and genetic erosion, setting deer populations up for total collapse.
Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), which is already epidemic in 29-states, and is spreading quickly throughout California and Oregon now, stems from the mismanagement of APEX PREDATORS that can take sick animals out of the populations before they spread the disease, and are themselves immune.
What these ‘managers’ don’t realize it that Bear, Wolves, Mountain Lions and Coyotes are immune to CWD. And having been mismanaged, now, when it’s almost too late, we see the results of the move designed to increase livestock profitability has yielded.
Human hubris, ego and greed allows for so-called monetary-driven solutions that lead to many-new problems, even worse problems in the chain of mismanagement events…
Published Science in UTAH tells the story of how ranchers there had coyote shooting contests. Then, they noticed a serious loss of grazing forage and immediately blamed the local herd of Bison. Scientists came into the area and determined that the loss of the natural predator (coyotes) of rabbits, created massive population of rabbits who were consuming over 30% of the available grazing forage… Are we learning yet? Ranchers there, suffering from reduced grazing, admitted publicly, they made a mistake killing coyotes.
When will our local elected officials come to terms with what’s NOT working?
“Bison are the most obvious presence on the landscape, other than cattle. They are big animals and they leave big dungs pats,” Ranglack said. “But when you walk around, it becomes pretty obvious there is a fairly substantial jackrabbit population. You see a lot of pellets. It turns out rabbits were consuming twice as much forage as the bison.”HERE IS THAT REPORT:
Nature knows best how to manage the ecosystems and wildfire, we don’t!
Nature’s herbivory can keep the most egregious fuels, grass and brush, down to levels where we once again have ‘normal’ fire that we had in the past.
And the sooner we learn that critical lesson, the sooner we can employ the solutions that worked for millennia. Our experience with mixed-herbivores is unparalleled. I’ve managed cattle, sheep, a few goats and 200 wild heritage horses. Our horse herd helped CALFIRE stop a deadly wildfire before it reached Ashland, OR… and that is a plain, proven fact, documented with photos and eyewitnesses.
Thoughts? Wanna full presentation and the video and published science that support ALL of the foregoing? Call me or email.
Thank you!
Regards, William
Wild Horse Fire Brigade
https://www.wildhorsefirebrigade.org/
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Enlightening article. I would hope that the current wild horse and burro roundups will be discontinued in this administration saving taxpayer money and saving the free-roaming populations of horses and burros. The agriculture department must be aligned and revamped regarding land leases that allow cattle grazing at the expense of the ‘wildies.’