WILD PEACE SANCTUARY
REWILDING
Rewilding, as a progressive approach to nature conservation, is primarily about enabling natural processes to shape the land, repair damaged ecosystems, restore degraded landscapes, and increase biodiversity. Many rewilding and nature conservation programs in Europe include equines in their land restoration work due to the unique ability of these animals to regenerate the soil and increase biodiversity. Conversely, in the US, wild horses and burros are caught up in a complex web of politics, motivated by profit, and are being systematically removed from public lands, despite their federal protections. With the various issues surrounding these native, keystone, ecosystem engineers shrouded in misinformation, we aim to shine a light on their beneficial presence in rewilding and regenerative agricultural projects. While we would always prefer to see these animals protected on the public lands where they first originated, evolved over millions of years, and still belong - which would protect these wild lands in turn from being degraded by industry - we see a win/win solution to the tens of thousands of those being held in captivity and/or going to slaughter each year.
Natural disturbance created by the presence of large-bodied grazing herbivores, such as trampling, rootling, rubbing, rolling, breaking branches, and de-barking trees, is one of the fundamental elements in rewilding and regenerating land as it encourages a diversity of plants, animals, insects, fungi, and other organisms. These methods of physical disturbance work to balance the natural process of succession that would ultimately lead to full canopy closure and biodiversity decline. Other beneficial factors are the dispersal of native seeds, the sequestering of carbon, and the transference of vital nutrients across the land through the depositing of manure.
Our inspiration comes from the growing movement throughout Europe of incorporating equines into regenerative agriculture, land restoration and nature conservation projects. One of these is the Knepp Wildland Project in the UK, now one of the top biodiversity hotspots in the UK since large-bodied herbivores including wild ponies, were introduced twenty years ago. The pioneers of this project, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, author of Wilding and The Book of Wilding, followed the ideas of Franz Vera, a Dutch ecologist and conservationist whose paradigm-shifting book Grazing Ecology and Forest History identified grazing herbivores as an essential element in creating the complex mosaic of dynamic shifting habitats that are required for maximum biodiversity.
According to Vera, we have forgotten about the huge numbers of megafauna, many species now extinct, that would have played a highly influential part in the formation and maintenance of natural ecologies, alongside fire and windthrow which also have important roles in maintaining the kinds of open glades and wooded groves that allow for a diversity of species, including wild flowers and butterflies. His conclusion was that large-bodied grazing herbivores are a fundamental and necessary force of natural disturbance on the land, and that the reintroduction of domestic descendants as proxies for extinct or absent native species can have a hugely beneficial impact on natural landscapes.
Inspired by the success of Knepp and other projects working with grazing ecologies, such as the rewilding of wild ponies in UK's coastal wetlands, the rewilding of horses in nature preserves, and Wild Ken Hill, we are working with many of the same ideas just on a smaller scale. While this requires more intervention, such as using rotational grazing to mimic the natural movements of a wild herd across the land, the basic principles are highly adaptable and scaleable. In the US we also have a distinct advantage to European projects in that our wild horses are already adapted to living freely on the land, unlike many equines in Europe that are selectively bred to reintroduce their wild instincts and hardiness.
Our aim is to demonstrate the benefits of working with wild horses and wild burros as rewilding engineers to restore habitat for native wildlife while simultaneously supporting them to live more freely on the land than conventional horse care practices tend to offer. We are supporting the process by introducing key regional trees, shrubs, and plants to enhance habitat for bees, butterflies and other pollinators; and cultivating a living medicine cabinet and food forest for our resident herd, human stewards, resident wildlife, and other wildlife displaced by industrial logging in coastal Oregon.
Ultimately, we see a win/win solution to the problem of the ever-increasing number of wild horses and burros being held in barren, shelterless, and crowded holding facilities in the US, at taxpayer expense, and the tens of thousands going to slaughter annually. This is to find ways to incorporate captive wild equines into land restoration, nature conservation, and regenerative agricultural projects. Not only would this provide an opportunity for these animals to live and thrive on the land again but it would help the land to heal, and would help to heal our hearts from the tragedy that is playing out in the US.
GRAZING ECOLOGY
We work with planned, adaptive, rotational grazing or adaptive multi-paddock grazing methods, collectively known as regenerative grazing, by moving our small herd of wild horses and burros regularly across the land to mimic their natural movements in the wild, and adapting these rotations to continually changing ecological conditions.
As ecosystem engineers, the presence of equines on the land benefits a multitude of species, and fosters and maintains a diverse communities of grasses, forbs, legumes, and wildflowers. They improve the health of the soil, increase biodiversity, and reduce the risk of wildfire through the removal of overgrowth and combustible brush fuel. As the only large-bodied non-ruminant (single stomached) herbivore in the US, they are uniquely beneficial, effectively re-seeding the landscape with their preferred forage as their simple digestive tract allows for vital native seeds to pass through their bodies fully intact - coated in nutritious fertilizer and ready to germinate, and their soliped (flat) hooves gently press those seeds into the ground increasing germination rates.
Unlike cows, sheep, goats, and other ruminants that, due to a lack of upper incisors, have to work their jaws back and forth tearing the grass up from the root as they graze, equines possess both upper and lower incisors so they carefully prune vegetation. Many of their natural behaviors create habitat for a multitude of other native species to thrive on the land, such as their practice of wallowing and bathing in the dust and dirt. This conditions their skin, creates a natural sunscreen and insect repellent, and helps to shed their winter coats, while the shallow bowls of bare earth this leaves behind creates microhabitats for numerous ground-dwelling invertebrates and warmth-loving, basking, and burrow-nesting insects such as pollinating bees and wasps.
Where most equine management systems are, at best, maintenance, and more often a process of ever-increasing pasture degradation, undesirable plants, and expenses with the need for stall bedding and supplemental feed, the practice of rotational grazing works on a continuous cycle of improvement. As the land becomes healthier, so do the animals, and over time it requires less and less intervention from people as we are working with natural systems rather than against them. In the UK, a movement known as Equiculture, is educating horse owners on these practices to raise awareness of how their animals can be improving rather than degrading the land they are kept on, if they are managed effectively by following the principles of regenerative grazing.
RESTORING BALANCE
So-called weeds are mostly beneficial plants that provide nutrients for microorganisms, feed wildlife, are essential to pollinators, and provide a source of food and medicine for humans. While some of these plants are overly vigorous and can out-compete other beneficial plants, rather than joining the ill-informed war on so-called invasives, we have chosen to honor one of the core principles of permaculture, namely that one organism's waste is another's food and that this is how energy cycles through the web of life in a closed loop system. Therefore, we look for ways to make use of the plants we are removing from the land, whether as food or medicine for ourselves or the animals, or by making mineral-rich fermented liquid plant fertilizers.
Some of the introduced (aka non-native), and overly vigorous (aka invasive), plants that we are slowly removing from the land as part of our rewilding and regeneration work include Rubus armeniacus, (Himalyan blackberry), Jacobaea vulgaris (Tansy ragwort), Hypochaeris radicata (Catsear/False dandelion), Cirsium arvense (Creeping thistle), Ranunculus repens (Creeping buttercup), Digitalis (Foxglove), and Parentucellia viscosa (Yellow bartsia). Some plants we pull by hand and others are grazed down by the animals prior to seed maturation. As we pull plants and clear brush throughout the year, we create brush piles which can provide essential cover for pollinators during extreme weather, and serve as nesting sites for birds, snakes, and small mammals.
View some photos and videos of our four-legged weed-eaters in the gallery below...
LEARN MORE
Wilding - Official Trailer
Fuel, Fire, and Wild Horses
The wild horses that are rewilding Britain
“We found out that large grazers drive habitat creation
and that’s now a cornerstone of rewilding.”
~
Franz Vera