National Parks Traveler

In a coastal landscape of Spanish moss-draped live oaks, salt marshes, and white sand beaches, a land that offers nesting habitat for loggerhead sea turtles, is crawling with armadillos, and feeds Red knots, a threatened bird species, and wood storks, horses are incongruous.

Though horses have been part of this landscape since the 1700s, and perhaps 150 live on this barrier island off the Georgia coastline now, it's not their natural habitat, maintains Patty Livingston.

"Given a choice, a horse would not elect to live on a barrier island, I'm sorry, but that's just not where they would choose to live," says Livingston, president of both the Georgia Equine Rescue League and the Georgia Horse Council and a plaintiff in a legal battle to see the horses removed from Cumberland Island National Seashore. "They are grazing animals. They like plains. They like nice green grassy pastures, and that's not the type of forage that you find on the barrier islands. Had they not been brought there by human beings, I'm prettuy sure they wouldn't be there today."

Horses can be found in many corners of the National Park System. You spot them running wild at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, splashing in the surf at Cape Lookout National Seashore in North Carolina and at Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland and Virginia, and of course as pack animals and tireless steeds that carry both rangers and visitors through the parks. But wild horses are somewhat of a conundrum in the National Park System. They’re a conundrum because they technically are not wild, but rather feral, meaning they descended from domesticated horses. As such, they technically are not native wildlife, not part of the natural landscape, and that has become a contentious issue.

It's a sensitive topic with many who see horses as majestic, loveable steeds that have long been associated with the West and even the National Park Service, not as a non-native species that should be removed from the park system.

At Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the National Park Service has raised the question of whether the horses there, categorized as livestock, not native wildlife, should be removed from the park. A recent comment period on that proposal drew more than 7,000 comments, just 45 of which backed the removal option.

Sea Horses

Where the Park Service will come down on horses at Theodore Roosevelt remains to be seen. The same can be said across the country, at Cumberland Island. Here, too, the horses are feral, not part of the native faunal assemblage. There were known to be horses on the island in the mid-1700s brought by English soliders during their battles with Spanish over control of the island, and more arrived near the end of that century with landowners, and in the 1800s with the plantations that sprang up in the 1800s, according to the Park Service.

While recent studies by the Park Service have pointed to environmental damage inflicted by horses, the animals are neverthess viewed by the agency as part of the landscape, albeit a non-native one. Now, though, the agency is being challenged over the equines' place at Cumberland Island via a lawsuit that claims the animals not only are damaging the seashore's environment and adversely impacting two federally protected species but are not being humanely managed by the Park Service and so should be removed from the seashore.

"I think you put your finger really right on the problem, which is, there is a dynamic that's ongoing within the park system, and this is reflected in the country at large," said Hal Wright, the attorney who filed the lawsuit against Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and the Park Service at Cumberland Island, during a National Parks Traveler podcast exploring the issue. "This is really a perception problem as to what the overall charge of the Park Service is as far as not impairing the overall national wildlife resources of the park system; in effect, to leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of present and future generations.

"Sort of opposed to that, is this overall, if you will, impression of the public at large that there are these other interests that should be served by the Park Service," Wright continued. "They're more tourist-related, and the Park Service has this obligation to serve the public at large in allowing them to almost have an entertainment value to be served by the Park Service. And I think the Park Service becomes sort of whipsawed in those two dynamics, which is to serve the public's tourism or entertainment value on the one hand, and then on the other to safeguard the parks' resources, which they really are sort of the public trustee for. And I think the horse issue sort of epitomizes that dynamic and that conflict that the Park Service faces."

While Wild Cumberland, an advocacy group that works for the preservation of the island, is not a plaintiff in the lawsuit, it does agree it's time for the horses to go.

"This is a complex issue that deserves to be handled with both common sense and compassion," said Jessica Howell-Edwards, the group's executive director, during the podcast. "Good stewardship would require us to show compassion to these animals that are suffering. But also good stewardship would require us to demonstrate respect for the ecosystems that they're damaging."

Livestock, Not Pets

Livingston doesn't understand why the Park Service keeps the horses at Cumberland Island, pointing out that the harsh environmental conditions cut their lifespans by two-thirds, with most living just 9 or 10 years.

"Do they have to [live there] at the cost of their lives? Does every barrier island have to have a herd of horses just to please spoiled people," she said on the podcast. "I don't think that they should have to pay for the pleasure of people just seeing horses run on the beach. I'm sorry, but I'm a horse person. I'm about the horse. Horses are livestock in my world. There are laws surrounding horses as livestock and they're treated as livestock, except that when a human being wants to interfere and choose to call them by another name. They are livestock and there are laws about livestock."

Cattle also once roamed the island, but were removed shortly after the national seashore was established, according to Howell-Edwards.

Carol Ruckdeshel, who lives on Cumberland Island and is a plaintiff in the lawsuit over the horses, points to manure piles, which National Park Service studies have said are damaging parts of the national seashore/Wild Cumberland

The National Park Service declined to be part of the conversation on the podcast, as the matter is in litigation. But in an email to the Traveler in April, prior to the lawsuit, Cumberland Island Superintendent Gary Ingram maintained the horses were not suffering.

"[T]he National Park Service has monitored the horses on Cumberland Island National Seashore annually with population census techniques since 1981. Condition ratings for observed animals have been predominantly in the 'good' to 'moderate' categories. At no time during the last 41+ years have there been findings indicating that the overall health of the herd was in extremely poor condition," he wrote.

He did not comment on a 2018 Park Service report that island's horses are having harmful impacts on the national seashore’s ecosystems. In that report, agency personnel noted that the horses were trampling vegetative cover and reducing revegetation, and appeared "to be altering plant species composition and ... likely increasing the vulnerability of dunes and salt marshes to erosion and storm damage." Manure was leading to nutrient enrichment of welands as well as contaminating the waters, in some cases with E. coli, it added.

"Together, these impacts make wetland habitats less favorable for native plants, fish, herpetofauna, and invertebrates," reads the report.

"A lay person can observe that these animals have grazed protected marsh grasses down to nubs in areas," said Howell-Edwards. "We can watch them and observe them eating the fields that stabilize this mature dune system on Cumberland Island. Hikers are required to circumvent enormous piles of waste that the bugs cannot recycle off quickly enough on the island. There are very obvious impacts that that should be recognizable to most of us who understand the impacts that cows, horses, grazing livestock can have on an area if they're allowed to roam freely. There have been a number of of studies and and research pieces done that have the data and document the damage that they have done."

Horses on Cumberland Island live only 9-10 years on average, about a third of the lifespans of horses in their natural habitat, according to Patty Livingston/Wild Cumberland

From Wright's perspective, the Park Service's approach to the feral horses is similar to one they took when feral hogs roamed the island.

"When the feral hogs were depredating over close to 80 percent of the sea turtle nests on Cumberland Island, the Park Service took a position, they basically threw their hands up and said, 'Well, what do you want us to do about it, that is sort of natural.' A very similar position of what they're taking now with the feral horses, and it required a legal action to sort of get them moving," said the attorney, who was involved in that action.

According to Wright, the horses also have trampled sea turtle nests and hatchlings and impacted habitat used by piping plover, another threatened species.

Whether the lawsuit will be settled before it goes to trial remains to be seen. For Livingston, she'd like to see the Park Service remove young horses from the island, sterilize the mares, and let nature take its course.

"We're looking at an eight-to-10-year plan where they would live their lives out, what's left of it," she said. "And the babies would have maybe an opportunity for a good life on shore. So that's kind of what we had put together as far as my committee, and all the research that we've been doing. But let me just say this: This is a situation on that island of survival of the fittest. And I just don't think that that is suitable for a national park, to have living conditions that really are just about that. It is a survival of the fittest there."

Though the solution might not seem overly complex, the appeal of horses running wild, whether in the West or on the coast, make it complex.

"I think this goes back to the very beginning of our discussion, when we were talking about that balance between the [National Park Service] Organic Act and the political interest, the need to protect and preserve vs. the political interests," said Howell-Edwards. "The complexity sort of lies within visitor demand. I mean, all of the science is there, the commonsense, the knowledge is there. But if visitors like to see them, and visitors want to see them, the park I think has a hard time making the right decision and choice. There's a large segment of the local community that depends on the tourism that those horses have historically brought to the seashore. And so I think that if you're looking at the complexity of this problem, the science and the data from an ecological perspective is there. But if you start thinking about the political interests that are potentially involved in the management of our public lands, I think that is where it becomes more complex."

Taking a big picture approach to the issue, Wright invoked Aldo Leopold, an early 20th century ecologist often seen as the father of wildlife ecology:

"He said, 'You know a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.'"

Traveler postscript: Listen to the full podcast conversation here.