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, and restore degraded landscapes. Through rewilding, wildlife's natural rhythms are able to create wilder, more biodiverse habitats. Our aim is to demonstrate the benefits of working with wild horses and wild burros to restore habitat for the native wildlife they were once an integral part of, while helping them to live more freely again and in harmony with the land.
Our inspiration comes from a growing movement around using wild equines in rewilding and conservation projects throughout Europe, including the Knepp Wildland Project in the UK. This pioneering project within the global rewilding movement has become one of the top biodiversity hotspots in the UK due to their implementation of the trailblazing ideas of Dutch ecologist and conservationist Franz Vera over the last 20 years. Their journey from industrial agriculture to rewilding advocates is documented in the film, "Wilding", based on a book written by Isabella Tree, one of the stewards of the Knepp Estate.
In Vera's paradigm-shifting book, Grazing Ecology and Forest History, published in 2000, he identifies large-bodied grazing herbivores as the stimulus for the complex mosaic of dynamic, shifting habitats that supports native wildlife to thrive. Their varied grazing and browsing habits and methods of physical disturbance on the land, such as trampling, rootling, rubbing, rolling, breaking branches, and de-barking trees, coupled with their ability to disperse seed and transfer nutrients across the land, balances the natural process of succession that ultimately leads to canopy closure and biodiversity decline.
According to Vera, we have simply 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, such as wild flowers and butterflies. His conclusion was that 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 could have a hugely positive impact on natural landscapes.
Inspired by the success of Knepp, and other projects working with grazing ecologies, such as Rewilding Britain's rewilding wild ponies in UK's coastal wetlands, Rewilding Europe's rewilding of horses in nature preserves, and the rewilding project at Wild Ken Hill, we are working with the same ideas, simply on a smaller scale. While this requires more human intervention, using rotational grazing practices to mimic the natural movement of a wild herd across the land, the basic principles and practices are adaptable and scaleable. Here in the US, we also have an advantage to many of these European projects. While they are forced to either breed wild traits and hardiness back into the equines they are working with, and/or ship them from other European countries, we have tens of thousands of wild equines living in captivity, ready to be engaged in US rewilding projects.
Ultimately, we hope to be a part of this growing movement educating land stewards, land owners, and nature conservationists on the benefits wild equines can bring to regenerative land projects, and how to work with them to restore land for native wildlife, while raising awareness of their current plight here in the US. Instead of being trapped in ever-growing numbers in shelterless, barren, crowded, and disease-ridden holding facilities, at tax-payer expense, or being funneled into the slaughter pipeline (22,000 in 2023), these keystone species and ecosystem engineers - that have adapted to thrive in almost every ecosystem on the planet - could be returned to the land where they originated, evolved, and belong, to create the complexity of habitat required to support maximum biodiversity.
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