Wild Horses Can Help Prevent Catastrophic Wildfires

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday morning. Everybody knows how much I love wild animals, and I love animals in general. With us today is William Simpson. He’s the ex director of the Wild Horse’s Fire Brigade and worried about the wild horses in America.

0:17 And William Simpson tell us about it. I mean, I spoke to Madelan Wilson a few weeks ago about the wild stallions and the wild horses out in America. You’re you tell me what you want.

0:32 Speaker 2 To talk about, all right, Thank you John for having me on the show. Yeah. I am the executive director of Wildhorse Fire Brigade. We’re a five to one C three nonprofit and we have a proven proof of concept plan. We saw the thirty eight thousand acre wildfire by using American wild horses protected by President Nixon in seventy one to graze down all

0:52 this grass and brush that’s on fire everywhere. So these horses are most of our horses are actually in prison the government funded holding camps run by the Bureau of Land Management and charging taxpayers one hundred and fifty million a year to feed them grass. Why they’re in these holding areas. These are store horses that were rounded up illegally.

1:12 I mean, they’re not supposed to be there. According to the Act signed by President Nixon seventy one, there’s seventy thousand of them there. They’re sterilized and branded, and they’re kept away from their natural job of basically managing these grass and brush fuels. So our plan is to take these horses. It’s a free plan. So legislators don’t like

1:32 it because they can’t figure out how to make money. You know, the corrupt usual suspects, you know, when they hear it’s free, are actually it’s cash positive. We save one hundred and fifty million right off the top by rewilding, taking the horses out of the holding, and moving them into the deep wilderness where all these fires are at.

1:49 They don’t like it because they can’t figure out how to spend more taxpayer dollars with my plan. But it’s very effective. We’re looking at probably saving somewhere between seven and eleven billion dollars a year with this plan. It’s proven, and we know from the UCLA study that in eleven years from two thousand and eight to twenty eighteen, fifty

2:09 five thousand Californians died prematurely of toxins and wildfire smoke. These are men, women, and children mining their own business. And that cost US four hundred and thirty five billion dollars in economic impact. That was just California. So I took that at the UCLA study. I took that and had a computer extrapolated to the West coast. We’re looking

2:29 at two hundred and eighteen billion and health damages two hundred and eighteen billion a year, and we’re looking at thirty six thousand people dying prematurely just in the Western United States every year.

2:41 Speaker 1 Let me get this straight. Let’s take it take a number forty years ago, fifty years ago, how many wild horses were there in America running.

2:48 Speaker 2 Around About forty fifty years ago, there was about depending on who you listened to, probably about twenty five or thirty thousand.

2:57 Speaker 1 And how many are there now there.

3:00 Speaker 2 Is about seventy thousand, and government holding in about fifty thousand on the open range.

3:05 Speaker 1 And right now they’re being held in Oklahoma. And you and you’re saying that if we’d let them free on government land, what would happen?

3:17 Speaker 2 Then, Well, on all these ungrazed lands, we have a lot of vacant lands with no economic conflict where we could put these horses. You know, if you go back forty years, we had we had millions more deer and elk on the land which are gone. That’s why we have the fires. The herbivore has collapsed. California is down

3:33 one and a half million, two million deer. They were eating three million tons of grass and brush just in California. So the whole West Coast has the collapse of our Herbivorey East Coast has a lot of deer we don’t and that’s what’s killing us. And then in the early nineteen hundreds, we had about three million wild horses in

3:49 America and those are those are of course gone. We sent a million to Europe during World War One. So these horses by rewilding them, taking them out of there in holding areas in Oklahoma, they’re in Indiana while and these ranchers that failed, what they do is they just need a fenced area to b ablem to give them

4:05 a contract to hold these horses and feed them grass. And that costs US taxpayers one hundred and fifty million a year by taking them out of those areas, moving them back where they do the natural work of fire grazing in areas beyond economic conflict. It actually creates more grazing for the livestock industry that reduces fire. I mean,

4:26 we just talked about these big numbers. We could save probably fifty billion a year on what’s happening with the health and property and casualty impacts from wildfire. Talks to wildfire smoke, and then of course the direct damage from wildfire.

4:41 Speaker 1 And so you really think that it’ll it’ll be great for America because you have less wildfires and will save America money.

4:55 Speaker 2 Yeah, it’ll save lives. I mean, we’re talking about thirty six thousand people in the Western United States dying prematurely, men, women, and children from the toxins that are coming out of these new wildfires. The fires are hotter than they’ve ever been, so they’re creating these brand new toxins that the American Chemical Society just talked about in a report of December

5:14 of twenty twenty five, brand new science. These toxins are deadly. My wife was killed in the big wildfire up here. I was on the fire line study and what would happen with the horses we had we stopped the fire, I got long damage but she ended up dead from the toxins, along with five thousand other Californians who died

5:32 prematurely that year. So now the data is out from UCLA, we know the smoke is deadly, and we know it’s killing about thirty six thousand Americans prematurely every year, just in the Western United States.

5:45 Speaker 1 Well, William Simpson, thank you so much for coming on this Sunday morning, and let’s hope that we can do the right thing by the horses and by America and we’ll catch up again real soon.

5:59 Speaker 2 Thank you, John, appreciate it.