Multiple studies have been done regarding the proliferation of weeds & what to blame.
Horses have become a convenient target. They don’t deserve such.
The list of what/who distributes weeds includes:
The RAILROADS. A rail car can be in So Florida today & be in Idaho in 5 days. They pass thru miles and miles of ‘Federal land’ (Which should NOT be OWNED by the FEDS in the first place), & they distribute weeds.
WIND. Surely EPA & all the Enviros cannot stop the wind-—so they hammer at what they can instead. I am only talking about normal wind patterns here.
BIRDS-—both regional & migrating. Again— The Enviros cannot stop that, so they hammer at a weaker foe.
STORMS/TORNADOES-—again, the enviros cannot stop those, so they focus on the horses.
HORSES-—are WAY down the list of culprits. Feeding ‘Weed Free” hay is quite expensive, both to the grower & to the buyer/user. If your horse is used to baled hay & suddenly has to use cubes or pellets, colic can result. Colic is still the major killer of horses each & every year, notwithstanding some sort of viral outbreak. The availibility of such feed isn’t constant, either. The drought in the SW has caused a domino effect on hay prices and availability this year. Texas horse owners are getting hay from as far away as Florida. Cattle owners sent a majority of their herds to market early & skinny because they could not get hay. I cannot sell my horses with this economy & I cannot slaughter them for other uses, either. I must keep feeding them SOMETHING!!!
The rules that Barry the Imposter’s administration put in front of the mining company is no more than a blockade to prevent any mining.
When there is no more copper for wiring in new homes, offices & government buildings, someone younger than I has to remember this complete lunacy on the part of this administration.
Shades of the pages of Atlas Shrugged & D’Anconia Copper!!!
I believe the American Horse Council has hard evidence of such studes.
The world is always full of both stoppable and unstoppable problems.
Not sure the fact that unstoppable problems exist in the world is a good reason to control the stoppable ones.
I’m not even really arguing that this particular rule is a good or necessary one, either at all, or for this area. I’ll leave that to others more educated than me. That prevents me from sounding like an idiot to someone who actually does understand the particulars.
What I do know, and wanted to correct, were the several posters who, knowing even less about it than I do, thought it was something stupid about mule nutrition. It’s not.
I am a horse owner and understand the challenges with feeding horses, in this and other years. Too much rain, not enough, high gas prices, even volcanos, make finding hay a challenge in any given year. If it’s not one thing it’s another...
Acclimating horses to pellets before pack trips, or even all the time, is actually a pretty good way to make their diet more stable and consistent, all throughout the year, year to year. Worth doing if you want to ride in these areas very much... A bale of hay is no fun to pack in anyhow. :)