I do not ever want anyone to mistakenly assume that the training and breeding program that we have developed for the Corollas will be an adequate substitute for maintaining a wild herd on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. All we are creating is a safety net, and a tenuous one at best.
Before cars, before the Civil War, before Nat Turner and Dred Scott, before the Constitution, before the Revolution, and yes, even before the settlers landed at Jamestown, Spanish Colonial horses roamed free in the southeast. Now they only reside wild and free and purely Spanish at Corolla and Shackleford.
They survived the wars. They survived the hurricanes. What ever the threat, they survived. If your ancestors, be they black, northern European, Indian, or Spanish, lived in the triangle drawn from Richmond to New Orleans to Key West; between the early 1500's and the American Revolution, they rode and worked these little Spanish horses. These horses carried my ancestors to their weddings, their wars, and their funerals.
Why should they be preserved? Because we do not have the right to extinguish history.
And I bet some of them were too heavy to carry. Or am I beating a dead horse?
ReplyDeleteThere are folks who work to preserve prarie, even after barbed wire became the norm. (Really..there is a program at Columbia that maintains a few acres of twelve foot deep prarie grass..such as what you would have read about in " By the Shores of Silver Lake" by Laura Ingalls Wilder...) and there are those who sail square riggers...still keeping their backs to the wind despite the switch to steam...it will always be so. And there will always bethose who rail against those who do...that is too dangerous, stop breeding garbage, you cannot do that because I said so...right...watch me. I suppose it is human nature to meddle, and has often caused me to wonder at our life expectancy.
There are a few groups dedicated to preserving these horses...there needs to be more. My fondest daydream has been to have enough land to raise cattle and smaller livestock, but you can bet your last bag of alfalfa meal that there would include a few corollas and western mustang mares. Too many eggs in one fragile basket. It is not even easter yet. -Lloyd
Amen, and then some!
ReplyDeleteThanks for putting it in words, Steve.
Nanci