College-Ready Writers Program Writing Task Day 1 Reading Packet H Wild Horses Northern wild horses Source: US Fish and Wildlife Service Student first name: Student last name: Teacher name: Class period: Grade level: 8th 9th 10th PROMPT FOR WRITING H. Wild Horses Wild horses have become a subject of debate. Wild horses are protected by law, and yet the number of horses has increased so much that they cannot get enough to eat on public land. What do you think the Bureau of Land Management should do about the challenge of managing wild horses? Why? Write an argument. Use ideas and evidence from the reading packet to support your argument. Use what you have learned about citing and quoting sources in your writing
Reading 6 Should We Protect Wild Horses? By Chuck Klosterman, March 21, 2014 Question: In the United States, it’s illegal to kill a wild horse on public lands. Yet wild horses can have destructive grazing behavior, and indigenous grazers and browsers (deer, for example) have to compete with them for land. . . Is it unethical to protect wild horses? T.G., NEW YORK Response: . . .Your argument is that wild horses hurt the environment; I’d argue that wild horses have become part of the environment itself. Horses alter the ecological landscape, but we’d be altering the landscape by eliminating the horses. If your point is that there’s a degree of hypocrisy in the human relationship with horses, I [agree]. There are certain animals humans tend to care about more than others, and it can seem arbitrary. If your thoughts on animal rights exist at one of the philosophical poles — if you believe no animal should ever be killed, or if you believe any animal can be killed for any reason — this question is easy. But most people are somewhere in the middle, holding views that don’t always make rational sense. For example, I find the extermination of invasive pythons in Florida less unsettling than the extermination of invasive Mustangs in Nevada. This is my emotional reaction. But ethics forces people to consider things that might contradict their feelings. The Bureau of Land Management estimates there are about 33,780 wild horses on public U.S. rangeland. The optimal population would be smaller by several thousand. Some may argue that thinning the herd increases the quality of life for the species as whole, which is true — assuming you’re not one of the horses to be eliminated. I would ultimately say this: It’s unethical to protect wild horses (which are currently not categorized as endangered) if our only reasoning is that we happen to like horses and believe they deserve preferential treatment. Our policy and criteria for horse populations should be the same as our policy for coyotes or any other mammal. But none of these species should be radically culled unless they pose a direct threat to human which does not appear to be the case. Now, if that sounds as if I’m “privileging” human life over nonhuman life, it’s because I am. I don’t think humans and nonhumans are
equal. But that doesn’t mean we can treat animals as bloodless statistical populations that we control at our convenience. Source: Klosterman, Chuck. “Should We Protect Wild Horses?” New York Times. New York Times, 21 March 2014. Web. 28 March 2014. About the author: Chuck Klosterman is full-time ethicist for the New York Times who, as a writer, confronts all manner of thorny questions and who isn’t afraid of expressing his opinions about how things are and How They Should Be.