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    The Hoofprints Guide to the Wild Horses of Assateague
    The Hoofprints Guide to the Wild Horses of Assateague
    The Hoofprints Guide to the Wild Horses of Assateague
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    The Hoofprints Guide to the Wild Horses of Assateague

    By Bonnie Gruenberg

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    About this ebook

    Conflict. Controversy. Compromise. The free-roaming horses of Assateague have survived on this ever-changing barrier island for hundreds of years. Today, Assateague is a National Seashore, where natural resource conservation is prioritized and more than 2 million people a year visit to enjoy the beach, camping and myriad recreational opportunities. The clever, resilient horses have adapted well to the incursion of people into their home ranges, but the presence of horses on the island has created friction as factions argue for against their continued residence. Nearly everyone closely involved with the fate of the herds of the Atlantic coast has a territory, an agenda, a prejudice, an unexamined assumption, that impedes rational thought or discourse. When these forces collide, battles ensue that hinge more on emotion than evidence. Distilled from the encyclopedic work Wild Horse Dilemma: Conflicts and Controversies of the Atlantic Coast Herds and including bonus photographs, the Hoofprints Guides offer in-depth information about each of the free-roaming East Coast herds. Each volume details the history, management concerns, behavior, and biological realities of each of the coastal populations.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBonnie Gruenberg
    Release dateSep 19, 2015
    ISBN9781941700334
    The Hoofprints Guide to the Wild Horses of Assateague
    Author

    Bonnie Gruenberg

    Bonnie U. Gruenberg, MSN, CNM, CRNP, is a practicing midwife, photographer, artist, avid horsewoman, and author of ground-breaking books, including The Wild Horse Dilemma: Conflicts and Controversies of the Atlantic Coast herds (2015), Hoofprints in the Sand (2002), Essentials of Prehospital Maternity Care(2005), and Birth Emergency Skills Training (2008). She has been studying and writing about the wild horses of the Atlantic Coast since 1994. She practices midwifery at a free-standing birth center in Lancaster County, PA.

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      Book preview

      The Hoofprints Guide to the Wild Horses of Assateague - Bonnie Gruenberg

      THE HOOFPRINTS GUIDE TO

      The Wild Horses

      of Assateague

      xDSC_4937.tif
      THE HOOFPRINTS GUIDE TO

      The Wild Horses

      of Assateague

      Written and Illustrated by

      Bonnie U. Gruenberg

      quaggas4.tif

      The Hoofprints Guide to the Wild Horses of Assateague

      Copyright © 2015 by Bonnie U. Gruenberg.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical (including photocopying, recording, and scanning), except as permitted under the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

      Quagga Press, the Quagga Press logo, and Hoofprints Guide are trademarks or registered trademarks of ­Bonnie U. Gruenberg and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

      All illustrations © 2015 Bonnie U. Gruenberg except as noted. The author’s paintings, drawings, and photographs, including those used in this book, are available as posters and giftware at www.BonnieGPhoto.com

      ISBN 13: 978-1-941700-24-2

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2015936072

      Published by Quagga Press, an imprint of Synclitic Media, LLC 1646 White Oak Road • Strasburg, PA 17579 • www.quaggapress.com

      Also by the author

      The Wild Horse Dilemma: Conflicts and Controversies of the Atlantic Coast Herds (Quagga Press, 2015)

      The Hoofprints Guide Series (Quagga Press, 2015)

      Assateague

      Chincoteague

      Corolla

      Ocracoke

      Shackleford Banks

      Cumberland Island

      Hoofprints in the Sand, Kindle Edition (Quagga Press, 2014)

      Wild Horses of the Atlantic Coast: An Intimate Portrait, Kindle Edition (Quagga Press, 2014)

      Hoofprints in the Sand (as Bonnie S. Urquhart; Eclipse, 2002)

      Essentials of Prehospital Maternity Care (Prentice Hall, 2005)

      Birth Emergency Skills Training (Birth Guru/Birth Muse, 2008)

      The Midwife’s Journal (Birth Guru/Birth Muse, 2009)

      Forthcoming

      Wild Horse Vacations: Where To See the East Coast Herds and What Else To Do While You’re Visiting (Quagga Press, 2015)

      Wild Horses! A Kids’ Guide to the East Coast Herds (Quagga Press, 2015)

      Birth Emergency Skills Training, 2nd Edition (Synclitic Press, 2015).

      00239.tifxDSC_5179.jpg00079.tif0022.tif

      Introduction

      In July 2010, record high temperatures drove people to the shore, where they staked territory on the beach hoping to catch a blessed sea breeze. I was no different. As the mercury topped 100°, I joined the mighty throng of escapees to the Maryland end of Assateague Island, laid out a towel, raised an umbrella, and popped up my shelter. When I looked up to survey the landscape, the incongruity momentarily startled me. Even after decades of regular visits, the scene seemed bizarre. On Assateague, among the multitude of noisy families and the prostrate sunbathers, wild horses lay snoring in the sand, wandered among visitors, and splashed in the surf. Across the dunes, in the camping area, wild horses ransacked tents and opened coolers, looking for food. Millions of people prefer Assateague over any other beach largely because it is home to free-roaming horses that are clever, crafty, and wholly acclimated to the presence of people on the islands that they and their ancestors have roamed for hundreds of years.

      More than 2 million people visit Assateague Island National Seashore every year, crowding into the developed areas or hiking out to enjoy solitude in maritime wilderness. Yet most people who spend time on this beautiful island are unfamiliar with its unique history, its environmental concerns, and the political winds that shape policies affecting it. The majority of people who visit Assateague to watch wild horses have no knowledge of their history, their behavior, or their bio-logical realities.

      When I first started researching the wild horses in the mid-1990s, I was surprised to find that wild horses lived on a number of Atlantic barrier islands and had once ranged along much of the Atlantic coast. They made their first hoofprints there not long after the arrival of early European -settlers, and in time they ran free on innumerable North American islands and peninsulas from the Caribbean to Canada. I learned that small herds remained on the coast of Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Georgia; on Sable Island, off Nova Scotia, Canada; and on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas. Each population of horses has its own character, its own history, and its own set of problems. In most cases, these animals have made a unique contribution to local history, and each herd has its own detractors and defenders.

      After my first book, Hoofprints in the Sand: Wild Horses of the Atlantic Coast, was published in 2002 by Eclipse Press, I dove in deeper, interviewing experts, evaluating the evidence, and monitoring the herds. I explored management conflicts that encompassed political, economic, and cultural issues as well as purely scientific ones. I studied storms and shipwrecks, equine be-havior and genetics, history, epidemiology, barrier-island dynamics, sea-level rise, beach devel-opment, and the perpetual clash of viewpoints. I studied hundreds of documents, from historical papers to scholarly journals to court transcripts, so that I might accurately present the pertinent issues. Distilling all this information, I tried to present all sides of the issues fairly so that readers might reach their own conclusions. The result is The Wild Horse Dilemma: Conflicts and Controversies of the Atlantic Coast Herds (Quagga Press, 2015) the most comprehensive work ever published about these horses.

      Wild Horse Dilemma is exhaustively researched, copiously documented, and peer-reviewed; but at 600 pages it may be too long for many people eager to learn about a particular herd. For readers with limited time, I created the Hoofprints Series. Excerpted from Wild Horse Dilemma and containing additional photographs, each Hoofprints book presents a single Atlantic Coast herd in sufficient detail to satisfy both the layman and the academic.

      I take all my wild-horse photographs though telephoto lenses that let me to keep my distance. When horses approached, I retreated. My goal has been to remain so peripheral to their lives, they will forget that I am nearby. Because countless people have stroked them, fed them, and lured them, some can be momentarily docile, occasionally indifferent, or routinely bold and pushy in the presence of people. As anyone bitten or trampled can attest, they are no less wild than horses that avoid human contact. When we impose ourselves and our desires on their lives, when we habituate them to our presence, when we teach them to approach us for food and at-tention, we rob them of their wildness. When we treat them as we would their domestic counter-parts, we miss the opportunity to observe them in a natural state, that is, to appreciate the things that make them irresistibly attractive. We miss the very point of driving past thousands of their tame kin to seek them out. We create something like a petting zoo hazardous to us and to them. If we truly love and respect wild creatures, we must learn to stand back and enjoy watching them from afar. Only then can they—and we—know the real meaning of wildness.

      As the earth’s dominant species, we have the power to preserve or destroy the wildlife of the world and the ecosystems in which they live. The choices we make regarding wild horses are far-reaching. We alter their destiny whether we act or choose to do nothing. We can begin to deal wisely with wild horses by understanding the facts and discovering how the threads of their existence are woven into the tapestry of life. Only through understanding can we hope to make rational, educated decisions about the welfare of these fascinating, inspiring animals.

      Bonnie U. Gruenberg

      Strasburg, Pennsylvania

      March 1, 2015

      Assateague

      Assa52010-364.tif3-0.tif3%20assachinc%20rev2%20for%20spinoff.tif

      A t the Maryland end of Assateague Island, visitors to the state and

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