RIVER CITY JOURNAL: WHO IS WILDER: HORSES OR PEOPLE?

Growing up near the Black River and Current River in the Ozarks was special, no two ways about it. Rivers are exciting places for young boys, and the wooded hills around those two rivers were made for exploring and hunting.

After living away from the area so long, you lost touch with some of the hot issues. One of those is what to do with wild horses in the Ozark National Scenic Riverways.

Wild horses?

Experts think the horses are descendants of domesticated horses that were allowed to run free in the 1950s.

For those of you who grew up in the Ozarks of Southeast Missouri about that time, you surely will remember that most of the area was open range. That meant farmers could let their livestock roam at will during the warm months of the year to graze. As a Cape Girardeau banker observed recently, the best crop produced on an Ozarks farm is rocks. How true, which is why your aged step-father gets such a sour look every time he sees the rock collection your family has acquired from all over the country.

Along Ozarks blacktops in the 1950s were official highway signs: Watch out for stock. Open range.

Sure enough, it was a common sight in the spring, summer and early fall to see cattle, hogs, a few goats and sometimes horses on or alongside the highways. They had the right of way. Killing a farmer's livestock with an automobile was like taking food off his table.

The roaming animals also invaded gardens, corn fields and hay meadows, sometimes with disastrous results. Have you ever seen a vegetable garden after a few of the neighbor's hogs visit?

You also had a couple of horses during those years. You would gladly have let them loose. Those horses might just as well have been wild rogues. Every time you got on one it would head for the nearest low tree limb. Those horses were mean, but they weren't stupid.

This isn't a confession. As far as you know those horses went to the glue factory after they were finished terrorizing young boys. They weren't let loose to start a herd of wild horses.

How bad is it to have horses along protected rivers? Experts are pretty worried about upsetting the balance of nature and all that, but how can horses nobody knows about be such a terrible threat?

Consider your uncle, the one who poaches wild game and fish year around. You don't need his name. The game wardens know it by heart. He has covered every square mile of the woods around the Current River. A few years back he even successfully stalked a black bear in that area. Not once over the years did he ever mention an encounter with wild horses.

The worst free-roaming animal you have ever seen or seen evidence of in the woods is two-legged and carries a gun, matches and a chain saw. The woods are irreparably damaged when endangered animals are shot, or the woods are set afire or trees are harvested indiscriminately on steep hillsides prone to erosion.

Free-flowing rivers crammed with canoeing fools who befoul the landscape are the real travesty of the protected riverways. You never saw a horse leave a pile of disposable diapers on a sandbar. No horse ever tossed aluminum cans in a river. No horse has ever stuck garbage under a rock on a riverbank.

Before the horses are rounded up, it might make more sense to corral a few homo sapiens. If you can find them, that is. In the vast woods of the Ozarks, some of these miscreants are about as easy to find as horses running free.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.