The other day I watched part of a documentary on PBS about wild horse herds in Montana. It was pretty interesting. One of the things that was interesting was the on-going dramas where stallions would put together bands of mares and their foals, and then other stallions would spend all their time running around trying to steal them from each other. Good times.

The other thing that was interesting was something they called a “Judas Horse” which was basically a domesticated horse which was trained to trick the wild horses when the land management people do their annual round-ups. The idea is that that the wild horses are highly social creatures, so they try to find out about and follow whatever this new-comer domestic horse is doing. The Judas Horse, however, has been trained ahead of time to lead the other horses into a trap, so that they can then be corralled. It’s sad, cause then they go out with the helicopters to help round up the wild horses and then sell some of them off and slaughter others. But I guess they have their reasons, and I don’t really know the first thing about land management.