Are wild horses native to the US, and does it matter?

New Scientist : In a case before a US federal court, animal rights groups are arguing that wild horses of the American West should be considered a native species and thus deserving of the same protections as elk or antelope. If the claim is successful, it could change the way the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages tens of thousands of wild horses on federal lands, writes Bob Holmes for New Scientist. Although it is generally accepted that North America is the ancestral home of horses, today’s wild horses are the feral descendants of domestic ones brought over from Europe centuries ago. Yet according to some researchers, whether or not the horses are native ought to be irrelevant to their treatment by the BLM. Mark Davis at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, is lead author of a new paper in Nature that questions the valuing of native species over nonnative ones. He says the distinction between native and introduced is arbitrary: “The question should be, are wild horses causing a problem? Are they providing benefits? Then you can develop policy to either reduce or increase their numbers.”