Connemaras need to evolve to avoid extinction

Where will climate change leave the American Connemara in 2050, three decades from now?

How will climate change affect horses in general?

One would expect horses’ relevance in an increasingly stressed world to be the No. 1 topic in many horse societies and publications.

The United States Equestrian Federation in 2013 launched an initiative to make the welfare of the horse a priority in the 21st century. Has USEF held webinars on whether there will be horses at all? I cannot find evidence of such a discussion.

The American Connemara Pony Society requires Connemara breeders to produce thick-legged, “rugged,” pony-heighted horses if the breeder wants the Connemara to pass an inspection by society officials, which are essentially three people with clipboards.

It’s perhaps the most selfish, short-sighted decision ever inflicted on American Connemaras, in my opinion; it was designed to benefit the herds of top Connemara officials, who often are the inspectors.

What can this thick-legged, rugged pony do? It’s hard to say.

Connemara inspections have no performance requirement, and some Connemaras inspected in 2015 in St. Louis were sticky movers that barely followed directions in hand.

Horses require expensive care, and they use a lot of resources, including acreage, hay, grass, feed, and shavings.

The annual cost of a recreational horse in the United States rose to $6,710 in 2016, nearly three times the cost of $2,319 in 2003, according to the American Horse Council.

The annual cost of a show horse rose to $24,239 in 2016, more than seven times the cost of $3,186 in 2003, according to the AHC.

This is no longer play money. Someone investing this amount of money wants tangible results.

Horses also contribute heavily to carbon emissions, and burying a horse has become a formidable challenge due to new restrictions, lack of services, and huge costs.

Florida’s horse population in 2016 totaled 387,100, the third highest total in the country, behind Texas and California.

University of Miami geologist Harold Wanless issued a warning about Florida’s coastal flooding and future coastal migration in an interview in National Geographic’s documentary “Paris to Pittsburgh.”

Wanless was speaking to Chris Castro, director of sustainability in Orlando, and said, “I think somewhere later in this century, Miami as we know it is going to be unlivable, so in reality in South Florida, we’re just going to be leaving. We don’t have the problem. You, up in Orlando, you better set aside your groundwater resources, and you better plan for us, you really better plan, because we are coming.”

South Florida is made up of the Miami-Dade/Broward/Palm Beach metropolitan area. It is home to 6 million people and includes Wellington, Florida, the winter horse capital of the English riding world.

Scientists in the documentary said coastal flooding is happening more quickly than expected, and a bigger swath of U.S. coastal residents will need to move inland by 2050 than originally forecast.

The U.S. population of 328 million in 2019 increases by a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau estimated in 2018 that, despite slowing population growth, particularly after 2030, the U.S. population is still expected to grow by 78 million people by 2060, crossing the 400 million threshold in 2058.

All of these added people will have to go somewhere, as will the displaced people from the coast.

Climate change may affect crops and the livability of other areas in the U.S.

Rising heat will affect every aspect of life, as will increasingly frequent disasters that wipe out people’s homes and farms.

Assuming there’s a place in that chaos for horses, and that’s assuming a lot, the horse’s role likely will remain as a recreational or performance horse.

It seems unlikely that horses will be lawn ornaments.

Most children will spend the bulk of their time indoors on their devices, if current trends continue.

Horses will have to compete for the few places left for them, and Darwin’s theory will take over. The fittest will survive.

The fittest will be horses designed to perform and win, those with the greatest spirit and intelligence that can cope with shrinking space and more people at every turn, while still delivering what is asked.

These horses are unlikely to be thick-legged, short, rugged ponies that are untrained but match a description on paper of one type of Connemara from Ireland in the early 1900s, a representative of a time before automobiles, the internet, mobile phones, and rapidly increasing climate change.

The Connemara required of the American Connemara Pony Society will be relegated to the history books, another victim of a changing world where relevance required evolution, not staying the same.