There was a time when almost all Americans took some delight in the scene of mounted horsemen on a trail in wildlands. There was something about a horse that most humans, Americans in particular, traditionally found to be inspirational. There was something almost spiritual about this creature of such power, beauty and the fire of wildness embedded in it yielding to the touch of a comparatively frail human. The presence of this animal seemed to magnify the presence of the human.
Deep within the American psyche, the wonder of it all still lingers - embedded notions of our not too distant past. The contemporary advertising industry senses this phenomenon as it uses the images of horses to enhance the marketing of clothing, automotive vehicles, food and beverages to millions of people who will never touch a horse.
But in an ever-modernizing America, barely out of its wilderness cradle, the real circumstance of the horse and rider in wildlands is changing. The horse and rider, once a symbol of a rich freedom in a place to be free in, is becoming pictured as the despoiler of such wild places. The newly developing image is one in which the horse and rider are no longer a part of wildness, but rather a possible contaminating entity.
At stake are our cultural and natural heritages. We celebrate these heritages in our recreational trail riding experiences. Like other kinds of wildland recreation, horse trail recreation is about solitude, challenge, and risks; just as importantly, it is about human-horse companionship, knowledge of the animal and the land which we both traverse, and a sense of horse-human-land harmony in a wild and scenic setting. It is in this experience that trail horsemen become renewed and re-created. It is here that we accumulate the memories to be dreamed when we return to the conveniences and routine of the modern, organized world. It is these experiences that keep us in touch with where we really came from and how we got here.
The Southeastern Equestrian Trails Conference is needed to bring trail equestrians together to take stock of themselves in reality and the realism of how they are perceived by other users of wildlands. Rightly or wrongly, trail equestrians have an increasingly tarnished image in the view of organizations that perceive themselves as the protectors of wilderness and the quality of wildness. The record is replete with evidence that these organizations have become extraordinarily powerful in leveraging the public land management agencies. As these agencies must suffer major budget constraints, the most expedient thing to do is to give the highest priority to the most passive types of land use.
The U.S. Forest Service Region 8, Southern Region, includes the 13 most southeastern states extending west to Texas and Oklahoma and north to Virginia and Kentucky. In this region the Service estimates that there are 4.7 million people who participate in recreational horseback riding, and that 3.2 million of them do recreational trail riding.
SETC covers an eight-state sub-region of the Southern Region, the South Atlantic states plus Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. The sum of the individual estimates of state horse populations within SETC is 1.6 million. It is reasonable to conjecture that at least two-thirds of these horses are, on average, trail-ridden once each year. If this is the case, then more than one million horses are annually on trails in the SETC region.
