Monday, December 6, 2010

Winter Break Goals

With my final exam on Thursday, I am free for three weeks to do my own personal research!  By writing this post highlighting what I want to accomplish in that time period, I hope it forces me to stick with it and be productive.

Winter Break Objectives:
  1. to study the Mongolian wild horse, an endangered horse that has never successfully been domesticated. what are their natural predators?  What caused their drastic decline?  What are they doing to bring these horses back?  Will that effect their species?  What are the differences between them and domestic/feral horses that we have in the United States?
  2. to study the social changes horses went through during the 20th century.  They went from a work animal, valuable for the strength and speed they offered, to a companion animal, valued for their beauty and friendship.  They are moving from "livestock" to "pet."  What implications does this have for the horse species?  What effects might this have in the future for the horse world?
  3. to define my thesis after visiting the Burns District BLM
These are my main study goals.  If anyone wants me to look into something and produce a little paper about it, let me know!  As long as it pertains to free-roaming horses, I am all over it.

2 comments:

  1. Hm. Przewalski horse might be off the list. There really is not a whole lot of literature about them that I can get to, unfortunately.

    So, as was suggested to me on R.T. Fitch's blog, I think I will do a comparison study of barrier island and salt marsh horses to Great Basin horses.

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  2. That's too bad, I was excited about the Pretzel horses! I was going to ask you if, aside from the obvious (Chernobyl), their habitat has changed much in the last hundred years, or if it's fairly static.

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