North American wild horses also referred to as "mustangs" are the successors of Spanish or Iberian horses that Spanish explorers brought to America in the 16th century. The word mustang was derived from the Spanish word "mustengo," which means "stray horse."

Recently, a proposal was filed to include these wild horses to the list of threatened or endangered species, but The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) rejected the proposal to list the North American wild horses, Oregon Live reports.

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Last summer, Friends of Animals and The Cloud Foundation filed a petition, seeking Endangered Species Act protection to thousands of mustangs, which, according to them, were threatened with extinction on federal lands across 10 Western states, from California to Montana.

An argument has been circling about the horses' distinct population since these native horses are very different from domesticated horses.

The USFWS refused a 90-day move to study the subject further; they concluded that a horse is a horse, be it wild or domesticated. 

"Although behaviors between domestic and wild, or feral, animals of the same species may differ, we find that the petition does not present substantial information that the North American wild horse may be markedly separate from other populations of horse as a consequences of behavioral differences," the agency said, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

The petition mentioned that since President Richard Nixon signed the Free Roaming Wild Horse and Burro Act into Law in 1971, mustangs' habitat has decreased by up to 40 percent.

It goes down to an argument when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) long rejected that the wild horse is a native species, that the Northern American wild horses went extinct temporarily on the continent 11,000 to 13,000 years ago, way before the Spanish conquerors reintroduced the said horse to North America in the 1500s.

Nevertheless, BLM has maintained its opinion that the American wild horses are not native. Friends of Animals expressed their disappointment over the conclusion of BLM, TechTimes reports.

Jennifer Barnes, lawyer of Friends of Animals, said, "These horses are different, they are treated different under the law, they behave differently and there's some evidence they are genetically different."

She added that they plan to look for more details before they would decide if they should file an emended petition to slow down BLM's roundups of mustangs.

TagsNorth America, Wild Horse, endangered species