LETEA FOREST, Romania -- Last year, the wild horses of the Danube Delta were threatened by dehydration and death after their watering holes dried up during a summer drought. This year, there are new fears for the horses' safety -- and it isn't drought but microchips.
With their population growing in recent decades, local authorities and residents in the delta, one of the world's biggest wetlands whose waters flow into the Black Sea, say the horses need to be reined in, with conservationists warning about the risk of overgrazing to the delta's endangered flora.
But animal welfare organizations and others say the new plan to microchip around 2,000 horses, which make up one of the last surviving wild herds in Europe, risks letting unscrupulous individuals illegally grab ownership. In some cases, that means the famed equines are sent to the slaughterhouse.
The feral horses draw thousands of tourists each year, many of them to the Letea Forest, a heavily wooded expanse in the Danube Delta where many of the horses are concentrated. The horses help bring in millions of lei in revenues as one of the main attractions in the delta, Romania's largest nature reserve that straddles the border with Ukraine.
There are several explanations as to how the horses came to roam free in the delta. The one accepted by most researchers is that they are the product of centuries-old wild horse populations that have been mixing with animals hailing from the collective farms that were scrapped after the fall of communism. Some researchers have also suggested that some of the horses originally came from the Bugeac Steppe, in southern Moldova and today's Ukraine.
The horses learned to survive without humans, and their foals were born in the wild. In the absence of natural predators, such as wolves, which have now disappeared from the delta, the horses have multiplied.
In an interview with the Romanian news agency Agerpres in February, the head of the local Health Veterinary and Food Safety Office (DSVSA), Mitica Tuchila, said, "Horses which are claimed should be microchipped, while local authorities, the Delta administration…or the county council" will become owners of the rest. Under Romanian law, owners already have an obligation to get domesticated horses microchipped.
The exact number of horses -- a figure usually put somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 -- has been the subject of speculation, says Ovidiu Rosu, a veterinarian and member of the animal protection association ARCA. Specialists from the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve (ARBDD) and ARCA counted 1,926 horses in the whole Danube Delta when they flew over in February. They estimate that the total number is 10-12 percent higher as the helicopter wasn't able to monitor every area.
Mayor Antonel Pocora: "The moment these horses become, say, the property of the town hall, you realize the responsibilities that come with it, and this means that money is involved."
For some of the locals, the horses are a problem.
Antonel Pocora, the mayor of the commune of Rosetti in the delta's Tulcea County, told RFE/RL's Romanian Service that there are simply too many horses and that they are destroying vegetation and grazing areas and stripping bark from trees.
Journalists from RFE/RL's Romanian Service visited the area in March. Plumes of smoke from vegetation fires started by local residents to clean the land rose high into the sky. The wild horses, a popular image often used to promote Romania as a tourist destination, no longer looked their majestic best. They were scraggly and scrawny after the hard winter months when food is scarce.
Wild horses graze in Letea as fires burn in the distance.
One villager, who only gave his first name, Nelu, was more vehement. "Our village can't take so many horses…. Let's get them locked up, 100 or 200 of them," he said.
Alexandru Munteanu, a high-ranking local official from Tulcea County, confirmed the start of an "action plan" to manage the wild horses. Under the plan, horses that graze in the delta will be identified and microchipped.
At a public debate on the issue on March 15, attended by environmental NGOs and animal protection groups, Tuchila from the DSVSA spoke out in support of the plan.
"Microchipping is a natural, constitutional right of an animal owner to identify his animal," he said.
For the most part, animal rights groups disagree. They say the horses are wild and therefore cannot have owners. They also say it will encourage and allow people to falsely claim ownership of the horses. In recent months, activists from ARCA and members of the SOS Delta Horses civic group say that horses have already been illegally transported out of the delta.
Rodica Craciunescu from SOS Delta Horses says that microchipping effectively gives the horse an owner "and they can do what they please, meaning we can no longer intervene as [the animal now] has an owner."
"Given that we have cases of horses being illegally transported in recent months, [I'd say] this amounts to giving them a death sentence," Craciunescu said.
The exact number of horses -- a figure usually put somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 -- has been the subject of speculation.
While the microchipping hasn't begun yet, the fears of abuse don't seem to be unfounded.
Nicolae Godea, an animal trader from the Mihail Kogalniceanu commune close to the Danube Delta, bought 368 wild horses and the right to the ownership of all their offspring. The man who allegedly sold them to him, Constantin Ivanov from a village in the Danube Delta, reportedly told the notary that not all of the horses were registered due to his health problems. Nevertheless, the contract, which was seen by RFE/RL and states that the horses will be chipped in the future, was still legalized.
Animal rights activists have accused Godea of being involved in transporting horses to the slaughterhouse and he has been fined for "irregularities" in the documentation. Speaking about his acquisition of wild horses from his farm in Mihail Kogalniceanu, Godea said: "I like animals," adding that he was sure that the man who sold him the 368 wild horses would be able to identify each one individually.
Animal rights activists have accused Nicolae Godea of being involved in transporting horses to the slaughterhouse.
He told RFE/RL that he planned to leave the horses in the Danube Delta, but when pressed about why he had bought so many horses, he admitted that he will sell some of the stallions. He said that he plans to expand his business activities to Letea where he has bought a farm and wants to set up a farmers' association.
Prominent animal rights activist and expert on the wild horses of the delta, Kuki Barbuceanu, is suspicious of Godea's transaction.
"So, the owner of several hundred horses and their offspring suddenly appears from nowhere. That means that all the horses in the delta belong to one person. You couldn't make it up!" said Barbuceanu, who is also the chairman of the ARCA association.
Rosetti Mayor Pocora also has reservations about local authorities becoming owners of the wild horses.
"The moment these horses become, say, the property of the town hall, you realize the responsibilities that come with it, and this means that money is involved. I don't understand how we can do it. Should we hire guards to graze the horses or what should we do?" he asked.
This isn't the first time there have been fears about the horses' welfare.
In the summer of 2022, locals, tourists, and the media warned that the only two watering holes in the horses' Letea Forest enclosure had dried up. Dependent on the springs for their drinking water, the horses were in danger of dehydration and death.
Finally, after several weeks, local officials arranged for sand to be cleared from both springs to allow water to reach the surface. The governor of the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve also ordered the opening of a gate to allow horses and other large animals to pass.
Animal rights groups say the horses are wild and therefore cannot have owners.
Meanwhile, animal rights activists from groups such as ARCA are looking into other ways in Letea to control the horses' breeding and reduce their impact on the local environment.
Veterinarian Ovidiu Rosu says microchipping the delta's wild horses is logistically difficult and inefficient. Instead, he goes out into the wilderness in an off-road vehicle so he can get as close as possible to the horses. He then fires fertility-control vaccines from an air rifle into the flesh of the mares to stop them from conceiving for a year. It's not easy work, he said, as the horses are easily startled. In March, he recounted, it took four days to vaccinate 30 mares.
Despite the difficulties, Rosu can't see a good alternative.
"Other countries use similar noninvasive, nontraumatic methods [to control free-roaming horses], such as American mustangs and brumbies in Australia," he says.
The association is preparing a new vaccination campaign in which they will use a vaccine that lasts three years rather than just one.
Researcher Stefan Raileanu, from the Association of Equine Veterinarians in Romania at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Cluj-Napoca, has proposed marking the animal's skin with liquid nitrogen at a very low temperature, a process known as freeze branding. That would allow authorities and NGOs to monitor the horses remotely with binoculars.
However, Raileanu still fears there could be abuses, with horses still sold to disreputable individuals.
In the meantime, he proposes creating an office that would oversee the wild horses, along the lines of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which manages and protects wild horses and burros across 10 Western states.
"The horses in the delta deserve this," Raileanu says. He hopes that the authorities won't give anyone a tool to butcher them.