You are incorrect on near all accounts here pal. Horses originated in North America and were hunted to extinction 10k years back by the clovis hunters. They were originally the size of dogs, and at some point made it across the Beiring Strait when frozen.

This is like suggesting that elephants are the same as woolly mammoths… they’re not even remotely the same thing. The horses today are not even close, the Spanish brought them here a few hundred years ago.

Wolves and Mountain Lions absolutely will kill and eat horses.

Yep, they sure will, but they’re not going to control the population at all. A wolf/pumas main food source is deer/elk. Not horses.

Ranchers and the right wing in general absolutely did not realize it was a mistake to kill them, in fact they are trying to finish the job and extirpate them from the continent. Idk where you were left with the impression ranchers stopped killing wolves and pumas. They like to tell their people to shoot, shovel, and shut up, about killing them illegally.

This I will admit shocked me a bit, the last time I spoke with some of my friends who are ranchers they liked the idea of the wolves coming back. Most were were worried about the damage that the deer population has caused, which is completely out of control. Seeing that this is no longer the case, and that ranchers are pissed because they lose a few cows a year is a bit ridiculous on their part.

And there are precious few wolves left. A couple thousand in Minnesota, a couple hundred in Michigan, a couple lone packs in the north cascades, (they killed an entire pack some years back, one of only a few,) and yellowstone has some. Not comprehensive, but those are the biggest populations of wolves that I am aware of, not sure of the Sierra Nevadas it seems like they must have some too.

https://www.fws.gov/species/gray-wolf-canis-lupus

So looks like I’m out of the loop on the timeline. They delisted in 2020 and relisted them in 2022. Interesting, I was under the impression they had a healthy population.