Horses and rangelands: Mutual contributions and perspectives[Chevaux et parcours : apports mutuels et perspectives]

Horses are increasingly present in pastoral areas but little is known about their potential contribution to rangeland utilization. In order to investigate this question in the context of Southern France, a specific research project was undertaken, with: 1) a farm-scale analysis to determine the importance of rangelands for horse feeding in agro-pastoral farming systems and 2) a territorial analysis to identify the role and importance of horses for pastoral areas, based on inventories, spatial analysis with GIS and interviews with local stakeholders. Among the "professional" equine farms we investigated, only a few feeding systems relied mainly on rangelands. In the other farms, rangeland utilization was limited due to lack of land, equipment or pastoral knowledge. At the territorial scale, horses were rarely accepted as proper rangeland users and the access of horse owners to land depended on the evolution of local ruminant farms. For a number of stakeholders, horses can help reducing land abandonment and show interesting complementarities with ruminants. Further research is needed about the interest of associating horses with ruminants for rangeland utilization at farm and landscape scales.