Why you can't feed the Corolla wild horses

Because the law is protecting the horse from your kindness. Feeding is the fastest way there is to teach a wild animal that people mean food, and a horse that expects food from people stops keeping the distance that keeps it alive. Currituck County understood that trade clearly enough to write the ban in the flattest language its ordinance contains — and it did not stop at feeding.

The details

The prohibition itself is four words long. Section 3-36 of the county ordinance — Feeding, riding, petting prohibited — states that it shall be unlawful for any person to feed, ride, pet, or approach with the intent to feed, ride, or pet any wild horse. Read the verbs in order and you see the design: feeding is barred, and so is approaching with the plan to feed. Intent travels with you down the beach.

Then the ordinance closes the gap everyone thinks they have found. Luring has its own definition, and it is broader than handing over a carrot: Luring = feeding, petting, or any attractant — actively enticing or tempting by feeding, petting, or any other means that would attract the animal. The offense is complete when you hold the food out. The horse does not have to reach you; a witness only has to see the gesture.

The penalty clause keeps the promise. The ordinance's enforcement section — Violation is a misdemeanor — routes a violation through the county's general penalty provision, and the evidence rule lowers the bar further: Two-witness prima facie rule makes complaints from two residents of different homes prima facie evidence. On a crowded summer beach, two witnesses are the minimum the sand provides.

Why so strict? Because a wild horse cannot unlearn a lesson. The herd's survival skill is distance — wariness of people, of vehicles, of the hand that looks friendly and is the beginning of dependency. A horse that starts expecting food starts approaching cars and porches to find it, and every behavior that follows is downhill from the first offer. That is why the ordinance's neighboring sections are just as absolute: Cruelty to wild horses unlawful bars molesting, wounding, poisoning, and conditions detrimental to welfare, and No possessing or harboring bars possessing, harboring, or confining a wild horse at all except under a veterinarian's treatment. The county is not regulating a nuisance; it is protecting an animal it has legally classified as wild.

If you want to do something for the herd, do the thing that actually helps: watch from the line, and support the nonprofit that manages the herd under its county agreement — organized by local citizens in 1989, CWHF organized 1989, 501(c)(3) in 2001, and doing the work a carrot never could.

The kindest thing you can hand a wild horse is nothing at all. The county wrote that into law; the herd's life depends on everyone reading it the same way.