A farmer i work for told me maple leaves are toxic to horses. id never heard that before but i never owned horses either.
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Really good feedback on my question, I am compiling it and will pass it on to my daughter! The suggestions for red mulberry and lindens particularly jumped out at me as having merit. No idea about what they might do for protection. They already have a couple of trees in one of the goat fields, and it’s fun to see the herd stand up on two legs to prune the leaves into a straight cut like Moe of the Three Stooges.
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Lindens are great for bees and linden honey is one of the most valued kinds here. They also grow large and broad and make good shade.
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They are poisonous to horses. I do not think the OP are having horses in their area. Unless they are planning to have horses there. If they plan on having horses there then no, do not plant maple trees of any type.
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Good choices.
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There ARE horses - along with goats, a few head of cattle, and sheep - so maples are out.
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This toxicity to horses is primarily limited to wilted leaves of red maple, A.rubrum - and possibly the Freemanii hybrids (redXsilver). I have seen some suggestions that silver maple may potentially be toxic, but the majority of the literature implicates A.rubrum.
I saw a few cases of red maple toxicosis in horses during my veterinary diagnostic pathology career. Most memorable one… owner pruned a bunch of limbs off red maple trees in his yard and tossed them over the fence into the horse pasture (fortunately, his own horses). All three horses gorged on red maple leaves and succumbed to severe hemolytic anemial and multiple organ failure.
I’ll echo -from personal experience - that ‘pasture trees’ that are at risk of early demise unless caged appropriately to reduce browsing and bark-stripping… especially if goats or deer are present.
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Cows too.
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True dat - they’ll walk through knee high lush gras and clover to eat the leaves off an isolated tree in the pasture.
Cows on the farm here were fenced out of the woods, except for a 40-ft wide strip. You could look across the pasture and see the ‘browse line’ about 8 ft up, where the cows kept every leaf - regardless of tree species - eaten off. Planted a mix of mulberry, pecan and bur oak seedlings along internal cross-fence lines to provide some summer shade in the paddocks. It was a continuous - losing - battle to maintain temporary electric fences around those, with the result being most were kept browsed down to ‘mulberry bush’ status or stunted little frequently defoliated pecans. The cows were sold 5 years ago, and now the hooved rats (whitetail deer) are keeping them browsed back almost to the same extent.
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Giant forest rats are so out of control it’s ridiculous. I’m pretty convinced we need a nationwide reintroduction of mountain lions–it’d definitely save property and lives. Mountain lions do not recognize humans as prey and tend not to hunt when people or livestock are active.
Since 1890, a total of 20 people have been killed by mountain lions in the entire US. 20 people in 130 years… Deer kill more people every three weeks.
Of the average annual 450 people killed each year by animals in the US, 97% of them are killed by deer.
Deer cause roughly 1.1 billion dollars in property damage each year. Except the real number is higher, because that’s only insured property and doesn’t include most agricultural and horticultural damage.
Bring back mountain lions.
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Hunting brings $2.5 billion in revenue annually to WI alone. Nearly 90% of that amount is thanks to deer hunters.
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Michigan DNR secretly brought cougar in to help control the deer populations, they continue to say that there are no cougar in Michigan, but when you start getting trail camera photos of cougar wearing tracking collars, its obvious.
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Any mulberry tree that ends up in a cow pasture ends up getting stripped back to bare branches by the time I move the pasture. Not that the mulberry trees care. I’m still going to have to take a chainsaw to most of them one of these days.
We must not have as much deer pressure here. Less woods nearby.
Sure, but the number of hunting licenses and other spending on hunting would not change much if the deer population was a bit smaller and better controlled. Especially in areas, such as where I live, where many hunters bag multiple deer each season.
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Well, the subject has drifted some but I think the OP got their question answered. If not they can jump back in!
I don’t know how big an issue it is elsewhere, but chronic wasting disease is showing up more and more out here. If the herd is not aggressively culled (I think) it’s bound to become an even more serious issue.
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License sales have dipped in a number of midwest states. That decrease coincides with reduced deer herds in many areas.
Hardcore deer hunters will hunt mo matter what. One weekend a year folks want to see lots of deer.
Plenty of debate to be had on both sides of the discussion. I will bow out.
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Around here, I think KyDFWR needs to lengthen hunting seasons and increase bag limits.
When I was growing up in east-central AL in the 1960s-1980s, I can recall, when I was about 4-5 yrs old, the Lee Co. Rod & Gun Club, which my dad was a member of, releasing whitetail deer and wild turkey to re-establish populations that had been reduced to virtually zero by overharvesting during the 1930s.
By the time I was a teenager, modern firearm deer hunting season ran from ~ Thanksgiving to the end of January, with a very liberal bag limit of one buck per day, and as the populations continued to climb, a short either-sex season was also instituted, when a person could harvest one unantlered and one antlered deer per day. I remember one particular season when my dad, my brother-in-law, and I harvested 22 deer, between us, off our farm (all went into the freezer). We ate venison at one or two meals every day, and dishes taken to potluck dinner were usually venison-based.
Checking today, I see that AL has now limited bag limits to three animals total per hunter for all seasons (archery, black powder, modern firearm).
It was a shock to me, moving to MO, and then to KY where the modern gun season is only 16 days long(only ~ 10 days in MO) and bag limits (including the archery & black powder seasons) are limited to one antlered and three unantlered deer.
It is not at all uncommon for me to see upward of 50 deer, any given evening, in the pastures within sight of my back porch, and they frequently come within 50 ft of the house to browse mulberries, garden plants, and rub various young trees. I can’t kill enough of them!
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I’m not allowed to kill any of them here in the city, and I haven’t killed deer or elk in 20+ years. But I sure wish we could get rid of them.
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Michigan may need to vaccinate their kitties before too long. Side note: I always thought it would be interesting if a tracking collar ended up on a freight train headed across the country.
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Yep, maple trees are out. I have horses so I know that is not something you want around them.
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