CHAPTER TWO: WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?
Horses’ North American roots inform debate about modern role
The wild horse has a long and tortured history in the West, and it’s all about personal values.
It includes working partnerships with Spanish conquistadors, Native Americans, settlers and the U.S. Cavalry. It includes ranchers turning out horses for recapture as needed, followed by unchecked proliferation, occasional drought and starvation.
It includes exploitation by rogues who gathered the animals by the truckload and sold them into slaughter for dog food or other products, stoking public outrage.
In the mid-20th century, the problem was the opposite of today’s rapid population growth. Admirers feared a possible elimination of all wild herds.
As the golden age of Western movies faded, Congress tried to write a new script. With the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, lawmakers mandated protection of these “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.”
The law required “the minimal feasible level” of management to achieve “a thriving natural ecological balance on the public lands.”
But what is “balance” for an agency like the Bureau of Land Management? The bureau officially considers horses and burros non-natives and must also offer its more than 390,000 square miles of federal land for every use
from bird watching and dinosaur digging to cattle grazing, logging and mining.
Natural history can tell much about the horse, but it can’t explain what’s really “natural.”
To some, the horse’s history in the West stretches back millions of years.
To others, it’s a history tracing its roots back 523 years, to the second landing of Columbus in the New World.
To some ecologists, it’s the story of a “feral” or escaped farm animal edging out native species — the equivalent of a house cat feasting on songbirds.
They all have a point, which is why finding consensus on what to do about the creatures is problematic.
Appearing in April before the BLM’s appointed National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board — the same citizen representatives who would later recommend euthanasia to halt extreme overgrazing — a wildlife biologist urged rapid reductions in the wild.
Horses are a “unique exotic herbivore” in North America and require more grass per pound of body weight than do cows, biologist John Goodell, representing the Oregon chapter of the Wildlife Society, told the board.
They can strip arid sage lands bare, threatening vulnerable native species.
Across the West, authorities are trying to keep sage grouse off the endangered-species list, for instance. The bird’s numbers plummeted over the past half-century as energy development and other uses fragmented sage lands. In many places, horses compete with them for water and forage.
Sage grouse inhabit 106 of the BLM’s 179 horse management areas, stretching from Wyoming to Oregon and south into Nevada, Utah and Colorado.
“Free-roaming horses and burros compete with native wildlife for food and water resources and disproportionately impact critical habitat such as seeps, springs and riparian zones,” Goodell told the board.
Native enough?
But are they really “exotic” invaders? It’s a question that science can only partly answer. “Homegrown,” it turns out, is in the eye of the beholder.
Scientists agree that the ancestors of horses, zebras and asses emerged from North America about 4.5 million years ago and spread to five continents.
Then came Equus caballus, a true horse more or less like those that we know today. It laid down its earliest known fossils in Texas around 1.2 million years ago.
As glaciers retreated at the Ice Age’s end, these horses struggled with a changing landscape, competition from encroaching grazers such as deer, and human hunters.
They disappeared from the Americas for 11,000 years, until Columbus crossed the Atlantic and brought them full circle.
This fossil record emboldens some who insist the horse has a natural niche in the West, its ancestral homeland.
“It’s the same horse,” said Gayle Hunt, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who founded the Central Oregon Wild Horse Coalition to fight against what she saw as the government’s attempt to appease ranchers by restricting horses “to the lowest levels they can get away with.”
Genetically, she said, it’s the animal that once roamed a colder continent.
“That in itself meets all standards for a native species,” she contended.
Indeed, the modern Morgan’s or Clydesdale’s DNA is from the same species that roamed America millennia ago, in the same way that a golden retriever and a German shepherd are both dogs.
It’s the same species, Texas A&M University veterinary geneticist Gus Cothran said, but it was domesticated in Asia at least 5,500 years ago. Since then, people have bred horses selectively for valued traits, such as speed or strength.
The resulting animal is somewhat bigger and probably less susceptible to predation, Cothran said, especially given that today’s mountain lions and sporadically placed wolves are smaller than Ice Age dire wolves or saber-toothed cats.
It also inhabits a drier and hotter landscape, with a long-since-evolved complement — or ecosystem — of plants and animals.
“You can see it’s not a huge (genetic) change by how easily they adapt back into the wild,” Cothran said. “But it’s still different.”
A mystical creature
At the Wynema Ranch Wild Horse Sanctuary, a Reno-area temporary shelter, horse caretaker Shari Floyd walked among the formerly wild mustangs she has fed and gotten to know for the past few years: Scar Butt, named for an apparent battle wound, and some motherfoal pairs that resulted from clandestine couplings. The horses wandered, munching around piles of hay.
Floyd singled out one chestnut mare she had long since expected to find a good home because she was halter-broken, willing to have her hooves trimmed, generally tame.
But few people seem interested in adopting anymore, she said. It can be a costly 25-year commitment.
She believes horses belong on the land, and she wishes more could remain untamed.
No one knows what really happened to North American horses thousands of years ago, she said. Those that have returned are “beautiful, free, wild.”
“There’s something mystical about the wild horse,” she said.
That word — “wild” — only compounds the magic.
“It’s a national icon,” said Jim Schnepel, president of the Salt Lake City-based Wild Horses of America Foundation. “No matter where you live, you have this vision of the West, and the horse is such an essential part of it that it’s just ingrained in our national psyche.”
That the horse stands as an icon to some and a threat to others prevents consensus for almost any solution to overpopulation, he said. Many will argue about whether it is, or ever can be, overpopulated.
And yet, Schnepel said, the U.S. can’t just allow mustangs to roam unchecked as some advocates demand, not on a modern Western landscape splintered by roads, fences and competing uses.
And not with fewer predators — the wolves, cats and grizzlies — than what once imposed a frontier equilibrium.
Left to themselves, wild horses breed with abandon, exploding a problem that ranchers and ecologists say is scouring wide swaths of the West into brittle dead zones. There are now about three times the number of horses in 10 Western states that lived there when federal protections for them began 46 years ago.
The 2016 census showed a 15 percent annual increase and a total population at least 21⁄2 times what federal land managers consider healthy for the available grasslands.
The BLM rounded up 700 from a herd of 800 horses at Beatys Butte, Oregon, in 2000. Within 15 years, the remaining 100 had become 1,200. They mowed down tall grasses and took over rare watering holes in eastern Oregon’s critical sage grouse habitat.
The agency again trapped most of
them in the fall of 2015.
“Five years ago, this was 2 feet tall,” BLM range specialist Les Booth said last April, standing on nubs of grass among patches of dirt at DL Spring, a water source at the base of Beatys Butte.
Then the horses multiplied and congregated around the spring, eating the basin rye and Idaho fescue to nothing.
More than 45,000 formerly freerange horses and burros now live in leased pastures east of the Rockies or at scattered federal adoption corrals. That number would grow to eclipse the wild population if the government had money to catch and feed many more of them.
Most of the 45,000 will spend their remaining years there, at a lifetime cost of $50,000 per animal. With ample water and grass, they will compound the costs by living perhaps twice as long as their free counterparts — 30 years or more.
One little foal eluded her $50,000 accommodations after her mother died trying to escape capture.
The foal that escaped
Indy had settled into a life far from the range where she was born and farther still from her wild lineage.
Unknown to the foal, a BLM advisory board’s bold but unheeded recommendation had sealed her future as a farmyard pet at a ranch in south-central Utah.
Citizen advisers troubled by the ecological damage that horses had caused on parts of the Western range recommended last summer that the BLM kill unadoptable captive horses to make room in corrals and pastures for the mustangs from more roundups.
So West and Kami Taylor opted to keep the filly they called Indy, instead of fostering her until she could live on grass and return to government care.
The BLM had asked their help weaning Indy after her mother died in a July helicopter roundup.
“We thought about bringing her back,” Kami Taylor said in September, “but then we heard about the horse killing.”
“Horse killing” is a toxic phrase in America. The advisory board’s recommendation to thin the ranks of captive mustangs led to a predictable backlash that caused the BLM to assure people it had no plans for euthanasia.
Horse lovers’ wrath over previous slaughters was fresh.
A U.S. Interior Department investigation of the BLM’s horse program laid bare the hard political realities.
The department’s Office of Inspector General checked out what proved to be legitimate complaints that the agency had sold up to 1,700 captured mustangs to a Colorado buyer who said he would find them “good homes.” Instead, he transferred them to truckers who hauled them to Mexican meat packers.
This fate was a violation of the agency’s rules against slaughter, imposed administratively despite a 2004 congressional amendment allowing sale of captured wild horses “without limitation.”
The apparent mass slaughter appalled many in a society that, unlike others across the Atlantic, generally does not savor horse meat.
But the October 2015 investigative report’s most politically telling lines paraphrased agency officials’ hand-wringing over the decision to sell or not to sell despite the 2004 congressional direction.
“BLM officials stated that operating contrary to implemented legislation by limiting sales and not destroying horses has contributed to an unmanageable number of horses,” the inspector general’s report concluded. “The (wild horse and burro program) senior adviser reasoned, however, that selling without limitation or destroying horses would be ‘political suicide,’ and Congress does not want to deal with those issues.”
In 2005, Congress withdrew support for unlimited sales, and each year’s budget since then has included a ban on using tax dollars to sell horses to so-called “kill buyers.”
The BLM now limits single buyers to four horses per year, after those horses have been unsuccessfully offered for adoption three times.
By last fall, Indy was waist-high and confident in her new surroundings, bopping a tetherball back and forth with her head and nuzzling strangers with her beige fuzz. This onslaught of “cute and cuddly” is how little mustangs win hearts, the Taylors agreed.
The couple said they knew Indy never was likely to end up in slaughter or euthanized, that the BLM advisory board just wanted to vent when it made its recommendation.
Still, the fate of thousands of captive mustangs is unsettled and unsettling.
At a pivotal time for wild horses, who could take chances with such a sweetheart?