FREE REIN?
Many ways to control horse numbers, but managing nature comes at a price
America’s wild horses and burros wildly outnumber what federal land managers say is healthy for the range, and their herds grow every year.
Some mustang enthusiasts question the government’s ideal herd numbers, while others say there’s room to grow if managers stop favoring cattle or expand territories where horses can roam.
The Bureau of Land Management, though, says a healthy population spread across 10 Western states would be roughly 27,000, far fewer than the 55,000 horses and 12,000 burros its census estimated before last spring’s foaling season. That census represented a 15 percent gain in a single year.
How can America maintain free-roaming horses and burros without trampling the wildlife habitat, grazing rights, recreation and other uses that people expect on their public lands?
Following is an examination of some of the things managers are trying, and other ideas that could work in combination to keep the animals in check but still free. Each has significant costs or other limitations.
Dart them
PZP, a form of birth control, can keep mares from getting pregnant for a year; one form that generally requires capture for application of a time-released dose can last two years. Researchers are trying to perfect longer-lasting birth control, with results suggesting a couple of applications can prevent most pregnancies over five years. Trouble is, wild horses are wild. Some herds are readily approachable and easy to dart, while others are skittish and live in rugged country. The BLM estimates it costs more than $300 to dart each mare, and using the helicopters that might be required to round up and treat some of the warier herds pushes that cost above $2,000 an animal.
The National Park Service has used PZP effectively to achieve a sort of equilibrium in the horse population on its East Coast reserve of Assateague Island. But doing so requires regular treatment of half of the island’s mares. Replicating this success across the West would require, at minimum, a new investment of millions of dollars every year. Depending on how the horses cooperate, the cost for treating thousands could easily climb to the tens of millions.
Currently, the BLM is treating fewer than 500 horses a year in the West.
Some advocates, including Utah resident Jim Schnepel of the Wild Horses of America Foundation, undergo training so they can volunteer to help dart horses. With thousands of Americans professing love for the creatures, he said, the volunteer program could bulk up to aid the BLM’s quest.
“I don’t think it’s been tried to its full extent,” he said.
Spay or neuter them
BLM officials thought they were closing in on an important solution when they contracted Oregon State University to remove the ovaries from wild horses in a pilot project that could have demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of this permanent sterilization. Horse advocates sued, though, and the agency canceled the program last fall.
John Turner, a University of Toledo zoologist working on better birth control for horses, said fears of the government using sterilization to eliminate herds are overblown. It’s unlikely that the government would, or even could, trap and treat enough horses to achieve that, he said.
“It’s only realistic to recognize that there’s a place for sterilization somewhere in the BLM program, somewhere down the line,” he said. “How that’s accomplished is another matter.”
Suzanne Roy of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign said surgical ovary removals would be dangerous and likely would require up to a week of observation to be sure the mares didn’t hemorrhage.
Instead, she said, the BLM should consider evidence that its own culling efforts are increasing the mustangs’ fertility by reducing populations below what the land can sustain. Healthy, well-fed and well-watered horses have more babies, reinforcing the agency’s futility, she said.
“They’re basically creating their own reality,” Roy said.
The agency has not entirely abandoned sterilization. It is studying the behavioral effects of neutering some stallions and returning them to the range.
Round them up
This is what the government has traditionally done, but it’s getting expensive.
A country that once adopted 10,000 or more wild horses in any given year now adopts a third or less of that number, often leaving thousands removed from the public range but without private homes.
Currently, the BLM is housing more than 45,000 animals in corrals or on leased pastures in the Great Plains states. Each animal in government care costs about $50,000 over its lifetime.
At that cost, rounding up and caring for the 40,000 or so horses and burros the agency believes are exceeding the public range’s capacity would cost $2 billion — and that wouldn’t even keep the remaining 27,000 or so from breeding their way back to the current levels.
The BLM plans to add new leased farms to the program this year to handle more roundups, but officials say they need other options.
Leave them alone
A common wish among horse lovers is for the government to simply stop rounding up horses or attempting to contain them on certain corners of the public range. Left to themselves, some advocates say, horses will reach their appropriate numbers and then “self-regulate” as deaths and births come into balance.
“Are they really overpopulated?” said Craig Downer, a Nevada naturalist who published a book called “The Wild Horse Conspiracy” and argues ranchers and other industries persecute horses against the public will.
“They’re not even filling their niche yet,” he said.
Sitting among the brush and wildflowers of the Pine Nut Mountain foothills near Carson City, Nevada, last spring, Downer scoped the hillsides for a herd that the BLM claims is pushing the range’s capacity, with about 200 animals.
In Downer’s opinion, that’s not even enough horses to guarantee long-term survival. They need to number at least 1,000 to be safe in the 90,000-acre management area, he said.
He pointed to tall grasses and pink phlox on the hillside as evidence that the horses aren’t harming anything. They may even help, he contends, by adding fertilizer from their droppings.
Horses originally evolved in the West and should be allowed to return and play an ecological role, he said.
“There’s people that just look at these horses as domesticated animals, end of story,” Downer said. “That’s a tremendous injustice to these ancient, ancient presences.”
Because horses disappeared from the continent thousands of years ago, though, the BLM considers them non-native. The agency also frequently has to step in to save drought-stricken animals.
BLM horse wranglers in northern Utah had hoped to spend much of last year darting mares with birth control. Instead, they spent most of the summer hauling water to horses in the Cedar Mountains southwest of the Great Salt Lake. That single rescue operation lately has cost the agency $25,000 or more per year.
The idea of letting horse numbers grow to until they naturally self-regulate is not universally accepted, even among horse advocates.
“Self-regulation usually means starving” or dying of thirst, Schnepel said. “We don’t have any predators out here besides man.”
All of the above
U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., thinks the time is right to push for enough federal funds to handle the West’s need for better, humane horse management. Within Arizona, he said, the bipartisan effort that kept the U.S. Forest Service from eliminating the Salt River wild horses demonstrates broad support for the animals.
Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, RAriz., both intervened to protect the herd in 2015.
Land managers need adequate birthcontrol options for horses, and they need more federal lands dedicated to preserving horses, Grijalva said. Horse adoptions have declined by thousands per year in the past decade and can’t halt the population explosion, he said.
“I’ve always seen it as a resource issue more than anything else,” Grijalva said. He expects to introduce legislation that would give managers more funds and options.
“Its time has come, because the population on the ground is driving this to (be) a bipartisan issue,” he said.