FROM WILD TO MILD
Segregated by sex, horses retire to leased pastures
DAVIS, Okla. — Dozens of mares cluster across a rippling prairie, munching on thick green grass between oaks and golden wildflower patches.
Except for the fences, and the giant wind turbines twirling atop a distant Arbuckle Mountains ridge, it might seem a snapshot from centuries past, when wild-horse herds roamed the tall grass of the vast Southern plains.
Instead, this rented pasture costs taxpayers $2.13 per day for each horse and is a final destination for hundreds of the 45,000 wild horses and burros that the U.S. government has pulled from the West’s mountains and deserts with nowhere else to go.
The Oklahoma pasture is one of at least two dozen private mid-continent farms where the government is paying to keep horses it doesn’t want running wild. Some of them will live in captivity for decades, aided by secure food and water that can double a wild horse’s life expectancy to about 30 years.
Roughly 31,000 of those captive horses live in leased pastures at an average cost around $2 a day, or a total of nearly $23 million a year. The rest live in corrals, such as one where Arizona prison inmates train them in Florence. Corral care averages $5 a day per horse, or a total of nearly $26 million a year.
Until land managers can fight through political stalemates to either effectively control wild-horse births or expand mustang territory across more public lands, this is their solution.
Noble solution ...
The Great Plains are where once-wild horses go to live and die.
“We are a retirement center,” said dentist and businessman John Jameson, who converted this grassland, his family’s onetime cattle ranch, into two fenced pastures so he could contract with the Bureau of Land Management to care for wild horses for about $14,000 a month.
Weaving his pickup around a 215mare herd and applying one of his ostrich-skin boots to the brake, he noted that they had lost their wariness quickly after arriving in Oklahoma. They approached the truck looking for hay.
He proudly pointed to an Appaloosa’s belly, swollen from the lush grasses it likely would never or rarely encounter in its former wild range out West. “They ain’t pregnant,” he assured. That would be a near-impossibility, as wranglers separate the sexes before sending mustangs to pasture.
“This is a noble activity that BLM does to provide for these animals,” Jameson said.
The praise is far from universal.
... or sign of failure?
Long-term pasture rentals are “a symptom of the broken program” on the Western range, Nevada mustang advocate Laura Leigh said.
They are what government officials erroneously consider a “necessary evil” to manage mustangs, she said, when those officials created the problem by rounding up thousands of horses in the first place.
“Kinda like a wife-beater that blames his wife when she dies,” she said.
Leigh and many other horse advocates want the government to focus on birth control, which they say could keep mustangs free while limiting environmental damage they may inflict through unchecked breeding.
It’s an approach that land managers are trying on a limited scale, but one they argue is not yet feasible across the 10 rugged states where mustangs roam. They’re counting on researchers to create longer-lasting contraception, and on the public eventually accepting some permanent sterilizations.
The entire federal wild horse and burro program costs about $80 million a year, but most of that goes into caring for horses that government helicopter contractors and wranglers have removed from the wild.
America’s horse owners once relieved much of the population pressure by adopting and training wild horses. Adoptions declined around the time of the Great Recession, though, and the few thousand per year that still occur don’t come close to keeping up with reproduction.
‘We’re horse savers’
Darrell Gardner is part of a small army of horse trainers trying to bump up the adoption numbers.
The 28-year-old from Amet, Louisiana, competed in the Mustang Heritage Foundation’s Fort Worth, Texas, “Extreme Mustang Makeover” last fall. The event, with BLM support, is intended to show what expert trainers can do with a captured wild horse within 100 days, and to encourage onlookers to adopt.
Gardner trotted his student — T2, after a previous horse named Tex — into the Will Rogers Equestrian Center arena and showed off the animal’s ability to step over logs, swing around a post and hold still for gate openings and closings.
These same tricks won Gardner the event with a different mustang in 2014. He split a $7,800 prize with the foundation.
Mustangs make quick learners because they’re savvy and adaptable from their time on the range. They rely on people the way they once did their herd, Gardner said. His technique begins with patience, with long hours spent in a corral until they become comfortable and approach him.
“You look at a transformation before your eyes, and you know that, pretty much, you did it,” he said.
While in Fort Worth, he perused a number of wild horses the BLM had trucked in for possible inclusion in another program the foundation pays him to join. He gets $800 for each horse he can train to the point that someone will adopt it.
He has trained 10 so far, and he kept at it last summer, even when a flood forced him from his home. He said he sees the work as a calling, because the horses need homes.
“We’re horse savers,” he said.
Captive herds carry limits
At the corrals outside the Fort Worth arena, dozens of admirers said they were looking but not shopping for a stallion. Some already had adopted one and could afford no more.
The roundups keep coming, snaring hundreds and, in some years, thousands more animals than private adopters. For that reason, the agency is looking to contract with a handful of new Great Plains pasture owners for long-term care starting this year, off-range program spokeswoman Debbie Collins said.
“You can see they’re not sad,” Collins said during an autumn tour of Jameson’s 1,000-acre Oklahoma pasture. “You have some fantastic grass growing.”
The pastured mares, separated from stallions, arguably have easier lives than in the wild, she said. On the Western range, stallions breed many of the fertile mares every year without rest.
Stress-free as the pastured life can be, though, perpetually shunting more animals into captive herds is no solution to wild-horse overpopulation.
“That’s not the answer, just like opening up every acre that we have in the West (to wild horses) isn’t the answer,” she said. There’s not enough water and forage for an unlimited wild population, she said, and not enough money for everexpanding leases.
“At some point,” she said, “you’re going to hit that wall.”
Horses adapt to life on a pasture
On Jameson’s Oklahoma ranch, the influx of Western mustangs solves two problems.
Jameson always wanted to keep the family land in a natural state, perhaps as some kind of preserve for the quail, turkeys and deer that move between it and neighboring Chickasaw Tribe lands. Cattle ranching was a volatile business, though, and not one that his children were likely to take up.
The government contract for horse care ensures they can keep the land as is with predictable costs and income.
The program also helps the horses, he said. They want for nothing, and have learned to trot toward the sound of an air horn when it’s feeding time in winter.
The few deaths so far included one from old age, one from lightning and one from sharp sheet metal that a tornado sent twirling into its neck.
About the only stress most of them have suffered came from a helicopter that a neighbor used to spray weeds, he said, perhaps reminding them of a roundup in the West.
This arrangement seems to Jameson the most humane way to handle overpopulation. “They know us, and they know we support them,” he said. “It’s a great way to solve it.”