Free-roaming horses are not “invaders,” despite claims by BLM

The federal Bureau of Land Management recently announced its 2022 plans to manage our nation’s wild horses and burros. It attracted little coverage, especially nationally, but the plan will have lasting effects on these iconic symbols of the American West.

The bureau — the largest land manager in the United States, with 260 million acres of lands in 11 states — plans to round up 22,000 horses and burros, place about 19,000 of them in stockades and holding pens and perform fertility treatments on the other 3,000 before returning them to the wild.

This will cut down significantly the bands of horses — loosely estimated to be 86,000 — grazing on public lands and spare them, the bureau contends, from the starvation, misery and death brought on by drought and extremes of temperature.

What will happen to the terrain where these horses had been grazing? If recent history is any indication, it will soon be the realm of herds of sheep and cattle.

A false premise driving the BLM’S strategy is the idea that horses are an invasive species. Early horses, the theory goes, died out around 10,000 B.C. in what we call “The Ice Age” (there were actually several) and did not walk on this continent again until they were brought from Europe by the Conquistadors. These new arrivals, some argue, have no right to our lands because they are not native.

This belief has prompted the government to treat horses as invaders even though the animals are the only mammals to be protected by name under federal law — through the Wild and Free-roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971.

A new study by Mcmaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, revealed that ancient DNA recovered from soil samples proves that mammoths and Yukon wild horses survived thousands of years longer than believed. DNA from mammoths and horses was discovered in permafrost dating from less than 6,000 years ago — a veritable blink-of-an-eye in the history of our planet.

If they were alive that recently, after the most severe aspects of the ice ages that supposedly wiped them out, then it is likely that they never became extinct and that today’s wild horses are their direct descendants or, at the very least, the proxies for their forebears. And they are part of our Western landscapes.

The study, which was funded partially by the Cana Foundation, was published in a new paper by the journal Nature Communications.

This is a crucial argument undercutting the BLM’S ongoing, systemic mistreatment of wild equids. But it is hardly the only one. The tactic of rounding up horses is cruel and inhumane. By law, the BLM is to look after wild horses’ health and well-being, not persecute them.

Hundreds of wild horses lost their lives at the hands of the BLM during mass roundups in 2021, chased by helicopters to the point of exhaustion and collapse. Horses were chased into barbed wire, knocked down by aggressive helicopter contractors, baby foals were abandoned. One startling example occurred in the Sand Wash Basin area of northwestern Colorado.

The BLM planned to remove nearly 80% of the horses in the basin to contend with what it described as emergency drought conditions. The roundup was intended, said the agency, to save the animals. But then heavy rains caused grasses to grow and filled the streams and waterholes.

Nevertheless, despite public outrage and entreaties by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, the agency pressed on. Cowboys in helicopters conducted the roundups.

What followed? Advocates began posting photos of thousands — over 5,000, by some estimates — of domestic sheep turned loose to graze on the very area the BLM claimed couldn’t support a few hundred horses.

Livestock companies and ranchers are permitted to graze their livestock by the millions at taxpayer-subsidized rates, yet the BLM blames wild horses for harm to the range, as if a small number of wild equids could possibly have greater climate impact than millions of methane-belching domestic ruminants.

The BLM’S corrupt Adoption Incentive Program, which pays adopters $1,000 to adopt up to four wild horses and burros, puts animals at risk of slaughter in foreign meat plants, despite the lip service the BLM pays to protecting them.

We call on BLM Director Tracy Stone-manning, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, and Congress to address the anti-horse and burro bias that pervades the BLM.

And the first step is getting up to speed with the latest science. Horses are not outsiders. They’ve been here all along.