Officials say 96 horses in Colorado killed by virus
An equine influenza virus likely caused the mysterious respiratory disease that has killed at least 95 wild horses and forced a federal holding facility in Colorado to go under quarantine, the Bureau of Land Management said Thursday.
Tests showed that a strain of the virus, known as H3N8, was likely the cause of the outbreak and related horse deaths, the bureau said in a news release, adding the virus is “not uncommon” among horses.
The identified strain is not related to a bird flu outbreak this year in the United States, officials said.
The bureau, which is in charge of caring for the nation’s wild horses, announced the outbreak Monday and said at least 57 horses had died since the weekend in Cañon City, Colo., more than 100 miles south of Denver. The number of deaths reached 95 by Thursday.
It’s the second time in recent weeks that the bureau had to shut down a facility because of a widespread illness among horses. In late March, a facility in Wyoming was closed and an adoption event for wild horses was postponed because some animals developed Streptococcus equi, a bacterial infection similar to strep throat.
The recent deaths are part of a larger struggle to sustainably manage wild horses and burros in the West. There are about 86,000 animals roaming public lands, more than three times what the bureau says lands can support.
In an attempt to keep populations in check, the bureau rounds up thousands of horses every year and offers them for adoption. But the number of people willing to adopt an untrained mustang has almost never equaled the number of animals the government removes, so a surplus has built up year by year in a collection of corrals and pastures that the bureau calls “the holding system.”
The system now holds more than 60,000 animals at a cost of about $72 million a year.
The holding system includes long-term ranches in the tallgrass prairie where unwanted horses can spend decades, as well as short-term feedlots where crowded corrals temporarily hold horses fresh off the range.
The short-term facility in Cañon City sits next to a Colorado state prison, where inmates train horses. It acts as a way station where animals from different herds that roam over 33 million acres of open range in the West are brought together in corrals that cover only about 50 acres, making it a potential breeding ground for disease. It is meant as a temporary stopover, but because of overcrowding in the holding system, horses often stay for many months.
The bureau said Monday there were 2,550 horses in Cañon City’s dusty maze of corrals — just a few hundred shy of its 3,000 maximum.
Steven Hall, a spokesperson for the bureau, said Thursday the facility would remain under quarantine “as long as necessary” to prevent the spread of the virus.
Most of the horses affected by the disease were removed last year from a swath of sage-dotted mesas in northwestern Colorado known as the West Douglas Herd Area, officials said. That roundup was done to protect the health of the horses, the rangeland and public land from overuse by excess horses, the bureau said. At the time, a portion of the herd was tested for a potentially fatal virus called equine infectious anemia, which can spread through fly bites. Although all the tests were negative, the West Douglas horses were temporarily kept separate from other horses, according to the bureau.
“This is the first situation that I’m aware of that so many horses died so quickly and so suddenly,” Scott Beckstead, director of campaigns for the Center for a Humane Economy, a nonprofit animal welfare organization, said Wednesday.
The Bureau of Land Management oversees about 245 million acres of public lands, mostly in the West, and has been overseeing wild horses and burros since they were protected by federal law in 1971.
The bureau has been under pressure for decades by horse-advocacy groups and lawmakers to shrink the size of the holding system. That has led to repeated scandals, in which thousands of protected wild horses were adopted out of the system only to immediately end up at slaughter houses.
In 2019, the bureau began paying adopters $1,000 a head to take animals off its hands. Adoptions have nearly tripled since the program started, but an investigation by the New York Times showed a large number of those horses were sold to slaughter buyers almost as soon as the checks cleared.