WILD, BUT NOT FREE
Is wild horses’ legacy a symbol or scourge?
America’s wild horses trace their lineage as far back as Spanish explorers. They symbolize the ruggedness of the American West. They’re protected by federal law.
But most people now agree there are too many horses for the land to sustain. Preserving them can damage native wildlife and costs taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. So what do we do with this animal that is not quite livestock, not quite wildlife? Reporter Brandon Loomis and photojournalist Pat Shannahan set out to find the answers.
Beginning today, you’ll meet the people trying to save the wild from the horses, and the horses from themselves. And you’ll follow the fate of a foal named Indy, whose mother died in a government roundup. In a way, her story is the story of all wild horses.
CONFUSION RANGE, Utah — Mustangs rounded the butte with manes flapping and hooves churning dust between the tufted cheatgrass and sagebrush. ¶ A pounding rotor chop echoed off the hillsides as a low-flying helicopter skimmed the brush tops, hurling still larger dust clouds. ¶ The horses were fleeing. The helicopter was chasing them. ¶ Around the bend, a ground crew of wranglers had erected a funnel of linked steel corral gates narrowing to a notch between shrubby junipers, where the wranglers would leap from hiding and chase the horses, furiously waving cowboy hats in the air and shouting, “Haw!” ¶ The narrowing steel chute curved like an elbow pipe to slow the thousandpound animals before depositing them in an oblong enclosure. At the other end, the ramp of a horse trailer waited. ¶ A mare, with her young foal trailing her, entered the haze of the corral trap. Wranglers closed in. The horse spooked. ¶ Seeing daylight through the steel bars where the narrowing trap curved, she bolted for the corner. As she rammed the gate, her neck snapped.
A wild horse runs past the dead body of a horse on the Confusion Range in Utah in July of last year. Wild horses face the realities of drought and a limited food supply. PAT SHANNAHAN/THE REPUBLIC
Her foal would be left behind, a baby horse somebody would have to raise and adopt. Ultimately, the July chase in the Confusion Range would kill four of the 257 horses gathered from the Conger Herd, a population named after an offshoot of the desert mountains. It would be an unusually high casualty rate, but one that wouldn’t discourage managers from continuing to push horses with helicopters, the method they consider necessary to efficiently gather wary horses in bulk from large herds. To some, the deaths are an unfortunate casualty of sound land management; to others, they’re a brutal tragedy. Neither classically livestock nor wildlife, the wild horse occupies a singular, exalted place on the Western range — one that pushes the land’s caretakers deeper into political quagmire every year. Hundreds more horses roam this strand of brown mountains than land managers say the desert, northeast of Nevada’s Great Basin National Park, can feed and water in ecological balance with wildlife, or with the cows that ranchers graze seasonally on the public lands. The horses sprinting toward captivity were the latest roundup targets in government attempts to control the wildhorse population. The attempts are growing increasingly desperate, the payoffs falling short. The number of horses grows by the thousands each year across the West. Seeking an elusive peace between nature and the passionate groups favoring one animal or another on the public range, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has long relied on these roundups. Every year, it takes some horses off the range to put up for adoption or out to pasture. But horse adoptions have waned, and the costs for keeping thousands of unwanted mustangs on leased farms continue to rise.
So this time, in the Confusion Range, the goal was different. The crew would capture at least 250 of the 350 Conger Herd horses, then rerelease 50 mares and 50 studs after marking them for observation in part of an $11 million study. Government and university researchers would track their behavior for a year before catching them again and gelding — neutering — most of the studs.
Then they would release them again and study whether this sterilization tactic alters the herd’s behavior as well as its population.
It’s a controversial plan among wildhorse advocates who insist the herds should run free without human meddling or social engineering. Their impassioned defense of an animal that scientists call “feral,” like alley cats, makes a clinical reduction in numbers all but impossible. Many ask that the government let the mustangs be, at least until they need rescuing from a drought.
Millions of Americans feel an affinity for the wild horse.
A single band of horses on the outskirts of metro Phoenix attracts hundreds of thousands of social-media followers, whose outcry halted a 2015 U.S. Forest Service plan to remove them from the banks of the Salt River.
“America has an emotional love affair with the horse,” said Jim Schnepel, whose Salt Lake City-based Wild Horses of America Foundation seeks to establish new sanctuaries for excess horses.
The romance draws a small crowd to roundups, where they prop folding lawn chairs and coolers onto the desert like they’re following the NASCAR circuit.