Horse Sense

The BLM, which has a reputation for underestimating equid populations and has no reliable way of figuring them anyway, claims that just on its own land there are about 32,000 animals, mostly horses. An additional 26,000 are being maintained in holding facilities, awaiting adoption. At auctions held around the country the BLM adopts out about 6,000 feral equids a year. But it admits that that’s not enough to keep the feral population in check, and there’s a limit to how many feral equids the public wants. Generally, you pay a $125 “adoption fee,” and after you get a vet to sign a statement that you’ve provided humane care for one year, you get a certificate of title and can do anything you want with your horse or burro, including selling it to a slaughterhouse.

Feral horses are big and dangerous. Arizona Audubon’s Tice Supplee has a friend who showed up looking like he’d been in a bar fight after his adopted mustang had knocked him around and eventually skewered itself on a fence stake. Now it’s in his freezer. In addition to knowledgeable horse people, the program attracts weird-pet fanciers—the ocelot-coatimundi crowd. Burros, often adopted as companions for horses, are less dangerous but more obnoxious. “What kind of a nut would want one?” Arizona State University zoologist Robert Ohmart asked me in 1985 when I reported on burros for Audubon. It was a question I relayed to my mother, who kept one in a failed effort to calm her semi-feral horses. It brayed from dusk to dawn and had the least efficient digestive tract of any creature I’ve known. People get tired of adopted burros fast. Twenty-one years ago the BLM was telling me it had pretty much “saturated the market.”

The BLM is between a rock and the equine lobby. Two basic elements comprise this lobby—one somewhat practical, somewhat rational, and genuinely and rightly concerned about humane treatment of feral equids. In its more thoughtful moments the Humane Society of the United States might fit this description. While it doesn’t worry about native ecosystems, it at least understands that population expansion leads to major suffering, and it is assisting the BLM in experiments with chemical contraception. “Where population reductions are well justified, nonlethal strategies like contraception should take the place of costly roundups,” wrote HSUS president Wayne Pacelle in a letter to The New York Times. But until contraception is practical over large areas of the West, if it ever is, the HSUS favors roundups and adoptions over culling by rifle.

The other element, a political juggernaut referred to by wildlifers as the “horse mafia,” advocates more animals on public range; vehemently opposes birth control, roundups, and adoptions; and wants no feral equid to die from anything, anywhere, no matter what. In 2005, for example, the Colorado Wild Horse and Burro Coalition and the Cloud Foundation (named after a feral horse named Cloud) failed in an administrative appeal to stop the BLM from experimenting with chemical contraception in Montana’s Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range. “BLM has used this herd as a science experiment, and it’s a shame in a wilderness setting,” declares Cloud Foundation director Ginger Kathrens. “It’s a situation that can be managed by nature, but they don’t value natural systems.” When I asked her how a system with feral equids in it could be “natural,” she said: “Wild horses are native to North America.”

In the late 1990s National Park Service biologist Erik Beever, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Nevada at Reno, ran afoul of the horse mafia by discovering facts not to its liking. In the most comprehensive investigation ever undertaken of what feral horses do to wildlife habitat, Beever examined soils, rodents, reptiles, ants, and plants across nine mountain ranges at 19 study sites, documenting dramatic horse damage. For this the horse mafia viciously attacked him in the press, accusing him of whoring for the cattle industry, which doesn’t like grazing competition from feral livestock. “It got pretty nasty,” Beever recalls. His work provided the BLM with the means, if not the motivation, for determining how many horses should be removed from an area for their own good.

Finally, consider the injunction preventing the Forest Service from rounding up and adopting out as many as 400 horses in northern Arizona. They’re domestic animals that escaped from the White Mountain Apache reservation in 2002 when a forest fire destroyed a fence, but the plaintiffs—In Defense of Animals, the Animal Welfare Institute, and the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Wild Burros—convinced a federal judge that they might be part Spanish. So before the Forest Service can remove them it must run DNA tests on each animal to make sure there are no ancient genes, an impossible task even if it had the funds. “We reseeded the fire area, and the horses are just hammering it,” says Robert Dyson, public affairs officer for the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. “They’re displacing wildlife. Channel 12 TV out of Phoenix reported that we planned to kill ‘wild horses,’ and our phones rang off the hook. We got letters from third graders all across Phoenix. We had carefully explained to Channel 12 that we’d be capturing the horses alive.”

“The injunction was all over the equine rags this spring,” says Supplee. “ ‘We won! We won!’ These horses are in the heart of our elk country, and uncontrolled elk can hurt riparian systems, too. Here the Forest Service is telling Game and Fish to reduce their elk [through increased hunting], and meanwhile, they have 400 horses running around. The Forest Service really got outmaneuvered on this one.”

Now and then, however, environmentalists outmaneuver the horse mafia. One of the first Important Bird Areas to be recognized in Nevada and possibly the best cottonwood gallery riparian forest left in the West is the Carson River delta—vital to all manner of birds, including western yellow-billed cuckoos and two subspecies of willow flycatcher. “The BLM had a management goal of 18 horses but let the population grow to 200 to 300,” reports Don McIvor, Audubon’s Nevada director of bird conservation. “They were hanging out in the riparian area, removing the understory, trampling willows, causing major habitat damage.” The BLM wasn’t doing anything about it, so McIvor and his colleagues complained to the Nevada Department of Wildlife, which prevailed on the BLM to remove all but 15 of the horses. The horse mafia never found out that Audubon was the driving force behind the roundup, so its full fury was directed at the state and feds.

With some sort of population control, horses and burros might make a decent living on grasslands—where their Pleistocene progenitors evolved—but those grasslands are leased or owned by cattle ranchers. So feral equids are restricted to arid and desert regions, where they suffer terribly. Supposedly they’re managed as wildlife, but when there’s a drought or food shortage the BLM tends as many as it can in the field or in holding facilities. Most animals, though, get left on depleted range, and the BLM can’t go onto the land of other agencies. So all across the West horses and burros slowly starve. In a January 4, 2005, op-ed for The New York Times entitled “Live Free and Die,” journalist and writing instructor Judy Blunt described a typical scene: “A cloud hangs over the Nevada landscape, caused by 500 half-starved horses pounding the high desert to powder, looking for food, stamping any remaining waterholes into dust. The foals are long dead, left behind as they weakened. Cowboys under contract with the BLM set out to gather the horses and move them, but a phone call redirects them to a worse situation in another area.”

Native animals are also capable of intense suffering. All manner of wildlife depend on desert trees such as paloverde, mesquite, and ocotillo. Small mammals are nourished by their seeds; birds nest in their branches; reptiles find sanctuary in their shade; desert bighorn sheep browse on their tender tips. Horses and burros girdle them with their meshing incisors, then stomp them into the dirt with their solid hooves. Supplee used to conduct Christmas bird counts in what she calls “lush and canopied dry riparian washes with huge mesquite and paloverde trees.” Feral horses moved in and trashed the habitat. “They broke off branches, stripped the bark, and killed the trees,” she says.