Our saddle horses gallop, snorting, down a dry wash below a ridge and out of sight of a herd of wild horses grazing quietly above us. The pounding hooves of our horses throw bits of red clay into the air as we ride through dense clumps of silver-green juniper and sagebrush. Ahead of us lie
the flat, timbered peaks of Montana`s Pryor Mountains, the sky above them a nickel-gray, pregnant with snow.
Lynne Taylor, a wild-horse specialist for the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) at the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Refuge, reins his horse up and ties him to a small shrub. He motions us to do the same.
”Stay down,” he says in a gravelly, trail-boss voice.
Taylor is the archetypal cowboy and at 51 may have spent more time in the saddle–either working or at rodeos–than out of it. A quiet man, he has been working with wild horses in the Pryors since 1971.
Stealthily we creep over a rust-colored ridge, then head up another. As we crest the second ridge, we can see the wild horses grazing, still unaware of us, a band of perhaps 13 led by a large black stallion. Then they see us and are spooked, their ears at attention, their nostrils flared. Wheeling back, their manes flowing and tails waving behind them in the wind, they gallop along the next ridge. After running for perhaps a quarter of a mile, they stop at a point where they can keep a wary eye on us.
There are few things that so powerfully symbolize the unbridled freedom and the openness of the West as does the sight of wild horses galloping across the sagebrush-studded Western range. A number of animal-conservation groups are fiercely protective of the wild horse, seeing it as, among other things, a last remnant of the Old West.
But the wild horse is not universally appreciated. Though some ranchers are among its staunch defenders, ranchers and federal land-management officials in the West generally see the animal as a scourge on the Western landscape, a kind of carp in a trout stream, because it competes with cattle and destroys rangeland, interfering with the ability of ranchers to make a living, especially in these economically difficult times. Opponents of wild horses claim that the animals are nothing more than feral animals–strays or descendants of strays let loose on the land. They believe that instead of receiving protection, the animals should be removed from the range and, in many cases, destroyed.
For many years ranchers and ”mustangers” rounded up wild horses and sold them to rendering plants that turned them into glue or pet food. Things changed with the passage of the federal Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Protection Act of 1971. Asserting that the animals were ”fast disappearing from the American scene,” Congress sought to protect them from human predation.
Some 16 years later, the wild horse is still a controversial issue between the protectionists and the ranchers, with the Bureau of Land Management caught mostly in the middle. Since the law was passed, it has engendered 21 lawsuits relating to wild horses.
The system outlined by the 1971 law requires the BLM to round up surplus wild horses whenever it determines that their number has gone beyond the carrying capacity of the range. The captured horses are then taken to corrals, processed and offered for adoption to those with the desire and means to keep them. The adoption process allows each qualified applicant to choose as many as four horses each, pay a $125 adoption fee per animal and take the animals home. For one year those who adopt the horses are subject to inspection by the BLM to make sure they are caring properly for the animals. After a year the horses become the property of their ”foster parents.”
But there are thousands more horses than there are people who want or are able to adopt them. And the number of horses on the range doubles roughly every seven years. Surplus horses that are not adopted are kept in feedlots, where they often end up living to the end of their natural lives, all at taxpayers` expense. The BLM, ranchers and others claim the law needs to be changed to make it more workable.
Animal-rights groups, however, say it is not the law but agency mismanagement and political pressure from the livestock industry that`s at the root of the problem. In fact, two of those groups have filed a lawsuit against the BLM claiming the agency is violating the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burros Protection Act by allowing some ranchers to circumvent the law and adopt large numbers of horses, which end up either as rodeo stock or passengers on a one-way trip to a slaughterhouse.
Researchers, meanwhile, with federal encouragement and help are searching for a long-term answer to the overpopulation of wild horses. Veterinary teams, for example, are testing birth-control chemicals that are either implanted under a horse`s skin or shot into it from a special rifle. But the programs are as yet unproven, and many questions remain to be answered.
The BLM appointed a committee to study the management of wild horses, and it came up with some recommendations to the Secretary of the Interior in early December, including one–euthanasia–that became very controversial.
”The last step is euthanasia for animals we can`t find a home for,”
said John Boyles, Chief of the BLM`s Division of Wild Horses and Burros. If the Secretary of the Interior accepts that recommendation, the simmering debate over wild horses may come to a boil.
The Pryor Mountain horse range–it`s in south central Montana just above the border and north of Lovell, Wyo.–is the focal point of another controversy. The Bureau of Land Management, which administers the range, claims that the horses have had no new blood in many years and are becoming dangerously inbred. Wild-horse enthusiasts believe that the 120 or so horses there, because they are so isolated, are nearly pure-blooded descendants of the Spanish mustang, which came from Spain and North Africa with the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th Century. The horses, the enthusiasts say, could be the only existing herd of that breed, and they don`t want to see the bloodline diluted.
The first horse to walk the Earth, some 50 million years ago, was the eohippus. The size of a present-day fox, it had four toes on its front feet and three on the rear. Fossil evidence indicates that during millions of years of evolution, the animal grew much larger, and its toes disappeared, turning into a single hoof. The animal thrived on this continent until the Pleistocene Epoch, about 10,000 years ago, when it went into decline. About 8,000 years ago the horse inexplicably disappeared and remained absent from the continent until it was reintroduced, in the form of the mustang, by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th Century. Eventually many mustangs, escaping from or let loose by their owners, mingled with other horses, and before long a wild-horse population established itself. In later years other kinds of horses were brought to the U.S., and there was a mixing of various breeds.
After World War I, motor vehicles began to replace horses and other animals used for transport and other purposes. Thousands of horses that had been raised for ranching, farming and the U.S. Cavalry in the Western states were no longer needed. Ranchers and farmers, operating on thin margins of profitability in the semi-arid West, often turned their horses out to run loose and fend for themselves in the wild. When harvesttime came and work horses were needed–perhaps to draw a wagon or a plow–they were rounded up. Many, however, were missed in the roundups, and these became part of the feral population. Interbreeding with the mustangs already in the wild, these horses created a mixed breed that took refuge in remote areas of the West.
Today, by BLM estimates, some 48,000 wild horses are scattered throughout 10 Western states, most of them concentrated in the Great Basin Desert, which includes most of Nevada and parts of Utah, California, Idaho and Oregon. About 30,000 are in Nevada; another several thousand in the other Great Basin states. The country–characterized by broad, dry, sagebrush-covered valleys broken by high, snow-covered island mountain ranges–is an ideal habitat for the animals.
Few Western wild horses look like the sleek, well-proportioned animals that freely roam the Pryor Mountains or the horses that people raise on a ranch. Most are short, ill-proportioned creatures with long, matted manes and tails and scruffy-looking long-haired coats, characteristics that lend support to those who claim that these animals are not a true wild species but feral animals undeserving of special protection.
Protectionists, on the other hand, insist that these horses were once indigenous to the United States and that after several generations in the wild, they have regained their ecological niche, their existence governed by the laws of nature, just like any other wild animal. Moreover, they claim that there is something special about horses as opposed to, say, cows. ”It`s a cultural thing,” says Pamela Willmore, an attorney who works for Fund for Animals, an animal-rights group in Reno, Nev., and a fervent supporter of the wild horses. ”Cows become food, but we use horses to produce the food. They`ve been friends. We`ve ridden horses into war.”
Wild horses, each weighing up to about 1,000 pounds when fully grown, live year-round in bands of from 6 to 15 animals, each band consisting of a lead stallion, his harem of mares and their colts. Lead stallions are routinely challenged by younger stallions that live on their own and raid the bands for mares to start their own harems. Studs will engage in fierce combat, kicking and biting and usually attempting to sever opponents` leg tendons, with the winner assuming control of the band or some of its mares. But the horses can be very affectionate with each other, and during courtship they tenderly nuzzle, whinny and sniff.
As wild horses, unchecked by predators, grew in numbers in the early part of the 20th Century–as many as a million of them once roamed the West–they came in conflict with stockmen. The animals were and are still blamed for fouling water supplies, a precious commodity especially in the bone-dry Great Basin. Ranchers also claimed the horses competed with livestock for forage and displaced indigenous species such as deer, antelope and bighorn sheep. Wild- horse roundups by cattlemen and professional mustangers became common. Working from horseback and in motor vehicles or, in later years, in helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, the cowboys would drive the wild animals into corrals and catch traps at the end of canyons. Traps were also set up at water sites to capture the animals as they came to drink. The trapped animals would then be sold to rodeos or, more often, to rendering plants.
The roundups were often cruel affairs, during which the horses suffered broken limbs, gunshot wounds and other injuries or, often, death. A much publicized roundup of wild horses in the 1970s did much to inflame the conflict between protectionists and ranchers. Wild horses high in the rugged Lemhi Range near Howe, Idaho, had been cornered by a group of mustangers who were planning to take the horses to a Nebraska slaughterhouse. (They claimed the animals were privately owned; others said the horses were wild). After trapping some 40 horses inside log barricades on high ground next to a cliff, the mustangers left, intending to return later. When they came back after three days, they found that four of the animals had escaped from the makeshift corral and plunged down the 200-foot cliff to their deaths. As the cowboys struggled to capture the remaining frightened horses, another went over the cliff. Two others fell into crevasses, where they died. Unable to free the carcasses, the cowboys chainsawed them off at the legs. Later, other carcasses were found at the bottom of the cliff with wire clips attached to their nostrils to restrict breathing and make them more manageable. The horses that survived and were captured were shipped to Nebraska.
”If a cowboy needed a little pocket change, to go to a rodeo or something, he`d go out and round up a few horses and sell them for pet food,” says Robert Hillman, director of field services for the Sacramento, Calif.,-based Animal Protection Institute (API), which considers the protection of wild horses one of its top concerns.
The roundups were conducted with deadly effectiveness. During a two-year period in southern Montana alone, for example, more than 20,000 horses were removed from the Bighorn Basin, where the Pryor Mountain refuge is located. By 1970, out of a million horses that once thundered across the dusty Western range, only an estimated 17,000 wild horses were left.
In the 1960s the wild horses found a friend in a rancher from Nevada. Velma Johnston, who later became known as ”Wild Horse Annie,” observed the cruel handling of some wild horses captured on the range. Incensed, she mounted a campaign to protect the animals, which led to the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Protection Act. Among other things, the act required that wild horses that are culled from oversized herds be held for adoption by private parties instead of being sent to the slaughterhouse. At first the law mandated that the wild horses forever remain the property of the federal government even after adoption; a recent change in the law granted ownership to the foster parents after a year of providing proper care to their adoptees.
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