A key question in the ongoing controversy is how many horses the Western range can comfortably accommodate. Each year the BLM is supposed to determine how many surplus horses there are in each management district. It must then round up that number of horses and offer them for adoption. Since the adoption program began in 1973, more than 60,000 horses have been adopted. But no horses are now being rounded up despite the fact that by government standards more horses are on the range than should be there.
The BLM estimates the top limit at around 25,000 to 30,000 animals
(figures hotly contested as too low by animal-rights groups); some 48,000 are now at large in the area. One problem is that the three BLM holding facilities–in Muleshoe, Tex.; Lovelock, Nev.; and Bloomfield, Neb.–are filled to their capacity of 3,000 wild horses each. There is no room for any more of the wild horses that should, by law, be removed from the range.
Kept in small corrals in feedlots, each of the surplus horses costs the government $2.36 a day for food, veterinary services and miscellaneous supplies. That`s $20,000 a day, or more than $7 million a year, for the 9,000 horses in the three holding facilities. The total budget for the wild horse and burro program is about $17 million.
The reason the facilities are filled to capacity is that there are far more horses that have been or still have to be rounded up than are being released for adoption. Not enough people are asking to adopt them, in part for economic reasons. A good saddle horse can be purchased now for less than a wild horse can be adopted. ”A registered quarter horse can sell for $75 today,” says wrangler Lynne Taylor. ”It costs $125 to adopt a horse. The economic incentive is not there.” Meanwhile, because of high reproductive and low mortality rates (wild horses have few natural predators), the wild-horse population is rapidly increasing, in the case of some herds, by as much as 20 percent a year.
The adoption process also means that many of the older, less-attractive horses will never find a home. ”What happens,” asks one BLM employee, ”to a 15-year-old stud that`s battle-scarred? Or an old mare that`s foaled out?” A stud is 5 to 7 years old before he moves in on the mares and forms a harem. He will then breed until just a year or so before he dies, which, on the average, would be about his 20th year. A mare will start bearing foals at 2 years of age and continue to breed for about as long as the stud is sexually active. The frequency of foaling varies from once a year to once every two or three years.
(The BLM has no problem adopting out burros. The animals, feral descendants of those used by prospectors who scoured the Southwest for precious metals, look like little donkeys and are novel and cute enough to be in constant demand.)
BLM administrators also point to the limit of four horses that may be adopted by each foster parent. With such a surplus of wild horses, they argue, there should be a provision for large-scale adoptions.
The BLM has actually tried to get around the four-horse limit and has been slapped with a lawsuit for doing so. Some ranchers in Montana, for example, have been allowed to obtain power of attorney from other individuals and thereby to adopt hundreds of horses each, supposedly because each was doing so at the rate of four animals for each person in his group. But after the mandatory year of BLM probation, all the horses became the property of the individual who had arranged the group adoption.
According to the API`s Hillman, some 1,500 horses have been adopted this way. ”They`re going to slaughter,” Hillman says, noting that while horsemeat now fetches around 20 cents a pound, it was recently as high as 40 cents a pound. ”They`re selling what they can to rodeos. But if a horse doesn`t buck, it goes to slaughter. There`s no ifs and buts about it.” Many animal-rights groups oppose sales to rodeos because, they claim, the horses are violently spurred or otherwise injured to make them buck.
The BLM refuses to comment on those allegations because it is a defendant in the lawsuit alleging that this kind of large-scale adoption is a violation of the 1971 wild horses and burros act.
The case, which is being heard in Reno, originally had two major parts. The first accused the BLM of cruelty to the wild horses during the roundups and in its holding and processing facilities. That complaint has been set aside after protectionists were allowed to monitor the roundups and inspect the corrals and, according to Hillman, conditions improved ”100 percent.”
The second part, for which a court decision is pending, contends that BLM is violating the law by allowing large-scale adoptions while knowing the animals will end up in the slaughterhouse.
Jerome Jack, who until December was area manager for the BLM`s Billings, Mont., district, which includes the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Refuge, defends large-scale adoptions, many of which he has helped process. He believes the wild horses and burros act desperately needs some retooling. ”Don`t incarcerate them in a feedlot for the rest of their lives,” says Jack, who is now director of the Montana Stockgrowers Association, a group that represents the cattle industry. If they`re not adopted, ”run `em through a sale ring. Someone might not pay $125, but he may pay $50.” Under current law, he says, such a sale is prohibited. The law should also allow horses to be shipped to slaughter if they cannot be adopted, Jack adds. ”Elk and deer populations are controlled by hunting,” he says, ”but horses are moved to a corral the rest of their lives. It`s not fair to the horses to keep them out there (on the range) and let them propagate.”
The law itself is fine, says the Fund for Animals` Willmore, who claims that if the horses are suffering, it`s because the BLM has failed to find a solution to overpropagation. Instead, she charges, the BLM, in secret concert with ranchers, ”sat down and just said, `How can we get around this law?` ” ”Everyone`s unhappy about seeing them standing around in corrals,”
Willmore says. ”I can`t understand why in 17 years the BLM can`t come up with a (sound) management plan.”
If the Secretary of the Interior approves it, the BLM may have a new wild-horse management plan designed along the lines of Jack`s thinking–and guaranteed not to please horse protectionists. Last December a BLM wild-horse advisory committee issued a five-part set of recommendations:
1. Adoption should continue at $125 a horse and $75 a burro.
2. If homes cannot be found for older horses, they should be made available for sale at a reduced cost.
3. Older horses are currently supplied to a prison in Canon City, Colo., where inmates use them to learn handling techniques. The program should be continued and expanded.
4. The idea of private lands being turned into sanctuaries with private funds is to be commended.
5. Any horses left after other remedies have been exhausted should be euthanized.
Federal law, according to John Boyles, chief of BLM`s Division of Wild Horses and Burros, allows the destruction of surplus horses. Until now, however, the bureau has avoided this ”final solution” to surplus horses. ”I don`t think anyone wants to destroy them,” Boyles says. ”But we tried to look for alternatives, and we couldn`t find any.” Sterility drugs to limit the fertility of wild horses, he adds, are too far from production at this point to be of much use.
Animal protectionists vow not to allow euthanasia for wild horses.
”We`ll fight it,” says Ted Crail, director of the Animal Protection Institute. ”We`re on the verge of (seeing) the last wild horse. We want the BLM to go back to being the good, not the evil, legal guardian of wild horses.”
Willmore believes the immediate solution lies in the creation of more federal sanctuaries where the animals are protected. (Aside from the Pryor Mountain Refuge, the only other federal sanctuary is the Little Bookcliff Wild Horse Area in western Colorado.) ”I think it`s a shame that an animal that`s done so much for us ends up this way,” she says. But any effort to carry out Willmore`s proposal is very unlikely, according to Boyles, who notes that the advisory panel specifically rejected the idea of any additional federally owned and operated sanctuaries.
API spokesman Hillman insists that it is relatively easy to solve the problem of too many unadoptable horses. ”A lot of those unadoptable horses should not have been rounded up in the first place,” he contends. ”If they would leave the horses out there that nobody wants anyway, there wouldn`t be any unadoptable ones. The problem is that the contract capture crews are getting paid by the head, so they`re not selective.”
Animal-rights groups are not the only ones who have gone to court over the management of wild horses. Ranchers have tried to force the government to remove horses from public and private land and compensate them for damage that the horses inflict on rangeland. In 1984 the Denver-based Mountain States Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit against the BLM on behalf of ranchers near Rock Springs, Wyo., claiming that the agency`s failure to keep wild horses off private land caused ranchers economic damage. This, the suit claimed, constituted a taking away of their property without compensation and therefore a violation of the ranchers` constitutional rights.
Constance Brooks, the vice president and general counsel of the Mountain States group who served as an attorney in the case, says members of the Rock Springs Grazing Association became concerned when the wild-horse herd roaming the southwestern Wyoming badlands swelled from its usual number of around 1,200 to some 6,000 animals. Land ownership in the area is checkerboarded, that is, one 640-acre parcel of public land lies next to a parcel of private land, which in turn sits next to a parcel of public land, etc., in
checkerboard fashion. ”The horses were running amok, causing problems and leaving permanent trails throughout the badlands,” Brooks says. ”Six months after the (1971) act passed, the ranchers called the BLM and asked them to remove the horses. The BLM ignored them for five years and then began an ineffectual removal program. And they stopped the program in 1979.”
That year the Mountain States group, described by Brooks as a
”conservative public-interest foundation created to protect private-property rights,” stepped in with a lawsuit challenging the BLM wild-horse management program.
Brooks argued that when the federal government passed the wild-horse act, it assumed responsibility for the animals, which is not the case with other wildlife, which roam at will and are considered under no one`s control. The ranchers, Brooks says, are asking for compensation for the forage consumed by the government`s horses on private land. She gave no precise figure for those damages.
The group won on the U.S. District Court level, won again before a three- judge panel from the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and then lost before the full panel of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Last December it asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.
Donald Carr, chief of the Wildlife and Marine Resources Section of the Justice Department, which represented the government in the case, says Brooks` argument is off-base. ”We`re not responsible for damage (the horses) might inflict, as if they were our employees or agents,” Carr says. ”We don`t own the horses. If they eat forage, they eat forage.” If the BLM isn`t doing its job and not gathering horses, Carr says, then a court order is needed to force them to do so. A remedy on constitutional grounds, he says, is absurd.
Carr says he finds the attitude of the ranchers ironic. ”Those horses have been out there (on public land) for the convenience of ranchers for years; (they were out there,) so they didn`t have to feed them. But when the Army came through and needed a ready supply of horses, the landowners could sell them (to the Army as if they owned them).”
Since the suit was filed in 1979, the situation near Rock Springs has improved from the ranchers` point of view. The BLM has culled the herd down from 6,000 to around 1,600. But Brooks says the issue is not over. ”More horses need to be taken off, and you can`t ignore the fact that every year
(the horses) increase.” The number should be reduced to 1,400, she says, and held there. ”And (even that number) is a gift of the grazing
association.”
That`s how the ranchers generally view the situation. Wild horses, they claim, interfere with the often-risky business of raising cattle. But that kind of talk rankles wild-horse protectionists. ”When you look at the fact that there`s 5.6 million head of cattle on the (public) range and 40,000 horses, and they say horses are causing the problem, something`s wrong,” says Hillman. ”There`s too many cattle on the range. That`s the bottom line.”
As ranchers demand the removal of more horses from the range and protectionists counter that there should be fewer cattle there, how can the issue be resolved? The eventual solution, which now appears acceptable to both sides, could lie in the use of implanted or injected timed-release birth- control chemicals that would hold the number of wild horses within acceptable levels.
A birth-control technique that has been used experimentally on a wild-horse herd in Idaho and other places shows some promise of success. Researchers from the University of Minnesota are also experimenting on controlling the fertility of lead stallions in some bands and of the mares in other bands in Texas.
In the case affecting the lead stallion, the horse, in an operation lasting from 15 to 20 minutes, is first anesthetized and then given a simple vasectomy. This procedure is based on the belief of some biologists that the lead stallion is the only reproducing male in a band. But because others think lesser stallions also mate with the mares of a given band, the other procedure focuses on sterilizing the mares. In this case a capsule about the size of a little finger is inserted in an incision made in the skin on the mare`s neck, and the incision is sewn shut. The capsule contains a timed-release hormone that prevents the mare from going into heat through two breeding seasons. Focusing on the mares has the added advantage of leaving intact the social structure of the animals by avoiding any procedure that might in any way diminish or alter the dominance of the lead stallion over his band.
Jay Kirkpatrick, a physiology professor at Eastern Montana College in Billings, and John Turner, his research partner who teaches at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo, are conducting similar fertility-control experiments on wild horses on Assateague Island off the coast of Maryland. Their work involves injections of the male hormone testosterone into stallions. ”We determined that we didn`t change the behavior of the animals,” says Kirkpatrick. ”That`s very important. If you changed the behavior of the lead stallion, the young stallions could come down and run off with the mares, and then you would accomplish nothing.
”If we can put a large enough dose (of testosterone) in an animal, it does two things,” Kirkpatrick continues. ”It decreases sperm production, and it decreases sperm motility (the sperm`s spontaneous wiggling motion).”
In research done in Idaho in the early 1980s, Kirkpatrick says, the procedure lowered foal production by 83 percent.
Researchers are also looking into injections of the progestational hormone progestin into mares to render them sterile. The key to making this last technique work, Kirkpatrick says, hinges on the ability to shoot a timed- release form of progestin into the mares from a distance, whether from ground level or from a helicopter. Kirkpatrick estimates the procedure could eventually cost as little as $5 per horse for an injection that could be effective for up to two years.
Until an effective and economical fertility-control method–or some other solution–is found, the presence of wild horses in the West will continue to be a problem, its seriousness varying with the vagaries of weather, the ups and downs of the animals` population, the state of the livestock market and changes in the political climate.
After a day on the range, our horses, anxiously nearing the corral and anticipating buckets of oats at the Pryor Mountain refuge, break into a trot. Suddenly a gangly wild colt just recently brought into the corral appears from behind a clump of sagebrush. Spooked, our horses jump, as the colt, even more spooked, bolts away and then, still skittish, stops and turns to watch us from a safe distance. It`s a grullo, a Mexican term for an ash-colored horse, and looks healthy enough. Jerome Jack, however, says he`s increasingly worried about the health of every successive generation of the Pryor herd.
The Pryor area is very dry and rocky, difficult to ranch economically and therefore sparsely populated. The wild-horse refuge itself is comprised of the steep slopes, canyons and bluffs of Pryor Mountains, its eastern boundary the long and cavernous Bighorn Canyon. Isolated by geography, the Pryor herd has received a minimum of genetic infusion from outside herds, and the horses over many generations have maintained unique traits that some believe are those of the Spanish mustang. The degree of herd purity is hotly debated. Protectionists believe there has been very little outside blood; the BLM thinks ranch horses have found their way into the refuge and, though the mustang traits are still dominant, have diluted the herd`s genes. Still another view holds that the original wild horses in the area were killed in the 1920s and `30s and that those of today`s herd are descendants of ranch horses.
The inbreeding, Jack contends, has come to the point where problems could arise imminently. ”It`s like any inbred population,” he says. Most, if not all of them, may have the same genetic defect, and ”if that one virus comes along, it could wipe them out. With this kind of confined herd, the BLM should take a look into the introduction of new studs to increase the genetic variability of the herd.” The new horses, he adds, should be similar in size, body formation and color to those already there so the appearance of the animals is not altered.
Dr. Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the San Diego Zoo, agrees that there is potential for a genetic problem. ”There`s no question inbreeding is going on,” he says, adding that ”it`s inevitable” under the conditions. But what exactly those genetic problems might be and when they would crop up is anybody`s guess. The horses may even pass through the high-risk period of inbreeding without a problem. ”But the conservative course would be to manage for the inbreeding” by selectively introducing some new stock, Ryder says.
The BLM has not taken steps to introduce new genes into the Pryor horses because some protectionists with a fondness for the Pryor herd claim the inbreeding issue is a manufactured one. ”The BLM is a land agency; they don`t know anything about animals,” says Hope Ryden, the New York City-based author of ”America`s Last Wild Horses” and a fierce advocate of the Pryor horses for more than 15 years. ”Inbreeding is a good thing. They do it with horses all the time. It`s called line breeding. (Through it) an animal becomes much more tailored to its environment.”
But to Ryder, who agrees that ”a very low level of inbreeding is desirable in a population,” father-daughter inbreeding is definitely not good for a population. ”From the material given me,” he says, ”there were father-daughter relations.” The issue is clouded considerably by the fact that the various aspects of inbreeding are subjects of debate within the scientific community.
In any case, Hope Ryden questions the BLM`s data and steadfastly opposes the introduction of outside blood to the Pryor herd. ”I wouldn`t say the herd is absolutely pure, but when animals have been living together for a long period of time, you get a very special breed of horse. Once they do that
(introduce new blood), the purity of this herd is lost, and we could lose a national treasure.”
