Our national obsession with
keeping “wild1” horses and burros on public lands that are
incapable of supporting them has always struck me as bizarre,
especially since it’s the result of our alleged love for them. Ask
most any wild horse advocacy group and you’ll be told that wild
horses are native wildlife and anyone who wants them off the public
land is fronting for the cattle industry.
It’s true that
cattle do more damage than free-ranging horses or burros because
there are more of them. But one horse does far more damage than one
cow. And though it’s true that a form of horse evolved in North
America, it went extinct along with other ice-age megafauna such as
the woolly mammoth. Arguing that the modern horses unleashed by the
Conquistadores are “native” to the continent because their
progenitors were here 10,000 years ago is as absurd as arguing that
elephants are native, too, because their progenitors were also here
10,000 years ago.
Unlike all native ungulates, and even
unlike cattle, horses and burros have meshing incisors and solid
hoofs. Because native vegetation of the arid West has evolved no
defense against these animals, they extinguish it and then starve.
Montana writer Judy Blunt describes a typical scene in The
New York Times of Jan. 4, 2005: “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.”
In 1972, responding to a
letter-writing campaign by passionate but ecologically illiterate
horse lovers, Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro
Act which placed all unrestrained, unclaimed horses and burros
under government care and made it a felony to kill, capture, sell
or harass one. This law compels the departments of Agriculture and
Interior to manage feral horses and burros in such fashion as “to
achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance on the
public lands.”
This sounds good but the mission is
impossible. First, the Bureau of Land Management doesn’t begin to
have the capacity to manage feral horses and burros. Second, horses
and burros are aliens and therefore can’t exist anywhere in North
America in “natural ecological balance.” The Interior Department
spends almost $40 million annually to keep feral horses on
perpetual welfare, while it invests just $74,472 trying to keep the
average threatened or endangered species in existence.
The removal-and-adoption program, run by the BLM, doesn’t come
close to dealing with the problem. “It’s frustrating to see them
spend money in areas that can’t maintain viable horse populations,”
says Nevada Department of Wildlife habitat bureau chief Dave
Pulliam. “:We see places where BLM has established a management
goal of 15 or 20 horses when their own science indicates that 100
is the threshold for viability. So why aren’t they zeroing out
these herds? Sensitive desert species like bighorns, desert
tortoises, and Gila monsters can’t tolerate horses. And horses will
stand over a spring and run off other animals.”
“Horses
and burros do incredible damage,” says Erick Campbell, a biologist
who retired from the BLM in 2005, and who frequently dealt with
wild horse issues during his 30-year career. “When the grass
between the shrubs is gone a cow is out of luck, but a horse or
burro will stomp that plant to death to get that one last blade.
When cows run out of forage the cowboys move them or take them
home, but horses and burros are out there all year. They’re not
fenced; they can go anywhere. BLM exacerbates the problem by
hauling water to them.”
The Humane Society of the United
States is trying to develop practical contraceptives deliverable in
the field, but the more radical horse lovers oppose all control
— even this. In 2005, the Colorado Wild Horse and Burro
Coalition and the Cloud Foundation (named after a feral horse named
Cloud) tried unsuccessfully 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,”
says Cloud Foundation director Ginger Kathrens. “It’s a situation
that can be managed by nature, but they (federal agents) don’t
value natural systems.” When I asked her how imported horses and
burros could be considered natural, she said: “Wild horses are
native to North America.”
Ted Williams is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He writes the Incite column for
Audubon magazine and lives in Grafton,
Massachusetts.
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