On Feb. 24, Tucsonans gathered on the southside to celebrate tradition. The 86th Tucson Rodeo Parade had all of its usual attractions—colorful costumes, flags flying in the wind and more cowboy hats than you can count.
In central Tucson, I discussed a key element of the parade—the horse—with author Deanne Stillman. Instead of seeing animals bedecked with beautiful saddles and awash in color, I listened to Stillman paint a dismal picture of the history of wild horses.
Stillman, author of Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, said you can’t discuss the plight of the wild horse (or mustang) without first knowing some history. Her book provides a detailed history of the wild horse—in the New World, on the prairie, in Hollywood and on the range. Stillman outlines how the horse was used—as an aid to soldiers in war, as entertainers, as a target for hunters and as a food source.
It’s not a pretty history. There were approximately 2 million wild horses in the United States at the end of the 19th century; today, there are between 22,000 to 33,000 free-roaming horses. An even greater number—approximately 40,000—are in captivity at government holding facilities.
Stillman said that the horse’s natural predator—mountain lions—cannot control the horse population. Without a natural predator, the horse population must be managed. It’s how the horses are managed that’s key in Stillman’s mind.
While there are adoption programs and sanctuaries for the horses, the greatest numbers of horses are removed from the range by roundups. Horses are gathered with the use of helicopters. Stillman witnessed a roundup in Nevada in 2004 and said “it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life.” Mustang advocates point to injuries and fatalities suffered during these roundups.
Once the horses are taken, most are placed in short-term holding facilities. Stillman recalled a case in Nevada several years ago in which horses were taken off a range due to drought. While in a holding facility, someone forgot to turn on a faucet, and six horses died of thirst.
Back on the range, the number of designated herd areas has dwindled. In 1971, the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was passed. A U.S. Senate report stated: “The principal goal of this legislation is to provide for the protection of the animals from man and not the single use management of areas for the benefit of wild free-roaming horses and burros.” Sounds good, but Stillman said more than 100 wild-horse ranges have been eliminated since then.
I first spoke with Stillman almost three years ago. (See “Wild Hooves,” City Week, June 5, 2008.) I asked what recent changes she has seen. “More and more people know about (the wild horse situation). A couple of roundups have been cancelled in the past few months. People are filing lawsuits. The brighter the light, the better it is for mustangs.”
Light shined in the U.S. House in February, when an amendment was approved to cut the Bureau of Land Management’s budget by $2 million in protest of the agency’s roundups. The BLM then announced reforms to their wild-horse management program. They propose to increase science-based fertility control, reduce the number of removals, promote volunteerism in managing horses, and improve transparency.
In response to the news, Stillman wrote, “I think the announcement is an interesting development, but to quote Ronald Regan, ‘Trust but verify.’ I still stand by my many calls for a moratorium on roundups pending an overhaul of management policy.” Stillman said proper studies must be conducted to get an accurate count of horses, which can then lead to correlated management practices.
Besides looking to the BLM, Stillman said Americans must look to themselves. “I’d like people to revisit our history … (and) understand the role (the wild horse) played in making our country (and know) what’s at stake if we lose it—our identity and our soul as a nation.”
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2011.
thanks for your time and consideration of thse matters, irene!
minor correction: the reason mountain lions can’t control the wild horse population is because they are gone from most areas where mustangs roam, wiped out by people and habitat destruction.
– deanne
So much misinformation, so little time to correct it.
Fertility control is prohibitively expensive if conducted at a level needed to keep horses and burros from ruining the health of our public lands. Adoptions lag far behind the growth of the herds, which is about 20% a year. Horses and burros are not native to North America and have no natural predators whatsoever. Mountain lions – which, by the way, exist in abundance throughout much of the West and have not been wiped out by people and habitat destruction – are capable of taking colts in the spring and occasionally an adult animal, but even the lion is largely ineffective at overtaking and bringing down full grown horses. Any limiting influence on their population growth will have to be supplied by humans, which guarantees controversy.
Organizations devoted to protecting the ecological health of our wildlands do not support the feral horse liberation movement, which is what we seem to be facing. The Wildlife Society (professional and academic organization of wildlife biologists), National Wildlife Federation and some members of the Audubon Society have spoken out for the need to control feral equine numbers on public lands. But neither these NGOs nor the government biologists with public trust responsiblities for the health of our public lands are any match for the romanticists and animal welfare activists who are determined to ignore or reject any facts they find inconvenient. Celebrities and journalists with little knowledge of the issue only amplify the misinformation and prevent us from getting any nearer a workable solution.
At least four government and private audits have concluded that BLM’s roundups are conducted in the most humane manner possible. The Office of Inspector General concluded that BLM has done a good job with a very difficult situation. What has turned this program into a disaster is Congressional meddling to satisfy a frenzied animal welfare lobby.
The 1971 Wild Horse and Burro Act made it illegal to kill, capture or harrass the animals. Prior that law, there were few protections for “wild” horses and burros, and their numbers were controlled by “mustanging,” in which private individuals captured and sold them for eventual slaughter and processing into cordovan leather, pet food, meat for export and a number of other products. (See John Huston’s 1961 film The Misfits with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe for an illustration.) The 1971 law also required the Bureau of Land Management, which manages most of the lands feral horses and burros occupy, to inventory the numbers and locations of existing herds, designate Herd Management Areas (HMAs), determine appropriate population levels and keep the herds within their HMAs at environmentally sustainable levels. The Act provided for sale and adoption of both horses and burros and specifically authorized euthanasia as a tool to prevent them from over-populating and destroying the range.
The 1971 Act might have worked reasonably well had Congress refrained from meddling with agency operations and given the agency enough annual funding to carry out its mandates. Instead Congress routinely caved in to pressures from horse lovers who were opposed both to the round-ups of excess animals and their subsequent slaughter. By the 1980s Congress’s annual budget appropriations for BLM began routinely prohibiting the killing of any animals that were not old or lame. This meant healthy horses and burros had to be rounded up and cared for at private facilities where they received feed and veterinary care paid for by BLM. Soon much of BLM’s budget for the wild horse and burro program was going to keep excess animals in pastures and corrals on private farms around the nation. Meanwhile, horse lovers were upset over the round-ups, which they perceived as brutal and traumatizing to the animals, and they were not happy that the number of animals in confinement was fast approaching the number left roaming free on the range. Both BLM and Congress started turning a blind eye to the Act’s requirements to keep populations at biologically sustainable levels and within their HMAs because it was cheaper to leave excess animals on the range than to pay for costly round-ups and long-term boarding. It also kept horse lovers off the backs of BLM and Congress, but that didn’t work well for other stakeholders. Private ranchers, public grazing lessees, wildlife groups, state game commissions and land departments, military ranges and other federal agencies including national parks and wildlife refuges were seeing their landscapes hammered by horses and burros that were known to be above their allowable levels and often went where they weren’t supposed to be. BLM was never especially good about keeping the animals inside the HMAs, but persistently allowing excessive populations was looking like willful neglect of duty. BLM cited a lack of adequate funding. States began taking BLM to court in order to force them to comply with the 1971 law. Arizona’s Game and Fish Commission took BLM to federal court on three separate occasions to force removal of excess feral burros in the western part of the state.
The presence of horses and burros on our public lands can only be justified as cultural resources associated with the settlement of West, much like longhorn cattle and Winchester repeating rifles. As such, their presence should be confined to limited areas so they cn serve as the museum pieces they really are. Most if not all of the “wild” horses and burros on our Western lands are from feral livestock that once belonged to humans but was turned out or escaped. As non-natives, they are not compatible with North American ecosystems and are exceptionally hard on a landscape that did not co-evolve with them. With solid hoofs and meshing incisors, they harm native plants, soils and riparian areas in ways native wildlife do not. Whereas a deer will nibble new growth from a tree, a horse or burro simply eats the tree. In Arizona, the problem has traditionally been with burros, but more recently horses have become a serious threat to forest lands in east-central Arizona. Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest faces having to host horses that have escaped from the nearby Apache reservation due to a judge’s decision a couple of years ago, and as the US economy went into free fall many horse owners were unable to care for their animals and took to dumping them on the reservation and in the national forest.
Believe me, nobody simply want to go around killing horses, nor does anyone want to lock them up in horse concentration camps where they cost the taxpayer tens of millions each year. What some of us do want is the application of science, math and economic to the problem, instead of emotion and politics. The science tells us we can’t effectively contain feral equine populations through fertility control, and it’s prohibitively expensive to even try. (Animal welfare activists are welcome to supply the funding.) The horse lovers’ lobby has suggested putting them on private ranches, which would be fine except that there aren’t enough private ranch owners to take them all, or anywhere near all. Adoptions have historically trailed far behind the animals’ natural reproduction rates.
The 1971 Act could not have passed without authorizing euthanasia as a tool for controlling numbers that exceeded what can be controlled by other means. It did so for a reason: the arithmetic of horse reproduction mandates it. What Congress has given us is a program that is scientifically, mathematically and economical unworkable, and they did so by ignoring their own federal law.
And will someone please tell me the purpose of cutting $2 million from BLM’s budget just to say Congress is unhappy with BLM? What exactly does Congressman Burton want BLM to do besides, as he stated, not kill any horses?
Go ahead, animal lovers. Have at me.
Geez, Larry, I can’t top that. Well, except to say that just about everything you said reminds me of the droppings left behind by the cattle that are released on the land that the Mustangs are removed from.
Great article. US citizens are totally behind the the mustangs and burros and want them on our public lands. It’s the sports hunters and cattleman that truely believe public land belong to them solely. They are pressuring the BLM to remove wild horses and burrosand using state wildlife agencies like Arizona Fish and Game to voice their opposition to the horses.
As long as the public is informed and engaged in the true contribution of the wild horse to our ecosystem like the spread of seeds through their dropping and keeping forest fires in check by consuming grasses, it think common sense will privail.
Remember, wild horses and burros are our living symbols of freedom. Become active in the wild horse community. Attend a lecture on Arizona Wild Horses and Burro on March 26, 2011 at the Bear Canyon Library 1pm-2pm.