INSIGHTS: The Truth About Wild Horses: Travesty of Justice

By Craig Downer

MINDEN, Nevada, September 22, 2004 (ENS) - To speak of the wild horse living upon the wide open, public domain lands of North America is to speak of one of the continent's most genuinely indigenous, ecologically complementary and magnificent of species. It is also to speak of justice in its highest sense.

The horse’s return to its true cradle of evolution in North America produces a positive resonance in every alive and attuned conscious man and woman today. These horses truly enhance the ecosystem of Western public lands, evolutionarily, ecologically, and in many other ways.

For example, due to its unique digestive system, the horse greatly aids in the building up of the absorptive, nutrient-rich humus component of soils. This, in turn, helps the soil absorb and retain water upon which many diverse plants and animals depend.

Since the horse’s digestive system does not thoroughly degrade the vegetation it eats, many diverse seeds pass through its stomach undegraded and able to germinate in its fertile droppings. This is a beautiful example of mutualism among animals and plants; and, in the horse’s case, it has been established over literally millions of years upon the North American continent.

Wild horses on the open range southeast of Battle Mountain, Nevada (Photo courtesy BLM)

Back in the 1950s when Storey County, Nevada, passed the first law in the nation to protect wild horses in their free state, this was one of their primary reasons.

The wild horse opens up water sources both during winter and summer for other species to partake. This it does with its hard hooves. In the same manner, it breaks crusty snow and ice during winter freeze over, allowing other animals to access vegetation to feed on, or for vital shelter.

And there are thousands of similar benefits that the horse provides to other native, North American species, precisely because it has co-evolved over not just thousands but many millions of years here in its true cradle of evolution - North America.

And much the same can be said of the horse’s close relative, the burro.

Much of this harmony is re-established when horses and burros regain their rightful freedom in the mountains, prairies, plains, valleys and deserts of the West.

This is recognized by the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, Public Law 92-195, still in effect and which was passed into law unanimously in 1971. This wise act recognizes the special relation between people and equids and, I believe, tacitly recognizes a moral obligation between humankind and horse kind.

Wild mare and foal in Wyoming 70 miles east of Yellowstone National Park (Photo by Sue Hahn courtesy BLM)

These individuals work for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, whose politically appointed leadership has decided to abandon the noble cause of the Wild Horse Act because of dirty politics.

Their record has been disgraceful; and during the current Bush administration the attitude has become even worse. It sinks to the same abysmal level as many state and local governments controlled by conniving vested interests whose conscience remains perversely dead when it comes to the wild horses and their freedom.

Why is the federal government planning to allow less than one wild horse or burro per public lands livestock permittee, about 24,000 nationwide, when each public permittee has hundreds or thousands of livestock in terms of equivalent grazing pressure upon the public lands?

And the ratio of public lands livestock resource consumption is at least 150 livestock to one wild horse or burro. And how very unfair has been the federal government’s zeroing out of nearly half of the legal wild horse and burro herd areas established under the 1971 Wild Horse Act.

Men and women should ponder all that these magnificent animals have done for humanity over, not just centuries, but millennia. It is estimated that the horse was first domesticated 6,000 to 7,000 years ago in the Middle East, and since that ancient date so much of our civilization has been built because of horses and burros.

Now that our polluting and ecosystem ravishing machines have largely displaced equids as our major means of transportation and tilling the soil, it is supremely just that at least a relatively minor but genetically viable population of wild horses be allowed to remain on about 13 percent of the public lands.

There the legal mandate should be that our public servants manage these lands principally for the wild equids, accommodating other multiple uses as harmonize with the wild horses and burros.

Unfortunately, because public lands ranchers, and the politicians they control or have become, are loathe to share even this minor portion of the public lands, we are presently witnessing the practical elimination of the wild horses and burros from their legal herd areas, their intended place under the sun.

Today, over 20,000 wild equids that have been unfairly gathered from their wilderness homes languish in concentration camp-like holding pens, such as in Palomino Valley north of Reno.

Wild horses are gathered off the range by helicopter northwest of Lovelock, Nevada, 1998. (Photo by Richard H. Brown courtesy BLM)

During such massive roundups as are occurring now, illicit activity often occurs, as when mass adopters end up disposing of many wild horses to killer buyers or directly to horse slaughter plants such as exist in Canada.

The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) announced intention is to reduce an already overly diminished wild horse and burro population of about 30,000 to about 20,000 nationwide, actually less than existed at the passage of the Wild Horse Act in 1971, when they were considered particularly in danger of disappearing from the American scene.

Most of these herds have assigned Appropriate Management Levels that are non-viable, many being less than 100 individuals and often such tiny numbers as 10 or 20. However the legal herd areas could easily accommodate more viable herds of 500 to 1,000 or more.

Indeed, the BLM plan would leave a few thousand legal wild horse herd acres for every wild horse or burro that is allowed to remain in freedom. Most of this acreage is occupied by livestock and game animals in direct countervention of the federal law.

My once favorite range for viewing wild horses was the Pine Nut Range just east of Carson City and Carson Valley, Nevada, where I grew up observing a magnificent and truly viable herd of about 2,000 in this 26 mile long and well watered range.

However, the BLM sided with local livestock and game hunter interests to eliminate all but about a score of the wild horses here and to declare the vast majority of this range horse free.

This is but one case among hundreds of official betrayal by our public servants across the West.

The West Douglas herd, one of four tiny remaining herds of about 100 in Colorado, is now being zeroed out to accommodate oil and gas drillers.

The historical Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Sanctuary established by Wild Horse Annie has been reduced to a struggling remnant in the Arrowhead Mountains on the Montana-Wyoming border, where the BLM only just recently pulled in its horns on its plan to sterilize the remaining mares with PZP inoculations because of an alarming increase in foal mortality.

A wild horse is innoculated with an immunocontraceptive drug in the Kamma Mountains, northwest of Lovelock, Nevada, February 1998. (Photo by Richard H. Brown courtesy BLM)

As one aware of the great value of the free-roaming horses in North America, the ancient birthplace of their kind, and of their great ecological fit and positive contribution here, and as a professional wildlife ecologist, I vehemently denounce the terrible injustice toward the wild equids that has been and continues to be perpetrated, contrary both to human and moral law.

The root of this injustice is the Big Lie that is being put out about these most worthy animals – a deliberate distortion and lopsided interpretation of the facts by vested interests who, because of those interests, lack a greater perspective to clearly perceive the place, role and value of horses, as well as burros, living in their free and natural state here in the West.

But all is not lost, and I would like to propose a viable solution to remedy this unjust and perverse situation.

In this regard, and following on an incriminating report by the General Accounting Office in the early ‘90s, there needs to occur an immediate Congressional investigation into the implementation of the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 in order to restore the wild equid herds to their legal herd areas.

In these areas, exploitative interests including livestock, hunter, miner, oil and gas, etc., must not be allowed to continue to squeeze the wild horses and burros off the land.

Nor can they be allowed to monopolize the public waters. These public waters and their sources have been trampled, overgrazed and often destroyed particularly by livestock hordes in the arid and semi-arid West for many years.

But rampant development and the siphoning off of public waters for wasteful overly indulgent uses by people is also a major threat.

As a wildlife ecologist, I recommend the establishment of sanctuaries that are truly viable, in size, in variety and in quality of habitat, so as to meet all the needs of long-term viable populations of interbreeding, reproductively active adults, together with younger and older generations.

This signifies a single herd on the order of 1,000 individuals, including a balanced assortment of all ages and both sexes. It should be noted that the harem social structure of the wild horses mandates a higher population to be truly viable since fewer stallions actually breed and pass on their genes relative to other species.

Let us learn to share the public lands with these magnificent creatures of God. Let us learn to share freedom with them on the Earth, by implementing the true intention of the Wild Horse Act.

For more information, visit http://www.saveourhorses.com/

The BLM's Wild Horse and Burro Adoption Program is found at: http://www.wildhorseandburro.blm.gov/index.php

View a petition from The American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign at: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/166841148

{Craig Downer is a wildlife ecologist, and a member of the American Society of Mammalogists.}