Rant of the Week - Wild horses

I’ve been feenin’ to rant about wild horses, but I was kinda waiting until the Little Snake Field Office does its wild horse roundup, scheduled for this October. The Sand Wash Herd Management Area (HMA) has an Appropriate Management Level of 163 to 362 animals. There are currently more than 450 horses there. However, this front page article in the Denver Post this morning made me decide to push up my timeline on my wild horse rant. Recently, BLM deputy director Henri Bisson presented euthanasia as a solution to a meeting of the Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board. This sparked all kinds of outrage. I’d contend that besides the dog, no animal is more revered in America than the horse.

Management of wild horses should be built upon this premise: Wild horses are an exotic species. I don’t care if they were in North America 10,000 years ago. If that’s our definition of “native,” then elephants are native, too. They are relatives of feral horses, set lose by ranchers. They should be managed as such, not on par with native wildlife. Yes, ranching interests do have the upper hand on public land and yes, livestock do cause more damage to the range—but only because there are more. One horse does a lot more damage than one cow. Horses have top and bottom teeth, which allow them to snip off vegetation right at the ground, killing the plant instead of allowing it to regrow next year. Additionally, livestock can be managed when environmental impacts are imminent. The BLM can, and does, force ranchers to move or remove cattle and sheep from the range. Nothing can be done about horses, except the roundups which occur every 4 to 5 years.

Horses are very destructive, yet wild horse advocate groups argue there should be no management of wild horses; they should be allowed to run free and never be rounded up. Not only that, but they ask that horses are returned to areas they were removed from (because of mixed land ownership and lack of water and/or forage). In addition to the significant environmental damage that would cause, there would eventually be a huge wild horse die off. That’s not my idea of limiting animal cruelty. Not many environmental groups favor wild horses. Environmental interests and wild horse interests are very different in many respects. They don’t dovetail often (except to fight oil and gas development, and occasionally, livestock grazing), largely because the wiser environmental orgs know the damage this introduced species does. When was the last time you heard the Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Center for Native Ecosystems, Colorado Environmental Coalition, etc speak out in favor of wild horses? If you want massive numbers of horses on the range, you’re going to see significant deterioration of the range and many starving horses. They reproduce like rabbits, and within 10 years we would have a massive ecological problem on our hands. Native vegetation and native wildlife would suffer greatly.

Wild horses are still really neat animals, and I support them being managed on public lands. Whether they’re native or not, they are still powerful and beautiful symbols of the west. But we can’t let radical animal rights groups dictate wild horse policy. “No easy fix” is correct. Euthanasia should be the absolute last resort, and I’m not sure we’re their yet. Fertility control sounds like a good compromise to me, and it we should be trying this approach in many areas. But even this is opposed by horse interest groups. In 2005, the Colorado Wild Horse and Burro Coalition and the Cloud tried unsuccessfully to stop the BLM from experimenting with chemical contraception in Montana’s Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range. I’ve dealt with many interests in natural resources, and none are more radical or uncompromising than wild horse advocates. The condition of the range should be the #1 objective, and to me that means fewer cows, sheep AND horses.

Let me close with this fact: The Interior Department spends almost $40 million on wild horses and burros, while it invests just $74,472 trying to keep the average threatened or endangered species in existence. Sorry, but that’s just plain wrong.