Lake Mead Looks for Ways to Make Unwanted Burros Hit the Road : Arizona: Barred from shooting the federally protected animals, officials have come up with kinder, gentler proposals. Joint use areas. Birth control. And, most important, adoption.

It’s time for the burros to leave Lake Mead.

National Park Service officials long have worried that the pack animals brought to the Southwest by Spanish explorers are too hard on the high desert and brush of northwestern Arizona.

Unable to shoot the federally protected animals, they have come up with management proposals that read more like social welfare programs: Joint use areas. Birth control. And, most important, adoption.

“There are more people willing to adopt burros than there are burros available,” said Kevin Enright, vice president of the Oatman Chamber of Commerce.

Burros often run free through the single street of the former gold-mining town of Oatman, 30 miles from the 1.5-million-acre Lake Mead National Recreation Area on the Arizona-Nevada line.

“We love them,” Enright said. “They’re so cute, and they’re so cuddly, and they’re pettable. People love to have their pictures taken with them.”

Park officials feel differently about the estimated 1,300 burros at Lake Mead. They view the animals as non-native interlopers that compete with endangered bighorn sheep and desert tortoises for food and space.

Kent Turner, Lake Mead’s chief of resource management, said officials hope eventually to reduce the burros’ 700,000-acre home on the range to half that size--largely by funneling the animals into a Bureau of Land Management adoption program.

For $75, anyone with a 400-square-foot pen and a 5-foot fence can become the proud owner of a wild burro. The animals thrive in the mountainous, creosote bush-dotted deserts of Arizona, Nevada and Southern California but can survive in a variety of climates, said Bob Mitchell, a BLM wild horse and burro specialist in Reno.

“Nationally, as soon as we get them into a facility, we can just ship them to a location and they’re adopted out immediately,” Mitchell said.

Burros not only are an obvious choice as pack animals and protectors of sheep from coyotes, but can make household pets, he said.

“A lot of people still just like them to have a fuzzy little critter in their back yard,” Mitchell said.

Many of those “fuzzy little critters” could become available this month, when the park service and BLM begin removing burros from areas designated as burro-free zones in the management plan. Those areas are deemed to be severely overgrazed and in need of rehabilitation.

The plan, outlined in an environmental impact statement, also discusses guidelines for establishing “joint burro use areas,” where burros frequently roam from park land to adjacent BLM property. Many such areas will be located in flat, open areas, where building miles of fences would be too costly.

The statement mentions birth control as a possible means of thinning burro herds, but current contraception techniques are not feasible, Turner said.

“It’s not a one-shot technique,” he said, explaining the injection that renders sperm and eggs inviable is effective for only a year. “It would require finding the same animal every year and having a subsequent injection.”

Karen Sussman, president of the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros, objected to the birth control option. The numbers of burros on public lands have dropped from 10,000 to less than 5,000 since Congress passed an act protecting them in 1971, she said.

“So many people think we just have burros galore,” she said. “Up there, we don’t.”

The burro removal project--part of a larger ecosystem management plan for the recreation area--is a compromise between advocates for burros and partisans of bighorn sheep.

“We would prefer to see all the burros removed,” said Warren Leek, vice president of the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society. “To us, they’re just a real fierce competitor with the natural wildlife.

“I would say in general that we’re pretty happy with the agreement.”

About 2,000 sheep roam the Black Mountain region near Lake Mead, but Leek said they may expand into other areas once the burros are removed.

Sussman accused federal officials of “ingrained, unfounded prejudice” against burros but said adoption is a responsible way to remove the animals if they cannot continue to roam freely.

“The fact that they’re going to manage some burros on park land we think is very positive,” she said.