Wild Horses Who Escaped Death as Foals Will Be Put Up for Adoption

Twelve small wild horses spared from death last summer during a roundup to stop a deadly equine disease are healthy and soon will be put up for adoption.

The Bureau of Land Management plans an April 10 silent auction at Stillwater, Okla., for the horses, which were newborn foals when their infected mothers were euthanized last June.

“The whole bunch are saved and that’s good,” said Glen Foreman of the BLM in Utah.

The BLM rounded up more than 500 wild horses in eastern Utah last spring and summer after equine infectious anemia was found in an adjacent Indian reservation’s wild horse herd.

In all, 115 horses that tested positive for the disease on BLM land were destroyed. The virus, spread by horseflies and mosquitos, causes death in about 30% of the afflicted horses and weakens many of the rest.

The 12 foals were about to be killed under orders of the state veterinarian, who wanted to protect Utah’s $350-million horse industry.

But the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros sued the BLM, contending that the foals’ positive tests for the disease may simply have been due to antibodies in their mothers’ milk.

Eleven had tested positive for the antibodies and one tested negative.

A federal judge blocked the killings. After several tense weeks a veterinary research project at Oklahoma State University agreed to take the foals, something Utah and bordering states had refused to do.

It turned out that the wild-horse advocates’ hunch was right: the foals did not have equine infectious anemia.

“We were pretty confident, but you don’t want to get too hopeful,” said Dr. Rebecca McConnico, an assistant professor of equine medicine who heads the research project at Oklahoma State.

“All the way from the first round of tests . . . they’ve been negative,” McConnico said.

OSU used a test that is expensive and difficult to administer in the field, but which measures the virus, not just antibodies.

The horses, now geldings and fillies, weigh as much as 600 pounds. Last Monday they were allowed outside a quarantined brick building for the first time and placed in a corral that two days earlier was covered by a foot of snow.

“I didn’t know how they were going to react,” McConnico said in a telephone interview. “The only water they had seen was in a bucket.”

“They were so funny; they just didn’t know what to do with the big puddles. They just rolled and played in the puddles and the mud. They just had a blast,” she said.

Six equine veterinary students were hired by the BLM to care for the horses and some plan to bid on their charges, she said.

As rewarding as the horse rescue has been, the chance to advance the research into testing foals of infected mares has been the most satisfying, McConnico said. “There is a lot we’ll be able to learn from this.”

Karen Sussman, president of the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based wild horse society that filed the lawsuit, says she doesn’t mind that BLM officials appear to be heroes for sparing the foals.

“If the BLM has learned something from this experience, let them take the credit. Our only goal is to be able to become teachers and models for the way we feel the world should be.”

The society is asking the agency to give the veterinary students first crack at adopting the horses, which have become attached to their caretakers. And the society wants the BLM to require bidders to promise permanent homes for the animals, said Valerie Stanley, the Animal Legal Defense Fund attorney who handled the lawsuit for the society.

The BLM will follow the same procedures it uses for all its wild horse and burro adoptions, which preclude doing what the society wants.

But Foreman said the BLM is requiring that all buyers live within a six-hour drive, or 300 miles, a range that reaches into Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and even the border areas of Colorado, Nebraska and Louisiana. That will reduce the travel stress on the young horses.

The minimum bid is $125.

Debbie Harrington, a wild horse and burro information specialist for the BLM in Oklahoma, said 23 other wild horses and burros also will be up for adoption on April 10. The BLM is planning another roundup of wild horses in eastern Utah this fall.

Waiting until then may allow the disease--if it still exists in the herd--to spread further, but it will give this spring’s foals a few more months with their mothers should the disease again be detected.

For information on the April 10 wild horse adoption in Stillwater, call the BLM at (800) 237-3642.