Mustang Herds May Be Heading Toward Corral

One of the last vestiges of the American West, the wild mustang, is so flourishing that federal land managers say they’re going to have to rein it in.

Running free across parts of 10 Western states, the estimated 48,000 wild horses and burros are far too many for the range to sustain, the Bureau of Land Management has concluded.

The agency wants nearly half of the 25,000 in Nevada removed and placed in adoption programs in coming years, and they’re counting on the Bush administration to provide the money for more of the roundups.

Advocates for the wild horses say it’s a land grab at the expense of herds that have been roaming the West for centuries, some dating to the days of the Spanish conquistadors.

The horse activists who have been fighting government roundups in court say that there’s plenty of open range to support wild mustangs and that the BLM is buckling to pressure from cattle and sheep ranchers who want to protect forage for their livestock.

They accuse the BLM of inflating horse population counts and argue any new federal expenditures should be targeted to a national census of the wild equines.

“There is a lot of land out there,” said Bobbi Royle, president of Wild Horse Spirit, a watchdog for the estimated 1,000 horses that roam the Virginia Range east of Reno and Carson City.

“It could support more horses than they are saying,” she said.

BLM officials rekindled the decades-old dispute when they announced last month that the Bush administration had assured them of the nearly $30 million they’ll need to carry out roundups this year.

“The number far exceeds the rangeland’s capability to support them,” said Bob Abbey, the BLM’s state director for Nevada.

They want to reduce the herd nationally to about 26,000 by 2005, about 15,000 in Nevada, depending on the outcome of range assessments.

“We need to gather animals in sufficient quantity to get the numbers down to a level that’s healthy for the animals and the land,” Abbey said.

Or, as the BLM’s Maxine Shane puts it:

“It’s just like if you keep two horses on your lawn or two cows on your lawn, pretty soon you would have no grass left.”

Environmentalists who want fewer head of livestock grazing on public lands have joined the horse advocates in arguing that the 25,000 wild horses in Nevada have little ecological impact compared with the hundreds of thousands of cattle that roam the range.

For example, Nevada’s Elko County ranked fourth among all counties in the nation in 1997 with more than 90,000 beef cattle, the most recent year calculated by the U.S. Agriculture Department.

“I’ve worked with the BLM for years, and I think the problem is the pressure on them from the cattle-ranching industry,” said Trina Bellak, an attorney and lobbyist for the American Horse Defense Fund in Potomac, Md. “It exceeds the noise the public can make.”

The Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 “wants horses preserved in balance with other competing interests,” Bellak said.

“I don’t have any benefit from one of those head of cattle, but I get tremendous benefit from driving out on the range and seeing wild mustangs.”

Wild horse population estimates given to Congress at the time the act was passed ranged from 17,000 to 2 million.

“No one really knew,” said Shane, chief spokeswoman for the BLM’s National Wild Horse and Burro Program, based in Reno.

The first census, taken in 1974, estimated Nevada had 22,000 wild horses and 1,000 burros, far more than any other state. Apparently its remote, high-desert sagebrush and grasslands were more to the liking of equines than homesteaders in the 1800s.

“People passed over Nevada on the way to California,” Shane explained.

Due primarily to weather cycles, horse population totals in Nevada have ranged from an estimated high of 34,677 in 1992 to a low of 22,463 in 1998.

Some are believed to be direct descendants of the horses Spanish conquistadors brought to North America in the 1500s. But many date to ownership of the U.S. cavalry, and others were turned out by farmers and ranchers over the years, Shane said.

Nationally, the BLM’s goal is to remove about one of every four wild horses and burros from the range this year.

“If we hadn’t been gathering horses, the numbers would be astronomical,” Shane said.

“It would be a pretty inhumane situation. You would have animals dying, not just horses, but wildlife too. It would be devastating.”

Ranchers in the Great Basin and mountain West areas hit hardest by wildfires are among the biggest backers of the government’s bid to pare the wild herds.

More than 1.7 million acres of range--an area bigger than Delaware--burned in Nevada in 1999. The result has been less forage.

“It’s a problem, and the long-term impact is not going to be good for anybody,” said Rachel Buzzetti, executive director of the Nevada Cattlemen’s Assn.

“They’ve been trying to do periodic roundups, but they are stretching the dollar as far as it can be stretched and they haven’t been able to accomplish the task,” she said from Elko, Nev.

Nevada Rep. Jim Gibbons helped secure an additional $9 million last year to push the BLM’s roundup budget to $29 million and is pressing for more.

“It’s an emotional issue,” said Gibbons, a conservative Republican who sits on the House Resources Committee.

“Every time the federal government goes to make a move, they are sued in federal court, whether it is over wild horses or any other species or animal or insect that occurs on the planet,” he said.

But Gibbons sees brighter days ahead.

“You’ve got a president in office now who understands ranching and how proper herd management takes place,” he said.

Terry Woosley, wild horse and burro program leader for the BLM in Winnemucca, said he’s gotten used to the fact that “both sides feel they are getting shorted.”

“We don’t try to fudge the numbers. We report what we count,” Woosley said. “As long as both sides are unhappy, you are probably right in the middle.”

The BLM removed about 7,000 horses from the range in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, about 4,000 from Nevada, 1,200 from Utah, 700 from Wyoming and 500 from California, where they also removed 742 burros.

The horses that are not adopted each year remain in a holding facility like the corrals that hold 2,000 at Palomino Valley north of Reno until they find good homes. Older horses are harder to find homes for, but most horses 5 years of age or younger are adopted, especially the colorful ones, Woosley said.

“Put a flashy paint job on any of those horses and they go right now,” he said.

Bellak adopted a horse from the BLM several years ago and recently returned to northern Nevada to find its original home.

“The animals are amazing,” she said. “My mustang has turned out to be a champion show horse. But I’ve always said if I could have left her there to live peacefully, I never would have adopted her.”