What is Happening to America’s Last Wild Horses and Burros?!
By Craig C. Downer,
P.O. Box 456,
Minden, NV 89423.
T. 775-267-3484. ccdowner@yahoo.com
July 14, 2010
The unanimously passed Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 (Public Law
92-195) charges two federal agencies with protecting and managing America’s last wild
horses and burros in the wild. These are the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the
United States Forest Service (USFS). The BLM falls under the direction of the Secretary
of the Interior, currently Mr. Ken Salazar, a Colorado rancher, while the USFS is under
the Secretary of Agriculture.
Original acreages eligible for inclusion as legally protected herd areas (based upon where
these animals were on a year-round basis at the passage of the Act) summed ca. 88
million acres as indicated from U.S. Geological Service sources and corroborated by
veteran BLM wild horse workers during the first decade of the program. However the
federal authorities now plan to allow wild horses and burros to occupy only 26.6 million
acres out of the 53.5 million acres they spuriously recognize as the sum of original herd
areas, ca. 350 in total in eleven Western states. And upon these 26.6 million acres, they
plan to allow only ca. 27,000 wild equids, including less than 3,000 burros and ca. 24,000
wild horses as so-called Appropriate Management Levels. This works out to right around
1,000 acres per scant remaining, individual wild horse or burro. And since there are ca.
27,000 livestock grazers upon the BLM and USFS public lands, this also works out to
only one remaining wild horse/burro per rancher, who grazes anywhere from several
hundred to many thousands of livestock on the public lands. The gross disparity is mind
boggling, as is the utter mendacity of those people, official or non, who claim that wild
horses and burros are overpopulating the West, for in any truly objective sense the very
opposite is true!
What has happened to the 27 million zeroed-out acres that were subtracted from the 53.5
million that BLM declares were all the wild equids were entitled to? And why is it that
even in those 26.6 million acres where the wild horses/burros are still ostensibly allowed
to remain, these “national heritage species” are still being marginalized, their impacts
overly magnified, their positive contributions and justifications ignored? Obviously this
is to justify giving them the short end of the stick when it comes to forage (over
allocation to livestock), water (failure to defend/secure water sources), and even space
within their reduced herd management areas (over fencing) – all contrary to the law!
An egregious case-in-point concerns the Calico Complex of five wild horse herd
management areas encompassing over half a million acres and where a very deadly
helicopter roundup has just occurred between late December, 2009, and early February,
2010. To date, ca. 150 deaths have resulted, most in the Broken Arrow wild horse
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holding facility to which these panic-stricken horses were brought. This is located on
private land several miles north of Fallon, Nevada. A third of these deaths have been due
to spontaneous abortion. In total, 1,922 wild horses were violently coerced from their
sparsely inhabited mountain and valley fastnesses by use of helicopter (Cattoor
contractor) and often over very rough and cliffy terrain strewn with jagged, hide- and
muscle-piercing, bone-jarring lava rocks. Hard pressed to keep up with the adult horses,
some of the foals or slightly older colts so chased were reduced to pitiful, quivering
wrecks for whom every step was excruciating. This inhumanity was hard to witness,
both during the actual roundups and long afterwards at the Fallon holding pens, where at
least two of these hoof-sore colts (one named Hope) died miserably.
As a fourth generation Nevadan, I have observed these Calico Complex horses going
back decades and learned much from old timers concerning their history. Recently
during October, 2009, and accompanied by fellow biologist Bob Bauer, I toured the
Complex in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Having witnessed the wonderful harmony that
was manifest in this wild-horse-containing ecosystem and now having to contrast this
with the pathetic, broken up remnant of wild horses that either remain in this region or
have been taken into captivity has been very disturbing. Whether in disarray in the wild,
held captive, or dead, the broken lives of these wild horses counts among life’s most
perplexing and anguishing conundrums. That our generously paid public servants,
whether appointed or hired, should allocate only one fourth of the forage in the Calico
Complex to wild horses when the law clearly states that the wild horses shall be the
‘principal though not exclusive’ benefactors within their legal herd areas shows to just
what an extent the Wild Horse Act has been subverted. Meanwhile livestock presence
has significantly increased in this Complex, as the once tightly functioning and welldispersed mustang bands are further thrown into disarray. It also bears mentioning that
trespass livestock, chiefly cattle, remain a significant problem in this area, as in many
throughout the West, and that, unlike horses, these cattle camp on and utterly devastate
stream- and lake-side ecosystems, as I so vividly recall at the Little High Rock Reservoir
where hundreds of cattle made an absolute quagmire out of the streams and lakeshore
habitat in September of 2006. This was when I observed another deadly BLM mustang
roundup just to the NW of Calico. As concerns these cows congregating in and around
water: what would you expect from a Hereford originating from moist, meadow-filled
Herefordshire, England?
Witnessing these wild horse roundups has been an awake nightmare for those of us
attuned to the magnificence of the natural, free-living horse returning to its ancient place
of origin and long-standing evolution here in North America. Equally disturbing has
been observing the disanimated lives now awaiting their uncertain fates in the Fallon or
Palomino holding facilities. Desperately dreaming of regaining their former freedom and
their families, here so many have perished in silence, their spirits finally and mercifully
released.
Having legally protested before the D.C. federal court concerning the Calico roundup and
as one currently appealing before the Interior Board of Land Appeals against the illconceived Tuscarora (Owyhee-Rock Creek-Little Humboldt) Complex roundup (now
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temporarily suspended by BLM national director due at first to seven and now 12 horse
deaths), I have grown quite disillusioned with the misleading claims of BLM officials.
These concern the “starving” horses and the “habitat destruction” they supposedly cause.
But BLM conveniently ignores the real causes here and humans’ major hand in this – the
greater story. BLM often cites lack of water for justifying the roundups, all the while
ignoring many natural sources and what could be done to see the horses receive their fair
share of these. This intentional blindness reveals a deep-rooted bias on the part of BLM
officials and those who give them their marching orders. And I have grown particularly
incensed by the boldfaced hypocrisy of officials who claim to be helping wild horses
while proceeding to do all the opposite. My patience grows thin too with supercilious
and apathetic judges who glibly relinquish responsibility when it comes to upholding the
unanimously passed Act. Obviously they lack the caring and the courage it takes to
defend these marvelous presences against public lands exploiters and their colluders
within the bureaucracies. Too many smug types are simply shirking their duty to the
General Public. This betrayal is of the lowest caliber, and it panders to ever-increasing
livestock, hunter, mining, and energy-extractive monopolies whose motivations toward
and perceptions of the wild horses are too often tainted by possessiveness and greed.
The 14 wild horse herd management areas of the 1.4-million-acre Caliente Complex
(Nevada’s Ely BLM District) became co-opted by plans for extensive solar energy
concessions as well as the usual monopolization of resources by public lands ranchers.
Subsequent to the draconian helicopter roundups that occurred last fall, these hma’s are
now all zeroed out “herd areas” where only our memories of the wild horses remain.
And this brings to mind another pretense for gutting the wild horse herds of the Calico
Complex: the notorious Ruby Valley natural gas pipeline whose justifying documents
called for drastic reduction of the wild horses as “nuisances.” BLM has just granted final
approval for this pipeline (7/13/2010). But please bear in mind here that the El Paso
Company in charge of this pipeline is owned to a large degree by British Petroleum (BP)
and that BP’s current oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico counts among the most grave
assaults upon planetary life ever allowed through slovenly lack of government oversight.
It appears that the “big interests” and the “big powers” are very much tied together.
Having already eliminated 5,642 wild horses/burros from the public lands since fall,
2009, in what remains of 2010, BLM plans on helicopter chasing and capturing an
additional 7,097 so called “excess” horses and burros. And as with the 1.4-million-acre
Caliente Complex, several of these are “zeroings-out,” i.e. total displacement of the wild
horses from their 1971 legal herd areas. One of these planned eliminations is the small
West Douglas wild horse herd of Colorado in spite of a federal judge’s recent ruling
against this (Judge Mary Collyer decision). In many similar cases, we are witnessing the
snide sabotage by a corrupt establishment of very under-populated wild equid
populations remaining throughout the West, when not through outright elimination then
through the gutting of the populations that plummets them to cripplingly low, socially
dysfunctional, fragmented, and genetically non-viable population levels.
As the desperate individuals who remain either isolated or in beleaguered bands
frantically try to recoup a successful survival mode against increasing odds, they must
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contend with even greater restrictions imposed upon them by jaded officials in cahoots
with the wild equids’ enemies. This machination goes on in all of the Western states
where wild horses/burros have a legal right and what’s more an genuine ecological niche
to fill. This machination works by means of restrictions upon their forage, water, space,
e.g. seasonal migratory areas, and very reputations: denying their scientifically
substantiated North American origins and contributions to the greater community of life.
Soon their very precious freedom, though legal, is denied … and too often their very
lives. -- How would this feel to their oppressors if the tables were suddenly turned?
As concerns wild equids (members of the horse family Equidae), we are dealing with
animals whose lineages have been integral to the development of the North American
ecosystem for at least 58 million years, or since the dawn (Eocene epoch) of the vast
Cenozoic Era in which we presently find ourselves. Since their origin, these herbivores
have not been significantly absent from North America. While the rest of the large
herbivores in North America are ruminant digesters, they are post-gastric digesters, and,
as such, restore a very important ecological role, thus complementing myriad long-time
neighbors – fellow species of flora and fauna. They place back into North America the
missing “equid element,” with which the continent’s ecosystem has coevolved for many
millions of year. So rather than being “misfits,” as they are often labeled, without doubt
these animals truly belong. They enhance the ecosystems to which they are suited,
including the more open regions of the West, and are benign gardeners wherever they
roam, true to their widely moving, semi-nomadic habit.
Their less decomposed droppings fertilize and build soils. Through their feces, they
widely disperse the scarified seeds of many native plants, seeds thus readied for
germination in the very soils their feces also prepare. Furthermore, equid droppings
greatly bolster the food chain, as a great variety of organisms, from tiny microorganisms
to dung beetles, birds to rodents to lizards, feeds directly or indirectly upon the equid
feces that are much more nutritious than ruminant grazer feces, e.g. cow, deer, bighorn
because less degraded. Horses and burros also act as prey species for such dwindling
predators as puma, wolves and bears. Again, nothing is wasted in nature as renewed life
springs from death. Clearly, in a food-chain related way, these wild horses/burros greatly
bolster the life community! Now the real challenge is can people learn to allow this
restoration and to become a harmonious part of it.
Another important point to emphasize is that wild horses and burros are the perfect
reducers of dry flammable vegetation and quite capable of fulfilling this valuable
function over vast areas. In these regions, they naturally rest-rotate their grazing pressure
if so allowed in fence-free regions. They prevent fires, from tiny ones to those multimillion-acre catastrophes that are alarmingly increasing in many regions because of
Global Warming. And they also do this because the build humus-rich, moisture-retaining
soils that dampen out incipient fires. – And all this is a great practical value for the wild
equids, however ignored.
Before closing, I need to emphasize one further message. What great healers wild horses
and burros are! The beauty of these awesome presences in equid form shines in motion
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and in interaction with each other and with all the rest of life and is universally
appreciated. These animals do something for our spirits; their company uplifts because
of a beneficent harmony that is felt by diverse kinds and that reaches out to touch we
humans in a very special way, considering our long history with them.
For these and other reason too numerous to here describe and because America’s wild
horses and burros have fallen into the hands of their enemies, an immediate moratorium
must be declared to stop the excessive roundups that are now obstinately proceeding.
Please urge President Barrack Obama to do the right thing: to emit an executive decree to
stop the roundups now (202-456-1111).
Also, it is critically important that you contact your U.S. Senators and urge them to
immediately shape up and pass the Restore Our American Mustangs (ROAM) bill
(Senate Bill 1579). If made an Act, this can accomplish exactly what its title suggests.
Spearheaded by Representative Raul Grijalva (AZ) and Nick Rahall (WV) and
introduced into the Senate by the late and great animal defender Senator Robert C. Byrd
(WV), in 2009 this bill was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives by the healthy
margin of 239 to 185 votes. So why is the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural
Resources allowing this critical bill to die (which it could well at the end of 2010)?! Do
we again detect that selfish, mean-spirited black magic of the public lands livestock
grazers, or of the energy barons, or of people who only value what they can blast, or of
those who have bought into the lies of the wild horse and burro detractors? We
Americans can certainly do better! Indeed, we must, for the sake of the wild, free-living
horses and burros who so embody America’s true spirit of noble independence and
freedom … who lend a special grace to our land.
We must not allow the current subversion of their reasonable right to the free and natural
life upon their ancestral lands where they belong. We must not allow this sabotage to
continue, for the sake of these wonders themselves … and for our very own!
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