By Dr. Robert Thorson
Wild horses: Let’s kill ’em.
That’s my opinion, based on a recent spate of articles and blog postings about the excess population of so-called wild horses on our federally owned Home on the Range. The Bureau of Land Management, which has the responsibility for managing these “feral equids” on publicly owned land in 10 Western states, hopes to euthanize those it can’t find the money to take care of.
The money they’re talking about is mine and yours, 37 million tax dollars this year alone. It’s being wasted on a misguided policy based on a romantic attachment to a cowboy past, rather than one that makes ethical, ecological or fiscal sense.
The 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was written during the frenzy of environmental legislation of the early 1970s. It describes wild horses as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West,” requiring that they “shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment or death,” and considered “an integral part of the natural system of the public lands.”
This sounds good in theory. The child in me is emotionally moved by the televised images of black and white Westerns of the 1950s. The Paleolithic adult in me also enjoys the sight of wild horses galloping free. But the scientist in me smells a rat. The so-called “natural system” described by law now includes “holding facilities,” agency-speak for big corrals. In them the Bureau of Land Management feeds and takes care of approximately 30,000 “wild” horses (and burros). This number nearly equals the grand total of all horses running free on agency-managed lands in 10 Western states.
The spiraling costs for the energy and food needed to haul farm products to horses on what amount to publicly funded feedlots is becoming prohibitive. During this year alone, the BLM estimates that the cost of its “wild” horse-feeding operation will rise by than $4 million to an estimated $26 million. This same money could be used to feed the increased number of working people visiting food banks, and to help those on fixed incomes to buy oil to heat their homes.
Turning the horses out of their corrals and letting them run away is not an option. The BLM estimates that the free-running population already exceeds what the land can support by 5,700 animals. Adding an additional 30,000 animals to the overgrazed range would wreak environmental havoc, says the federal government.
Yes, say ecologists, who view horses as bullies that trample, denude and degrade the semi-arid habitats where less evocative endemics have a previous claim. No, say wild horse advocates, who see the euthanization plan as a way of making more room for big-game animals like elk and antelope, and for beef cattle. One of my concerns is that the visually fascinating plume of dust raised by a pack of running horses accelerates the melting of mountain snowpacks, reducing the water storage that keeps streams running during the summer and fall.
I would feel differently if wild horses were an endangered species. They are not. They are invasive, introduced accidentally by 16th-century conquistadors.
An earlier breed of horses was present throughout North America during the Pleistocene ice ages. They went extinct about 13,000 years ago, along with the woolly mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, dire wolves and saber-toothed cats. No one really knows why indigenous horses disappeared, though some consider excess predation by human carnivores to be a plausible explanation.
As with the worst invasive plants, the few Old World horses that escaped found great success in the New World and spread, reaching a population governed by nature’s checks and balances and American Indian capture. But in the 21st century, having shot, trapped and poisoned their predators and protected them by law, we are now forced to feed these horses by hand. To my mind, the doeeyed Bambis in our Eastern backyards are far more wild and less environmentally damaging than the equally beautiful galloping mustangs of the West.
Feeding wild horses is an oxymoron. Compounding that stupidity with federal tax dollars is a mistake.