Rangelands meant for 27,000 horses now contain 73,000, and that number increases by 15% to 20% a year. A hundred groups representing all interested parties took part in the meeting in Salt Lake hosted by the National Horse and Burro Rangeland Coalition, to discuss just what in the heck to do.
There are currently another 45,000 animals held in off range facilities costing $50,000 dollars per horse over their lifespan.
Wild horses aren’t really “wild” in a wildlife sense, they are feral, which means a domestic animal that lives in the wild. True wild horses of North America have been extinct for thousands of years.
Amongst the sweeping environmental issues passed into law in the early 70s was the Wild Free Ranging Horse and Burros Act, as if giving an official name of “Wild” might somehow change biology. It didn’t.
That act called on our government to care for 27,000 horses, and to euthanise or give away excess. Every prior year, funding has been specifically denied for anything leading to euthanizing horses, or providing inspectors for a slaughterhouse. (Europeans and others like horsemeat.) This congress might just be different, the appropriations bill does not forbid euthanasia, and there are fifty some odd thousand horses extra.
To say this is a contentious issue is like saying deserts are dry. Then again advocates have had 45 years to come to reality. I’ve never heard of a group raising money to buy land and feed all those horses. There are no practical solutions that have ever been effective. People were voluntarily injecting birth control which also made the animals unfit for European consumption which might well have been the purpose. The cost and effort to inject, and then re inject, is simply overwhelmingly cost prohibitive. Try catching a horse that has never known a halter.
Cattle are not the issue. When there are too many cattle they are moved or sent to slaughter. Feral cattle have been gone for a century. The western US has fewer cattle every year. A cow will walk a couple miles to drink water, a horse will travel ten or twenty or thirty, each way. The amount of habitat that can be degraded is huge. Desert soils you might have heard are fragile, that’s why we don’t allow any cattle on many of them. Horses go wherever they wander, there are no restrictions on range.
Horses are neither fish nor fowl as the expression goes. Not wildlife, and not livestock, horses aren’t managed by state wildlife agencies nor US Fish and Wildlife nor the Department of Agriculture. Like other unwelcome chores they were given to the Bureau of Land Management, and are now sucking up the BLM’s budget.
BLM “Wild” Horse and Burro Program
Wildlife Society Position Statement
National Geo
Slate Article by a Conservation Biologist where he lays it on the line.
The issue has become one of imagery, not integrity, and this is where science is losing out. If people value feral horses more than native birds, elk, pronghorn, or the fragile native plants that are overgrazed into oblivion by burgeoning horse herds, then no amount of evidence will change their minds.