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A Dramatic Rescue for Doomed Wild Horses of the West
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Wild horses compete with cattle and wildlife for food and water. Horse advocates say federal officials have made faulty assumptions about the number of horses that can be accommodated on federal land, tilting those findings in favor of cattle interests.
"We're livestock people. We know animals live and die. And we take that as a very normal part of life. We fully realize animal rights people hate that aspect of the livestock industry. We don't particularly seek the euthanization. What we seek is the management of the population," said Jeff Eisenberg, director of federal lands for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, an industry lobbying group.
The federal government has been rounding up wild horses since the 1980s, putting them in holding facilities and offering them for adoption to horse lovers, who promise not to sell them for slaughter. But the roundups became aggressive under the Bush administration. As of June, BLM was holding 30,088 animals, more than triple the 9,807 held in 2001.
Bisson said yesterday that the BLM would limit the roundups next year to about 5,000 horses.
Meanwhile, the pace of adoptions has been falling as the cost of feeding and caring for the wild horses has skyrocketed. The price tag to federal taxpayers for maintaining the horses tripled from $7 million in 2000 to $21 million in 2007. Hay prices for one short-term holding facility in Nevada rose from about $160 per ton in 2007 to almost $300 per ton in 2008, for example.
In a report released last week, the Government Accountability Office called the situation a "crisis" and said the bureau needed to exercise its options, including euthanasia and the practice of selling the wild horses "without restriction," meaning they could be sold for slaughter.
In the first analysis of BLM's wild horse program in 18 years, the GAO found that the agency lacked a coherent nationwide management policy. The GAO recommended that the bureau investigate alternatives to euthanasia and adoption.
Animal rights groups say the government ought to sterilize horses and return them to the wild to live out their lives. In addition, they say, it should offer tax incentives to landowners who allow wild horses to live on private land.
Virginie L. Parant of the American Wild Horses Preservation Campaign, a coalition of about 45 groups, said the BLM does not use a scientifically sound method to estimate the size of horse herds or the number of horses that can be sustained on the range. That makes the roundups arbitrary, she said.
What's more, about 19 million acres of land where wild horses once roamed have been removed from the program, reducing the amount of land available to the horses and increasing their concentration elsewhere.
People on all sides of the issue recognize some fundamental changes are needed.
"It's intractable," Eisenberg said. "The animal rights people put the BLM in a box. We are seeking a balance in the land. Congress doesn't want to put more funding into these holding facilities, especially when times are tight. It's a problem nobody likes."
