Dude's Ranch and America's Contradictory Relationship with Wild Horses

Wild horses have a long history with North America. Fossil records show they were living in North America millions of years ago, gradually spreading to Asia likely via the Bering land bridge before losing a battle to the elements and becoming extinct on this continent. In the early 16th century, European explorers reintroduced the horse to Mexico, and the animal eventually found its way north into territories controlled by Native Americans and Europeans. Many of these horses formed wild herds; by some estimates, there were more than a million wild horses roaming North America by the turn of the 20th century, likely because humans had killed many of the horse's natural predators.

The horse's main predator in the 20th century was man. By 1971, when Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horse & Burro Act of 1971 (click act for details ) and President Nixon signed it into law, there were approximately only 60,000 wild horses left on U.S. lands, their numbers drastically reduced by wholesale roundups and massacres. The act, championed by a Nevada resident nicknamed Wild Horse Annie, was designed to halt the killings. Americans roundly supported the act, reportedly flooding Congress with letters, a volume of mail second only to the number of letters Congress received about the Vietnam War.

But the act created to protect wild horses has slowly been eroded by the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that manages U.S. lands, under the theory that there are too many free-roaming horses and that they need to be managed. The BLM first created 303 herd management areas, but over the years, that number has been whittled down to 201. The BLM has also established "appropriate management levels," which allows the agency to round up horses by buzzing them with helicopters and corralling them into pens for eventual sale through the BLM's adoption program.

The underfunded adoption program, however, has been largely a bust, leading to crowded holding pens that don't give the BLM any wiggle room to round up more wild horses, which ranchers desperately want so that their beef cattle can graze without interference. The stealth amendment in last year's appropriations bill was the latest attempt to appease ranchers; the amendment requires the government to sell horses older than ten years or those who have not been adopted after three attempts. Guess who typically buys these older mustangs? Middlemen, or "killer buyers," who then sell the animals to be shipped to international slaughter houses that process meat for overseas markets.

The losers in this game of backroom legislation are, of course, the horses. It has already cost the lives of 41 mustangs. It could cost thousands more.

The sad fact is that all of this is completely unnecessary—the covert legislation, the animal deaths, the hard feelings from horse lovers across the nation. The BLM could easily deal with America's wild horses without a drop of blood being spilled. The agency could reopen the 102 herd management areas that it has zeroed out; it could adopt immunocontraception programs to keep herds from becoming too large; it could funnel the money from its helicopter round-ups into a mass-marketing budget for its adoption programs; it could simply leave the horses alone, with an acknowledgment that Americans value their equine history as much, if not more, than their beef.

Half of the country's wild horses are in Nevada and the BLM is gathering them off of public land in record numbers with increasingly thin justifications behind the roundups..

Critics allege the BLM has repeatedly engineered or otherwise contributed to the conditions on public ranges, which are later used to justify the removal of horses. Fences have cut the horses off from water and forage all over the west, which BLM then uses as a reason to round them up.

Overall, BLM has gathered a quarter of a million horses off the public range, but what's happening now is different from previous years, both in scale and long-term intent, and it is happening with virtually no oversight.

"They are saying, ‘Okay, we will do what we want.' They just totally caved in. What the public doesn't already realize is that these greatly reduced herd management areas are already a very serious reduction. But now they're just going for broke. They are saying, ‘Hell, get rid of them,'" said Craig Downer.

"We have taken the number of horses off the range by over 50-percent in 20 years. For these people to say the horses are out of control, the numbers are out of control, there isn't anything out there that's realized a 50-percent decrease in the last two decades. Certainly not the number of cattle out there," said Jerry Reynoldson.

By almost any measure, there has been a dramatic shift. The pace of the government roundups has jumped over the last several years, averaging more than 9,000 head per year. As of early 2009, there are more than 33,000 horses in places like Ridgecrest, California or Fallon, Nevada -- more horses than exist on the open range. Once they get to government corrals, they're no longer wild horses. Essentially they become wards of the state -- welfare horses living off the public dole and for the rest of their lives, they will be warehoused at either government pens or private ranches.

Overview of the Wild Mustangs-- See News report!!