Wild Horses - and a Government Program that Works

A roundup of wild horses took place about a week ago near Durango, Colo. These roundups, which occur annually all across the western United States, are part of the Bureau of Land Management's strategy as part of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. The act charged the BLM with managing the West's wild horses to maintain herd and resource health.

Recently, many people have charged that the BLM is not doing its job, and actually harming the horses by removing them from the wild. Protests and lawsuits are common at wild-horse roundups. These people believe that wild horses are endangered, and that removing and stressing them could cause them to stop breeding, leading to the disappearance of wild herds.

That impression is false.

Horses compete with all other range animals -- deer, elk and domestic grazing stock such as cows and sheep -- for resource use. Any area can support only a limited number of animals, depending on the quality and amount of forage that grows there. In the arid western United States, rangeland forage can be very sparse, meaning that sustainable herd size is fairly small.

The estimated carrying capacity of the western range for wild horses is about 26,000 - but almost 40,000 horses and burros roam the West's public land today. Thus, wild horse populations are too large to be sustainable. Because horse herds can double in size every four years, a significant number of horses must be removed every year.

Wild horses have no natural predators and are not native to North America. The only ways to control herd size are to remove horses from the range and control reproduction. The roundups give the BLM the opportunity to do both.

Federal land managers are starting a program to give mares hormone shots to prevent pregnancy, which eventually will reduce the need for roundups and keep herd levels more sustainable. The horses the BLM removes from the range are either adopted or sent to pastures in the Midwest where they live out their lives. About 41,000 wild horses are kept in these pastures today.

The American mustang is not endangered in any way. The Wild Horse and Burro Act was a directive to preserve the mustang in a sustainable way on public lands.

While I fully support monitoring government agencies and holding them accountable, protests without full information are pointless and degrade the cause.

For more information on the Wild Horse and Burro Program, check out the BLM’s website: http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/whbprogram/history_and_facts/quick_facts.html

http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/whbprogram/history_and_facts/myths_and_facts.html