FENCED INFENCED INcompiled and designed by Josianne Kimbrel

FENCED IN

FENCED IN

compiled and designed by Josianne Kimbrel

Book design copyright © 2011 by Josi KimbrelPublished by Josi Kimbrel for course number GR.434 Typography 4,taught online by Carolina de Bartolo in Spring, 2011 at Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA. Printed by Josi Kimbrel, San Cruz, CA. Bound at The Key Printing and Binding, Oakland, California, USA. All rights reserved.

For JuniorThe horse that changed my life.

CONTENTSIntroduction 6

CHAPTER ONEMustangs Today 10

CHAPTER TWOManagement 36

CHAPTER THREEAdoption 70

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTIONThe evolution of the horse pertains to the phylogenetic ancestry of the modern horse from the fox-sized, forest-dwelling Hyracotherium over geologic time scales. Paleozoologists have been able to piece together a more complete picture of the modern horse’s evolutionary lineage than that of any other animal.

The horse belongs to an order known as Perissodactyla, or “odd-toed ungulates”, which all share hoofed feet and an odd number of toes on each foot, as well as mobile upper lips and a similar tooth structure. This means that horses share a common ancestry with tapirs and rhinoceroses. The perissodactyls originally arose in the late Paleocene, less than 10 million years after the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event. This group of animals appears to have been originally specialized for life in tropical forests, but whereas tapirs and, to some extent, rhinoceroses, retained their jungle specializations, modern horses are adapted to life on drier land in the much-harsher climatic conditions of the steppes. Other species of Equus are adapted to a variety of intermediate conditions. ≠ The early ancestors of the modern horse walked on several spread-out toes, an accommodation to life spent walking on the soft, moist grounds of primeval forests. As grass species began to appear and flourish, the equids’ diets shifted from foliage to grasses, leading to larger and more durable teeth. At the same time, as the steppes began to appear, the horse’s predecessors needed to be capable of greater speeds to outrun predators. This was attained through the lengthening of limbs and the lifting of some toes from the ground in such a way that the weight of the body was gradually placed on one of the longest toes, the third. ≠ Horses were absent from the Americas until the Spanish brought domestic horses from Europe, beginning in 1493, and escaped horses quickly established large wild herds. The early naturalist Buffon suggested in the 1760s that this was an indication of inferiority of fauna in the New World, then later reconsidered this idea. William Clark’s 1807 expedition to Big Bone Lick found “leg and foot bones of the Horses” which were included with other fossils sent to Thomas Jefferson and evaluated by the anatomist Caspar Wistar, but neither commented on the significance of this find. ≠ The first equid fossil was found in the gypsum quarries in Montmartre, Paris in the 1820s. The tooth was sent to the Paris Conservatory, where it was identified by Georges Cuvier who identified it as a browsing equine related to the tapir. His sketch of the entire animal matched later skeletons found at the site. ≠ During the Beagle survey expedition the young naturalist Charles Darwin had remarkable success with fossil hunting in Patagonia. On 10 October 1833 at Santa Fe, Argentina, he was “filled with astonishment” when he found a horse’s tooth in the same stratum as fossil giant armadillos, and wondered if it might have been washed down from a later layer, but concluded that this was “not very probable”. After the expedition returned in 1836, the anatomist Richard Owen confirmed the tooth was from an extinct species which he subsequently named Equus

curvidens, and remarked that “This evidence of the former existence of a genus, which, as regards South America, had become extinct, and has a second time been introduced into that Continent, is not one of the least inter-esting fruits of Mr. Darwin’s discoveries.” ≠

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In 1848 a study On the fossil horses of America by Joseph Leidy systematically examined Pleistocene horse fossils from Academy of Natural Sciences and concluded at least two ancient horse species had existed in North America: Equus curvidens and another which he named Equus americanus. A decade later, however, he found the latter name had already been taken and renamed it Equus complicatus. In the same year, he visited Europe and was introduced by Owen to Darwin. ≠ The original sequence of species believed to have evolved into the horse was based on fossils discovered in North America in the 1870s by paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The sequence, from Hyracotherium [popularly called Eohippus] to the modern horse [Equus], was popularized by Thomas Huxley and became one of the most widely-known examples of a clear evolutionary progression. The horse’s evolutionary lineage became a common feature of biology textbooks, and the sequence of transitional fossils was assembled by the American Museum of Natural History into an exhibit which emphasized the gradual, “straight-line” evolution of the horse. ≠ Since then, as the number of equid fos-sils has increased, the actual evolution progression from Hyracotherium to Equus has been discovered to be much more complex and multi-branched than was initially supposed. The straight, direct progression from the former to the latter has been replaced by a more elaborate model with numerous branches in different directions, of which the modern horse is only one of many. It was first recognized by George Gaylord Simpson in 1951 that the modern horse was not the “goal” of the entire lineage of equids, it is simply the only genus of the many horse lineages that has survived. ≠ Fossil information on the rate and distribution of new equid species has also revealed the progression between species was not as smooth and consistent as was once believed. Although some transitions, such as that of Dinohippus to Equus, were indeed gradual progressions, a number of others, such as that of Epihippus to Mesohippus, were relatively abrupt and sudden in geologic time, taking place over only a few million years. Both anagenesis [gradual change in an entire population’s gene fre-quency] and cladogenesis [a population “splitting” into two distinct evolutionary branches] occurred, and many species coexisted with “ancestor” species at various times. The change in equids’ traits was also not always a “straight line” from Hyracotherium to Equus: some traits reversed themselves at vari-ous points in the evolution of new equid species, such as size and the presence of facial fossae, and it is only in retrospect that certain evolutionary trends can be recognized. ≠

I N T R O D U C T I O N     [ 13]

MUSTANGS TODAY

In 1971, the United States Congress recognized Mustangs as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West, which continue to contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people.”

MUSTANGS TODAYToday, Mustang herds vary in the degree to which they can be traced to original Iberian horses. Some contain a greater genetic mixture of ranch stock and more recent breed releases, while oth-ers are relatively unchanged from the original Iberian stock, most strongly represented in the most isolated populations. ≠ Today, the Mustang population is managed and protected by the Bureau of Land Management. Controversy surrounds the sharing of land and resources by the free ranging Mustangs with the livestock of the ranching industry, and also with the methods with which the federal government manages the wild population numbers. Many methods of population management are used, including adoption by private individuals of horses taken from the range. Mustangs are referred to as wild horses but, since all free-roaming horses now in the Americas descended from horses that were once domesticated, the more correct term is feral horses. ≠ The English word “mustang” comes from the Mexican Spanish word mestengo, derived from Spanish mesteño, meaning “stray livestock animal”. The Spanish word in turn may possibly originate from the Latin expression animalia mixta [mixed beasts], referring to beasts of uncertain ownership, were distributed in shepherd councils, known as mestas in medieval Spain. A mestengo was any animal that are distributed in those councils or for those, and by extension any feral animal. ≠ The first Mustangs descended from Iberian horses brought to Mexico and Florida. Most of these horses were of Andalusian, Arabian and Barb ancestry. Some of these horses escaped or were stolen by Native Americans, and rapidly spread throughout western North America. Native Americans quickly adopted the horse as a primary means of transportation. Horses replaced the dog as a travois puller and greatly improved success in battles, trade, and hunts, particularly bison hunts. ≠ Starting in the colonial era and continuing with the westward expansion of the 1800s, horses belonging to explorers, traders and settlers that escaped or were purposely released joined the gene pool of Spanish-descended herds. It was also common practice for west-ern ranchers to release their horses to locate forage for themselves in the winter and then recap-ture them, as well as any additional Mustangs, in the spring. Ranchers also attempted to “improve” wild herds by shooting dominant stallions and replacing them pedigreed animals. ≠ By 1900 North America had an estimated two million free-roaming horses. Since 1900, the Mus-tang population has been reduced drastically. Mustangs were viewed as a resource that could be captured and used or sold [especially for military use] or slaughtered for food, especially pet food. The controversial practice of mustanging was dramatized in the John Huston film The Mis-

fits, and the abuses linked to certain cap-ture methods, including hunting from airplanes and poisoning, led to the first federal wild free-roaming horse protec-tion law in 1959. This statute, known as the “Wild Horse Annie Act,” prohibited the use of motor vehicles for hunting wild

horses and burros. Protection was increased further by the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971. ≠ The 1971 Act provided for protection of certain previously established herds of horses and burros. Today, the Bureau of Land Management is the primary authority that oversees the protection and management of Mustang herds on public lands, while the United States Forest Service administers additional wild horse or burro territories. ≠ Historically, many of the Native American tribes bred their horses carefully to improve them for their purposes. Among the most capable horse-breeding people of North America were the Comanche, the Shoshoni, and the Nez Perce. The last in particular became master horse breeders, and developed one of the first truly American breeds: the Appaloosa. Most other tribes did not practice extensive amounts of selective breeding, though they sought out desirable horses through capture, trade and theft, and quickly traded away or otherwise eliminated those with undesirable traits. ≠ In some modern mustang herds there is clear evidence of other domesticated horse breeds having become intermixed with feral herds. Some herds show the signs of the introduction of Thoroughbred or other light race-horse-types into herds, a process that also led to the American Quarter Horse. Other herds show signs of the intermixing of heavy draft horse breeds turned loose in an attempt to create work horses. Other, more isolated herds, retain a strong influence of original Spanish stock. ≠

17,000    100   

P O P U L AT I O N   O F   W I L D   M U S TA N G S   B Y   S TAT E   I N   2 0 0 9

FIGURE 1.1Wild mustang used to live through out 

the entire United States, today they can only be found 

in the west.

[ 1 6 ]     F E N C E D   I N

FIGURE 1.1

Some breeders of domestic horses con-sider the Mustang herds of the west to be inbred and of inferior quality. However, supporters of the Mustang argue that the animals are merely small due to their harsh living conditions and that natural selection has eliminated many traits that lead to weakness or inferiority. Some mus-tang supporters also maintain that some “inbreeding” actually concentrates the traits of hardiness and durability, making the mustang a valuable genetic resource. Regardless of these debates, the Mustang of the modern west has several different breeding populations today which are genetically isolated from one another and thus have distinct traits traceable to par-ticular herds. These herds vary in the degree to which they can be traced to original Iberian horses. Some contain a greater genetic mixture of ranch stock and more recent breed releases, others are relatively unchanged from the original Iberian stock. ≠ Two researchers have advanced an argument that Mustangs should be legally classified as “wild” rather than “feral.” They argue that, due to the presence of Equus ferus ferus on the North American continent till the end of the Pleistocene era, horses were once native animals and should still be consid-ered as native animals, and therefore defined as “wild,” not viewed as an exotic species that draws resources attention away from native species. ≠ Today, free-roaming horses are protected under United States law, but have disappeared from several states where there were once

established populations. A few hundred free-roaming horses survive in Alberta and British Columbia. The BLM considers roughly 26,000 individuals a manageable number, but the feral Mustang population in February 2010 was 33,700 horses and 4,700 burros. More than half of all Mustangs in North America are found in Nevada [which features the horses on its State Quarter in commemoration of this], with other significant populations in Montana, Wyoming and Oregon. Another 34,000 horses are in holding facilities. ≠ Controversy surrounds the presence of feral Mustang herds. Supporters argue that Mustangs are part of the natural heritage of the American West, whose history predates modern land use practices, and thus the animals have an inherent right of inhabitation. However, other people remain vehemently opposed to their presence, argu-ing that the animals degrade rangeland and compete with livestock and wild species for for-age. ≠ The debate as to what degree Mustangs and cattle compete for forage is multifaceted. One group of opponents, primarily cattle and sheep ranchers and those who depend on the live-stock industry, argue essentially that feral horses degrade rangeland and compete with private livestock for public land forage. The environmentalist community is split over the position of the Mustang within the North American ecosystem. This debate centers on the potential classifica-tion of Mustangs as either an introduced species such as cattle, or as a true native species due

M U S TA N G S   TO D AY     [ 17]

various collections, including that of the of the of the dangers the Prince faced almost daily. Battles with younger stallions, mountain lions lying on rocks or branches waiting patiently for a passing meal. A leg was broken while charging a rock-strewn slope. ≠ With the cool of evening wild horses left their lounging places and began threading their way toward water on a favored meadow for graz-ing. Groups of friends perhaps or the favored few of an amorous gelding led by a wise old mare respected for her wisdom. Hopefully I watched those distant groups but the Prince was not amongst them. Deer came out of hid-ing and grazed amongst the mustangs unafraid. Far off, I heard the thunder of wild turkey wings as they lofted their heavy bodies into the air and flew upwards toward nighttime perches in some tortured cottonwoods. ≠ I was about to quit my search and head for home miles away, when I felt that I was being watched. Startled, I whirled as though a mountain lion was snarling at my back. There in a tiny meadow stood Prince and his band of mares staring at me as though I was an enemy. The Prince snorted an alarm, and circled to catch my scent. For a moment his band seemed frozen in time. Then he nickered softly and came toward me as his fillies lowered their heads to graze. ≠ It has been twenty-two years since I left my ranch and family in Oregon with the madcap idea that I could make a difference in the lives of wild horses. I knew that I’d be criticized and called a fool, but it was all worth the gamble. I had grown up with wild horses in Oregon and owed them for a great deal of joy. ≠ In the past, some of the financial support for the Sanctuary came for the sale of foals from our registered quar-ter horse and paint mares. That market has now tanked and we are forced to seek other income to pay the Sanctuary bills and raise money for the $75,000 hay bill that we owe for this year ’s winter hay. Like other non profits, we have seen gifts from major donors wither away, while our fixed expenses such as fenc-ing material, tractor repairs, fuel and taxes go on. I check the mail daily in hopes that those wonderfully caring folks who have dug deep in the past, will remain loyal to the mustangs and help us again. ≠ Academy of Natural Sci-ences and concluded at least two ancient horse species had existed in North America: Equus curvidens and another which he named

Equus americanus. A decade later, however, he found the latter name had already been taken and renamed it Equus complicatus. In the same year, he visited Europe and was introduced by Owen to Darwin. ≠ The original sequence of species believed to have evolved into the horse was based on fossils discovered in North America in the 1870s by paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The sequence, from Hyracotherium [popularly called Eohippus] to the modern horse [Equus], was popular by Thomas Huxley and became one of the most widely-known examples of a clear evolutionary progression. The horse’s evolutionary lineage became a common fea-ture of biology textbooks, and the sequence of transi-tional fossils was assembled by the American Museum of Natural History into an exhibit which emphasized the gradual, “straight-line” to the evolution of the horse. ≠ Since then, as the number of equid fossils has vastly increased, the actual evolutionary progression from Hyracotherium to Equus has been discovered to be much more complex and multi-branched than was ini-tially supposed. The straight, direct progression from the former to the latter has been replaced by a more elaborate model with numerous branches in different directions, of which the modern horse is only one of many. It was first recognized by George Gaylord Simp-son in 1951 that the modern horse was not the “goal” of the entire lineage of equids, it is simply the only genus of many horse lineages that has survived. ≠ Detailed fossil information on the rate and distribution of new equid species has also revealed the progression between species was not as smooth and consistent as was once believed. Although some transitions, such as that of Dinohippus to Equus, were indeed gradual pro-gressions, a number of others, such as that of Epihip-pus to Mesohippus, were relatively abrupt and sudden in geologic time, taking place over only a few million years. Both anagenesis [gradual change in an entire population’s gene frequency] and cladogenesis [a pop-ulation “splitting” into two distinct evolutionary branches] occurred, and many species coexisted with “ancestor” species at various times. The change in equids’ traits was also not always a “straight line” from Hyracotherium to Equus: some traits reversed them-selves at various points in the evolution of new equid species, such as size and the presence of facial fossae, and it is only in retrospect that certain evolutionary trends can be recognized. A Mustang is a free-roaming feral horse of the North American west that first descended from horses brought to the Americas by the Spanish. Mustangs are often referred to as wild horses, but the more correct term is feral horses. ≠ In 1971, the United States Congress recognized Mustangs as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West, which continue to contribute to the diversity of

[ 1 8 ]     F E N C E D   I N

1998    1999      2000      2001      2002    2003      2004      2005    2006      2007        2008

50,000

45,000

40,000

35,000

30,000

25,000

20,000

15,000

FIGURE 1.2Wild mustang and burro population in the  United States from the year 1998 through 2008

FIGURE 1.2

M U S TA N G S   TO D AY     [ 19]

P O P U L AT I O N   O F   W I L D   M U S TA N G S   B Y   Y E A R

life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people.” Today, Mus-tang herds vary in the degree to which they can be traced to original Iberian horses. Some contain a greater genetic mixture of ranch stock and more recent breed releases, while others are relatively unchanged from the original Iberian stock, most strongly rep-resented in the most isolated populations. Today, the Mustang population is managed and protected by the Bureau of Land Man-agement. Controversy surrounds the sharing of land and resources by the free ranging Mustangs with the livestock of the ranching industry, and also with the methods with which the federal government manages the wild population numbers. Many methods of population management are used, including the adoption by private individuals of horses taken from the range. Mustangs are often referred to as wild horses but, since all free-roaming horses now in the Americas descended from horses that were once domesticated, the more correct term is feral horses. ≠ The English word “mustang” comes from the Mexican Spanish word mestengo, derived from Spanish mesteño, meaning “stray livestock animal”. The Span-ish word in turn may possibly originate from the Latin expression animalia mixta [mixed beasts], referring to beasts of uncertain ownership, which were distributed in shep-herd councils, known as mestas in medieval Spain. A mestengo was any animal distrib-uted in those councils, and by extension any feral animal. The first Mustangs descended from Iberian horses brought to Mexico and

[ 2 0 ]     F E N C E D   I N

Florida. Most of these horses were of Andalu-sian, Arabian and Barb ancestry. Some of these horses escaped or were stolen by Native Americans, and rapidly spread throughout western North America. ≠ Native Americans quickly adopted the horse as a pri-mary means of transportation. Horses replaced the dog as a travois puller and greatly improved success in battles, trade, and hunts, particularly bison hunts. ≠ Start-ing in the colonial era and continuing with the westward expansion of the 1800s, horses belonging to explorers, traders and settlers that escaped or were purposely released joined the gene pool of Spanish-descended herds. It was also common practice for west-ern ranchers to release their horses to locate forage for themselves in the winter and then recapture them, as well as any additional

Mustangs, in the spring. Some ranchers also attempted to “improve” wild herds by shooting the dominant stallions and replacing them with pedigreed animals. By 1900 North America had an estimated two mil-lion free-roaming horses. Since 1900, the Mustang population has been reduced drastically. Mustangs were viewed as a resource that could be captured and used or sold [especially for military use] or slaughtered for food, especially pet food. The controversial practice of mustanging was dramatized in the John Huston film The Misfits, and the abuses linked to certain capture methods, including hunting from airplanes and poisoning, led to the first federal wild free-roaming horse protection law in 1959. This statute, known as the “Wild Horse Annie Act,” prohibited the use of motor vehicles for hunting wild horses and burros. Protection was increased further by the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971. ≠ The 1971 Act provided for protection of certain previously established herds of horses and bur-ros. Today, the Bureau of Land Management is the primary authority that oversees the protection and management of Mustang herds on public lands, while the United States Forest Service administers addi-tional wild horse or burro territories. ≠ Historically, many of the Native American tribes bred their horses carefully to improve them for their purposes. Among the most capable horse-breeding people of North America were the Comanche, the Shoshoni, and the Nez Perce. The last in particular became mas-ter horse breeders, and developed one of the first truly American breeds: the Appaloosa. Most other tribes did not practice extensive amounts of selective breeding, though they sought out desirable horses through capture, trade and theft, and quickly traded away or otherwise eliminated those with undesirable traits. ≠ In some modern mustang herds there is clear evidence of other domesticated horse breeds having become intermixed with feral herds. Some herds show the signs of the introduction of Thorough-bred or other light racehorse-types into herds, a process that also led in part to the creation of the American Quarter Horse. Other herds show signs of the intermixing of heavy draft horse breeds turned loose in an attempt to create work horses. Other, more isolated herds, retain a strong influence of origi-nal Spanish stock. ≠ Some breeders of domestic horses consider the Mustang herds of the west to be inbred and of inferior quality. However, supporters of the Mustang argue that the animals are merely small due to their harsh living conditions and that natural selection has eliminated many traits that lead to weakness or inferiority. Some mustang supporters also maintain that some “inbreeding” actually con-centrates the traits of hardiness and durability, making the mustang a valuable genetic resource. Regardless of these debates, the Mustang of the modern west has several different breeding populations today which are genetically isolated from one another and thus have distinct traits traceable to particu-lar herds. These herds vary in the degree to which they can be traced to original Iberian horses. Some contain a greater genetic mixture of ranch stock and more recent breed releases, others are relatively unchanged from the original Iberian stock. ≠ Two researchers have advanced an argument that Mus-tangs should be legally classified as “wild” rather than “feral.” They argue that, due to the presence of Equus ferus ferus on the North American continent till the end of the Pleistocene era, horses were once

M U S TA N G S   TO D AY     [21]

native animals and should still be considered as native animals, and therefore defined as “wild,” and not viewed as an exotic species that is drawn resources and attention Today, free-roaming horses are pro-tected under United States law, but have disappeared from several states where there were once estab-lished populations. A few hundred free-roaming horses survive in Alberta and British Columbia. The BLM considers roughly 26,000 individuals a manageable number, but the feral Mustang population in Febru-ary 2010 was 33,700 horses and 4,700 burros. More than half of all Mustangs in North America are found in Nevada [which features the horses on its State Quarter in commemoration of this], with other significant populations in Montana, Wyoming and Oregon. Another 34,000 horses are in holding facili-ties. ≠ Controversy surrounds the presence of feral Mustang herds. Supporters argue that Mustangs are part of the natural heritage of the American West, whose history predates modern land use practices, and thus the animals have an inherent right of inhabitation. However, other people remain vehemently opposed to their presence, arguing that the animals degrade rangeland and compete with livestock and wild species for forage. ≠ The debate as to what degree Mustangs and cattle compete for forage is multifaceted. One group of opponents, primarily cattle and sheep ranchers and those who depend on the livestock industry, argue essentially that feral horses degrade rangeland and compete with private live-stock for public land forage. The environmentalist community is split over the position of the Mustang within the North American ecosystem. This debate centers on the potential classification of Mustangs as either an introduced species such as cattle, or as a reintroduced native species due to the prehistoric presence of horses in North America, albeit with a gap of thousands of years between their extinction and reintroduction from European stock to create a new breed. ≠ Researchers note that most current Mus-tang herds live in arid areas which cattle cannot fully utilize due to the lack of water sources. Horses are better adapted by evolution to such climates.; they may range nine times as far from water sources as cattle, traveling as much as 50 miles a day. This allows them to utilize areas not grazed by cattle. In addi-tion, horses are “hindgut fermenters,” meaning that they digest nutrients by means of the cecum rather than by a multi-chambered stomach. In practical effect, horses can obtain adequate nutrition from poorer forage than can cattle, surviving in areas where cattle will starve. ≠ Like an eagle I sit perched on a flinty escarpment of the highest part of the Sanctuary watching the world below, a scene at this moment silent as a photograph. To the east, hundreds of miles of rolling prairie where once a host of

covered wagons wound their way westward. To the south, the smoky haze of a Nebraska grass fire. To the west, as I watch, I see the evening purpling of Wyoming. Below me a skein of canyons, deep and dark, drain the life blood of these hills to the Cheyenne, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the sea. ≠ The slight breeze brings to me a strange perfume, crushed sage, the ter-ritorial scent of a mountain lion, the faint musk of a mule deer, pack rat, and of course, the stallion piles which adorn the highest meadows. I am watching with faint hope to see the great black mustang gelding we call ”The Prince” who pranced into our lives in a ship-ment Stefanie Powers and the Ford Motor Company saved from slaughter. When I first saw the Prince, he came at me as though to do me hurt, but turned out that he was only near sighted and wanted a closer look. Since then, we have become good friends. ≠ He was gelded somewhere back in his history, but apparently no one bothered to tell him, for he commands the pret-tiest bunch of fillies on this wild horse sanctuary. The prairie grasses have buffed his hooves to a shine. Buf-falo and blue gramma grass have given his coat a luster no show horse remedy could match. Eyes large, dark, and lustrous, with depths no man can fathom. Hatred when another challenges him for his mares yet with a lover ’s softness as a filly grooms his mane. ≠

[ 2 2 ]     F E N C E D   I N

M U S TA N G S   TO D AY     [23]

[ 24 ]     F E N C E D   I N

The Prince has been missing now for fifty seven days. I last saw him with his band as they lazed in the shad-ows of a landmark pine. I looked there a few hours ago but his old tracks in the gray dust had faded and the lone pine tree sang mournful in the persistent breeze. As I sat on the rocks overlooking thousands of acres of wild horse sanctuary, I could not help thinking of the dangers the Prince faced almost daily. Battles with younger stallions, mountain lions lying on rocks or branches waiting patiently for a passing meal. A leg broken perchance while charging down a rock-strewn slope. With the cool of evening wild horses left their lounging places and began threading their way toward water on a favored meadow for grazing. Groups of friends perhaps or the favored few of an amorous gelding led by a wise old mare respected for her wis-dom. Hopefully I watched those distant groups but the Prince was not amongst them. ≠ Deer came out of hiding and grazed amongst the mustangs unafraid. Far off, I heard the thunder of wild turkey wings as they lofted their heavy bodies into the air and flew upwards toward nighttime perches in some tortured cotton-woods. I was about to quit my search and head for home miles away, when I felt that I was being watched. Startled, I whirled as though a mountain lion was snarling at my back. There in a tiny meadow stood Prince and his band of mares staring at me as though I was an enemy. The Prince snorted an alarm, and cir-cled to catch my scent. For a moment his band seemed frozen in time. Then he nickered softly and came toward me as his fillies lowered their heads to graze. In the past, some of the financial support for the Sanc-tuary came for the sale of foals from our registered quarter horse and paint mares. That market has now tanked and we are forced to seek other income to pay the Sanctuary bills and raise money for the $75,000 hay bill that we owe for this year ’s winter hay. Like other non profits, we have seen gifts from major donors wither away, while our fixed expenses such as fencing material, tractor repairs, fuel and taxes go on. I check the mail daily in hopes that those wonderfully caring folks who have dug deep in the past, will be loyal to mustangs and help us again. ≠

M U S TA N G S   TO D AY     [25]

MANAGEMENT

The evolution of the horse pertains to the phylogenetic ancestry of the modern horse from the fox-sized, forest-dwelling Hyracotherium over geologic time scales. Paleozoologists have been able to piece together a more complete picture of the modern horse’s evolutionary lineage than that of any other animal. The Bureau of Land Management [BLM] is tasked with protecting, managing, and controlling wild horses and burros under the authority of the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act to ensure that healthy herds thrive on healthy rangelands and as multiple-use mission under the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Under the 1971 Act, shooting or poisoning Mustangs in the wild is illegal, and doing so can be prosecuted as a criminal felony. ≠ Healthy adult Mustangs have few natu-ral predators aside from mountain lions, and to a lesser extent, grizzly bears and wolves. The mountain lion is well-known for predation on feral horses, and the larger members of the species may hunt both horses and moose. They are very effective predators that kill by either leaping onto an animal or chasing it down in a sprint, then grabbing the prey with their front claws and biting the neck, either at the wind-pipe or the spine. ≠ Where there is natural balance of predators and prey, Mustang numbers tend to stay in balance. However, in many areas, natural predators have been eliminated from the ecosystem.Without some form of population control, Mustang herd sizes can multiply rapidly, doubling as fast as every four years. To maintain population balance, [or, some argue, to make room for cattle] one of the BLM’s key responsibilities under the 1971 law is to determine an appropriate management level [AML] of wild horses and burros in areas of public rangelands dedicated specifically for them. ≠ Control of the population to within AML is achieved through a capture program. There are strict guidelines for tech-niques used to round up Mustangs. One method uses a tamed horse, called a “Judas horse,” which has been trained to lead wild horses into a pen or corral. Once the Mustangs are herded into an area near the holding pen, the Judas horse is released. Its job is then to move to the head of the herd and lead them into a confined area. ≠ Most horses that are captured are offered for adoption to individuals or groups willing and able to provide humane, long-term care after payment of an adoption fee that ranges from $25 to $125. In order to prevent the later sale of mustangs as horse meat, adopted mustangs are still protected under the Act, and cannot be sold in the first year except when certain very specific criteria are met. As of 2010, nearly 225,000 Mustangs have been adopted. ≠ Because there is a much larger pool of captured horses than of prospective adoptive owners, a number of efforts have been made to reduce the number of horses in holding facilities. At present, there are about 34,000 Mustangs in hold-ing facilities and long-term grassland pastures. The BLM has publicly considered euthanasia as a pos-sible solution to overpopulation. In January 2005, a controversial amendment was attached to an

appropriation bill before the United States Congress by former Senator Conrad Burns, dubbed the “Burns rider.”. This modified the adoption program to allow the sale [with the result usually being slaughter] of captured horses that are “more than 10 years of age”, or that were “offered unsuccessfully for

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adoption at least three times.” In 2009, Sec-retary of the Interior Ken Salazar proposed the creation of federal wild horse preserves in the midwest, where non-reproducing ani-mals would be kept. Another approach to placing excess animals has been advanced by Madeleine Pickens, wife of oil magnate T. Boone Pickens, who seeks to create a private sanctuary in northern Nevada. There are also increased efforts to assist with finding appropriate adoption homes. One example is a promotional competition that gives trainers 100 days to gentle and train 100 mustangs, which are then adopted through an auc-tion. ≠ The Bureau of Land Management [BLM] was established in 1946 through the consolidation of the 1850’s Actual Cadastral Survey Status Map from the General Land OfficeGeneral Land Office [created in 1812] and the U.S. Grazing Service [formed in 1934]. The functions of the BLM are also addressed in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 [FLPMA]. To see a comprehensive list of legislation that BLM operates under, click here . And, to see vid-eos describing the early history of BLM, click on “Fractured Land Patterns.” ≠ The BLM is responsible for carrying out a variety of pro-grams for the management and conservation, of resources on about 245 million surface acres, as well as 700 million acres of subsur-face mineral estate, These public lands make up about 13 percent of the total land surface of the United States and more than 40 per-cent of all land managed by the Federal gov-ernment. To see how BLM is organized, click here. ≠ Most of the public lands are located in the Western United States, including

Alaska, and are characterized predominantly by extensive grassland, forest, high mountain, arctic tun-dra, and desert landscapes. The BLM manages multiple resources and uses, including energy and miner-als; timber; forage; recreation; wild horse and burro herds; fish and wildlife habitat; wilderness in areas; and that of the archaeological, paleontological, and historical sites. Click here for a medium size map [1288 x 760] of BLM-managed lands and click here for a large size map [4168 x 2460]. In addition to its minerals management responsibilities noted above, the BLM administers mineral leasing and oversees mineral operations on Federal mineral estate underlying other state, private, or Federally-administered land, and manages most mineral operations on Indian lands. ≠ The public lands provide significant eco-nomic benefits to the Nation and to states and counties where these lands are located. Revenues gener-ated from public lands make BLM one of the top revenue-generating agencies in the Federal government. In 2007, for instance, BLM’s onshore mineral leasing activities will generate an estimated $4.5 billion in receipts from royalties, bonuses, and rentals that are collected by the Minerals Management Service. Approximately half of these revenues will be returned to the States where the mineral leasing occurred. ≠ The Bureau administers about 57 million acres of commercial forests and woodlands through the Management of Lands and Resources and the Oregon and California Grant Lands appropria-tions. Timber receipts [including salvage] are estimated to be $55.4 million in fiscal year 2007, com-

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pared to estimated receipts of $33 million in Fiscal Year 2006 and actual receipts of $13.5 million in Fiscal Year 2005. ≠ Under its mul-tiple-use management mandate, the Bureau administers more than 18,000 grazing permits and leases and nearly 13 million authorized livestock animal unit months on 160 million acres of public rangeland. BLM manages rangelands and facilities for 57,000 wild horses and burros. The 253 million acres of public land administered by the BLM includes over 117,000 miles of fisheries habitat. ≠ The Bureau has an active program of soil and watershed management on 175 million acres in the lower 48 states and 86 million acres in Alaska. Practices such as re vegetation, pro-tective fencing, and water development are designed to conserve, enhance public land, including soil and watershed resources. The BLM is also responsible for fire protection on public lands and on all Interior Department in Alaska, as well as for wildfire management on the public lands on the public lands in Alaska and the Western States. ≠ The job of balanc-ing this mix of resources and uses grows more complex each year, as the West’s population growth creates new pressures and heightens existing management challenges. With over 68.3 million people living in the region today, the West continues to be the fastest-growing area in the nation. Working with its partners at the local, state, and national levels, the BLM will meet its mission of sustaining the health, diversity, and productivity of the pub-lic lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations. ≠ Federal protection and a lack of natural predators have resulted in thriving wild horse and burro populations that grow substantially each year. The BLM monitors rangelands and wild horse and burro herds to determine the number of animals, including livestock and wildlife, that the land can support. Each year, the BLM gathers wild horses and burros from overpopulated herds in places where vegetation and water could become scarce if too many animals use the area. ≠ These excess animals are offered for adoption to qualified people through the BLM’s Adopt a Wild Horse or Burro program. After caring for an animal for one year, the adopter is eligible to receive title, or owner-ship, from the Federal government. While the challenge of adopting out enough animals is greater than ever, the program is a popular

one. In fact, the BLM has placed more than 225,000 wild horses and burros into private care since 1971. Endangered icons Wild horses: run for your lives George W. Bush styles himself a cowboy president. One job of cowboys is to claim the American wilderness for ranch-ing, so it’s little surprise the Bush administration is behind a new effort to suppress—and perhaps slaugh-ter—one of the last symbols of untamed America: our wild horses. ≠ Since 1971, wild horses and burros have been federally protected by the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Protection Act, a pitched battle piece of legislation won in 1971 by Velma Johnston, aka Wild Horse Annie. [Wild Horse Annie was an intrepid Nevada character who, after seeing blood spilling out of a truck that was hauling mustangs to the slaughterhouse, cam-paigned for the act.] Legend had it that, apart from the war in Vietnam, Congress received more mail about pro-tecting wild horses than about any other issue in its history. Related in Slate Christopher Hitchens explained the essence of the cowboy in a January 2003 article. Meghan O’Rourke, the self-proclaimed horseracing junkie, wrote about her love for horses. In June 2001, Richard A. Posner and Peter Singer debated animal rights. ≠ Now the trucks that caught Wild Horse Annie’s attention may be revving their engines again, thanks to a stealth rider attached in November to a fed-eral spending bill. The new law, pushed by ranching interests, Western senators, and Bush’s Department of the Interior, probably condemns thousands of wild horses to the slaughterhouse—where they’re likely to be made into dinner for Europeans. ≠ Wild horses were indigenous to North America, populating this con-tinent before the Ice Age. They moved north across the Bering land bridge, fanned out from Siberia to the rest of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, then became extinct here. When Europeans reintroduced horses to the Americas in the 16th century, some escaped and formed wild herds. By 1900, there were 2 million wild horses in America. Their major predators, such as the mountain lion, were all but wiped out, and for more than a century their biggest enemy has been man. Horse roundups and massacres went unchecked for decades until Wild Horse Annie came along. ≠ In 1971, when the act was passed and signed by Richard Nixon, perhaps 50,000 horses remained, according to the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Interior agency in charge of them. It’s hard to count horses, but today, according to the BLM, there are 36,000 on public lands. Wild horse advocates dispute that number and say there are no more than 20,000 still roaming the range. Everyone agrees that the numbers are dwindling and most of the horses are in Nevada, which is where the wild mustang is making its last stand. [The state gives the mustang props everywhere—brothels name

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FIGURE 2.1Calico Nature  Preserves  reservation breakdown.

C O M PA R I S O N   O F   C A L I C O   R E S E R VAT I O N   A L LO C AT E D   U S E

HORSES

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11,424

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themselves after it, downtown Vegas features wild horse statues, its picture hangs in every dive bar in the desert—but in real life, it gets no respect.] ≠ Today’s fight over wild horses is a strange battle, in which cattlemen and ranchers—the traditional enemies of the wild horse—have inadvertently teamed up with environmental groups, which generally regard wild horses as an invasive, non-native species. Along with the oil and gas lobbies, the ranching industry largely determines BLM policy toward public lands, which is where wild horses and burros roam. Many ranchers who lease grazing land from the BLM for meager fees—a situation opponents call “welfare ranching”—see wild horses as pests that destroy the land and take food from cattle, although study after study indicates that cattle do more damage to the range than horses. Moreover, public lands west of the Mississippi, which is where most of the country’s remaining wild horses live, supply just 3 percent of our beef. Under a myriad of management schemes and subsequent legislation, the 1971 law meant to protect the horses has been gradually weakened in order to deal with what the BLM says are “excess” horses. The BLM established “herd management areas” and “appropriate management levels” aimed not, as the act mandated, at preserving wild horses but removing more and more horses from the range. In 1971, there were 303 herd management areas; today there are 201. According to advocates who gathered recently for a conference in Carson City, Nev., the BLM has been grabbing small herds of horses in surprise sweeps. Periodically, the BLM enforces a

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policy of “zeroing out” horses, which means completely eliminating horses from a partic-ular herd management area, thus opening it up to drilling and the introduction of more cattle. ≠ Under Bush, slow-motion neglect has been replaced by a vigorous assault on mustangs. The BLM’s wild horse removal policy has escalated ferociously. The “gath-ers,” as the BLM calls them, are carried out by helicopter and are reminiscent of The Misfits, the Marilyn Monroe movie about the cruel mustang roundups outside Reno in the 1950s and ‘60s. Although helicopter round-ups aren’t as traumatic for the horses as the fixed-wing aircraft roundups depicted in The Misfits, horses can instinctively run them-selves to the point of injury, if not death. I witnessed several roundups this summer and saw foals being trampled by frightened mares and stallions once they were inside cramped holding pens. ≠ Horses that sur-vive the roundups face a murky future in the BLM cute-in-name-only adopt-a-horse pro-gram. For $125, you can buy a wild horse at one of the BLM’s adoption events held peri-odically around the country. The BLM tries to make the adoption easy, providing infor-mation on mustang training clinics, and lately even in some states offering to drive the horse to you at no cost. Full ownership is not granted for one year, a period in which the BLM may make surprise inspection vis-its. The problem is that there are many more horses in BLM pipelines than there are adopters, yet the roundups continue. In 2004, almost 4,000 wild horses and burros were removed from Nevada public land. An additional 5,000 at the very least are slated

to go this year; the goal is to cut the wild horse population in half by the end of 2005. Wild horse advo-cates fear that if the government even comes close to these figures, the herds that roam the range will no longer have the numbers to sustain themselves. ≠ But the November rider represents the gravest threat yet to the remaining mustangs—and a triumph for the cattle industry. Many senators and representatives did not know that Montana Sen. Conrad Burns had attached the last-minute rider to the 2005 federal appropriations bill when they approved it before their Christmas break. ≠ The rider probably spells doom for many of the 14,000 wild horses that languish in BLM facilities because they have not been adopted—and also endangers horses rounded up in the future. According to the new law, which took effect in January after Bush signed it in December, any horse that is older than 10 [not old for a horse] or has not been adopted after three tries through the poorly advertised adoption program can now be sold to the highest bidder. “Highest bidder” generally means middlemen who resell the horses to slaughter-houses. The demand for horse meat comes from Europe, Japan, and Mexico, and as fear of mad cow dis-ease escalates everywhere, the appetite for it increases. This combination of increased roundups and sales to meat-packers will devastate the remaining herds. ≠ A few legislators are fighting back. On Jan. 25, Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the House Resources Committee [which oversees wild horse policy on federal lands], introduced a piece of legislation along with Republican Rep.

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Ed Whitfield of Kentucky to overturn the Burns rider. “Very few icons of the West remain,” Rahall said, “and wild horses are certainly a symbol of the frontier era and our nation’s spirit. To allow them to be slaughtered without exhausting all other options, such as adoption, is an affront to our history.” ≠ Even if the horses aren’t immediately sold to slaughterhouses, they face another potentially disturbing fate. They may be bought by a prominent Montana rancher named Merle Edsall, who has planned for months to “repatriate” 10,000 wild horses to a “sanctuary” in Mexico. Edsall says he wants to build a wild horse tourist attraction, but once they move south of the border, it would be impossible to monitor what hap-pens to them. Edsall may also have influenced the Burns rider. The language in the Burns rider was the exact same wording floated by Edsall at a meeting of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board last February in Phoenix. ≠ Many wild horse advocates are hoping that the Rahall/Whitfield legislation will win additional sponsors and will be enacted quickly in the current Congressional session. But public lands ranchers are a powerful interest group. If the Burns rider remains as law and is carried out, our cowboy President—recently characterized by Burns as “a man who earned his spurs”—may be remem-bered for eradicating the living symbol of the American West, the very horse he rode in on. ≠ In the winter of 2oo5 Nelson Quispe, new from Peru to North America, was hired to herd sheep in Wyoming’s Red Desert. His sheep-rancher boss, Pat O’Toole, gave him a six-year-old mustang to help him cover the long miles over snow whales and sagebrush to open range. The mustang was white all over, with dark spots on his rear, betraying some Appaloosa in his ancestry, but with hooves like dinner plates, suggesting the additional introduction of something more along the lines of a draft horse. He’d been named Dot by the inmates at the Honor Farm near Riverton, where he’d been trained as a wild-born five-year-old. As a result the mustang had both native sense and correctional-facility manners, and you can do a lot worse than that in a horse. ≠ O’Toole told the Peruvian, “If the wind picks up, and the sheep get blown out, just head back to your sheep camp. Whatever you do, don’t try to follow them.” He said this in both English and Spanish and, just to be sure, in gestures, because the way weather can turn on you in Wyoming, a man needs all the languages at his disposal to explain it. After that, a veteran herder of these ranges, also a Peruvian, gave the young man one short, critical piece of advice in Spanish. Then Quispe rode off with Dot and the sheep into the wide-open world. ≠ He wasn’t there very long before the wind turned to speeding metal sheets, and the temperature hit 35° below zero Fahrenheit. Quispe, full of youth’s eagerness to prove itself, tried to stay with the flock. Then the sheep blustered off the range, and night fell, and the wind sped all the harder. The young shepherd was lost, frozen solid to his horse and sure he would die. Just then, however, he remembered the key piece of advice the veteran shepherd had given him. So Quispe leaned forward, took off Dot’s bridle, and wrapped his arms around the mustang’s neck. He closed his eyes and committed his soul to the Holy Mother. ≠ Dot —whose ancestors roamed these plains roughly one and a half million years ago, and who was born wild onto this very land just six years earlier, and therefore knew this world to the millionth power—lowered his head to smell for prairie dog and badger holes to keep from falling and, compensating with brains and courage for what he lacked in beauty, took the terrified youngster right back to camp. ≠ When the weather in Wyoming seems hell-bent on murder,

and a shepherd can’t see past his nose, the difference between life and death is—just as it used to be a cen-tury ago—a good, native-bred horse with more than a usual dose of backcountry smarts. But when the wind dies down, and cell phone service is restored, this modern age arrives with noisy, impatient abruptness, and wild horses look out of place in a West that is shrinking around them. So a straggle of mares and a few foals led by a single stud running parallel to a barbed-wire fence, power pylons, and an oil-field truck behind them is the way I first saw mustangs near Rock Springs late in the fall of 2007. ≠”Wild horses are right in the middle of a culture that wants nothing to do with them,” said Jay Kirkpatrick, director of science and conservation biology at ZooMontana, in Billings, a cen-ter for the development of contraceptives for wildlife. Kirkpatrick, who has spent more than 30 years study-

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ing the animals, said the wild horse has been despised ever since white men came west—blamed for everything that can and does go wrong on these grasslands. So in the mid-1800s, when stockmen released up to 40 mil-lion cattle on the plains, where horses had lived for centuries without destroying the grazing, at most two million mustangs were held responsible for the suddenly depleted range. ≠ At the same time, the range-tough wild horses, a fast-breeding renewable resource, were indispensable to early set-tlers. Occasionally hunted to keep their num-bers in check, they were also rounded up periodically for ranch work and transport or were used to conquer and define the growing nation. Lt. Ulysses S. Grant, invading Mexico with Gen. Zachary Taylor ’s army in March 1846 on a freshly caught mustang [from mes-tengo, meaning “stray”], tells in a contempo-rary account: “As far as the eye could reach to our right, the herd extended. To the left, it extended equally. There was no estimating the number of animals in it.” ≠ But then came railroads and roads, cars and tractors, tanks and combine harvesters, and you can’t fix a dead horse with a monkey wrench, so the mustang lost its value as transport and instead became, literally, dogmeat. Millions of pounds of wild horsemeat were processed into food for dogs, cats, and chickens during the 1930s alone. “Man,” as Pat O’Toole said, “was the wild horses’ natural preda-tor.” ≠ Traditionally ranchers haven’t had much time for anything that competes with them for resources. It’s not uncommon to find coyote carcasses draped over barbed-wire fences, as if Westerners had gone troll-

ing for whatever offended their souls and, unable to shoot the wind, turned their ire on something more tangible. In February 2006 the Sportsman’s Warehouse in Reno, Nevada, sponsored a competition in which the varmint hunter who brought in the most proof—such as the jaws of coyotes, foxes, bobcats, and mountain lions—would win a boat. Around the same time several wild horses were also shot, even though mustangs have been federally protected since 1971—under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act—from capture, branding, harassment, or killing. [It was largely the efforts of a Nevadan, Velma Bronn Johnston, better known as Wild Horse Annie, to bring the plight of mustangs to public attention that led to passage of the act.] ≠ You can outlaw cruelty, but you can’t outlaw the culture that spawned that cruelty. Wild horses around the Rock Springs area [where Dot is from] have been killed in greater numbers than anywhere else in the country. It’s impossible to know if the deaths are the deliber-ate work of ranchers fed up with the pressures on their grazing or of careless young men with too much time on their hands. In the spring of 2005 two Wyoming men and two men from Utah roped a wild stallion and castrated the animal with a knife. The mustang bled to death, and its body was dragged to a remote draw and left to rot. All four men were apprehended, convicted of misdemeanors, given six-month sus-pended jail sentences, and ordered to pay fines of a little more than a thousand dollars each. ≠ It’s hard to conceive that anyone would kill a federally protected mustang in this way, until you take into

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account the anatomy of the West: little towns strung like beads along highways, and between the towns an impression of endless public lands where it’s still possible to imagine getting away with anything, in part because these expanses feel as if they belong to no one and everyone all at once. ≠ In the ten Western states where wild horses are found, the federal agency in the unenviable position of overseeing the interests competing for public lands—livestock and minerals, trees and the people who hug them, hikers and wildlife, wild horses and water sheds—is the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM is required to manage its 258 million acres [more than any other federal agency] for an ever changing West and for “multiple use.” In theory there should be enough room for everything, but in reality, from the moment pioneers settled here, resources have been extracted with little patience for anything that got in the way of a silver dollar. These are not—and never were—lands managed for all things equally, but for the pri-orities of the age. ≠ Historically the priority has been livestock, and in 2006 cattle and sheep con-sumed 20 times as much forage on BLM land as wild horses and burros. But in the past 30 years the tone of the culture has been changing. Ranchers in many parts of the West have been losing their dominant place, and the loudest voice is now coming from oil companies. With intensifying pressure to make the United States more energy independent, the BLM has leased 44 million acres of land for oil and gas, nearly five million of that in areas set aside for wild horses. It’s an indelible use of the land: Even when capped, the wells don’t go away.”The energy is where you find it,” said Tom Gorey, PR officer for the BLM’s wild horse program. He sounded profoundly reconciled to that fact. ≠ Gorey’s agency oversees some 30,000 wild horses, which are confined to 29 million acres of disconnected BLM herd management areas [HMAs]. Under the 1971 act the BLM must keep the herds at what it decides are appropriate man-agement levels [AMLs]. Some horse advocates believe the AMLs are arbitrarily low, threatening the genetic viability of the herds; ranchers say they’re unrealistically high, threatening vital grazing. ≠ Pat O’Toole’s grazing allotments [an allotment is an area of BLM land leased to stockmen] overlap with HMAs in south-central Wyoming and northwestern Colorado, and he has the measured calm and authority of a man who has learned his priorities the hard way. “When the wild horses were regularly harvested by ranchers,” he said, “they couldn’t take the range down. Then the wild horse was protected, and the ability to control their numbers was taken out of the ranchers’ hands—and now there’s just too many of them.” He thought for a moment. “We’ve had a ten-year drought. Then add to that, oil and gas development is

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putting inconceivable pressure on the public land, and then consider that the wild horses have already taken the grassland to nothing. It’s hard on everyone—the wild horses, the ranchers, the wildlife, everyone.” But even as O’Toole spoke about his frustration at wild horses’ appetites, he defended their right to exist as a symbol. “Wild horses have their place on the range,” he said, “but when they’ve eaten themselves onto bare dirt, it’s hard to feel that they’re being appropriately managed.” ≠ Jay Kirkpatrick of Zoo Mon-tana agreed that wild horses “can exceed carrying capacity in places and cause prob-lems not only for livestock and wildlife but for themselves. But,” he said, “the key to understanding why wild horses are the scapegoat for poor land management and worse politics is that, unlike huntable wild-life and livestock, they have no economic value.” ≠ So the argument about wild horses and the resources they use comes down to this question: Do we have the land-scape—physical and emotional—for them? While horse advocates and stockmen often argue the relative merits and demerits of the mustang on more emotional grounds, scien-tists are arguing on the basis of a fundamen-tal fact: If the horses can be classified as native to North America, they have a right to the use of the land. If they’re not native, they don’t. ≠ “Free-roaming horses are a feral, exotic species,” said Joel Berger, a wildlife biologist based in Teton Valley, Idaho. “They’re in direct competition for habitat with native wildlife.” Berger suggested that the BLM’s budget for wild horses might be better spent on the study and protection of native species. But Kirkpat-rick and his sometime collaborator Patricia Fazio, an environmental writer, have long asserted that the wild horse is a native species and should be regarded as such by state and federal agencies. “Modern horses evolved on this continent 1.6 million years ago, only to later disappear,” Kirkpatrick told me. “The two key elements for classifying an animal as a native species are where it originated and whether it coevolved with its habitat. The horse can lay claim to doing both in North America.” ≠ Although scien-tists differ on where today’s horse, Equus caballus, arose, it is agreed that early members of the genus Equus appeared in North America some five million years ago. Some of them wandered across the Bering land bridge and spread into Asia [where they were eventually domesticated], Africa, and Europe. But these horses disappeared from their North American cradle about 12,000 years ago. One theory is that Pleistocene man, entering the continent around that time, hunted the horse to extinction. Other scien-tists theorize that a virulent disease, or perhaps a combination of climate change, disease, and hunting, wiped out the horse. In 1519 horses were brought to the North American mainland when Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico. Some scientists argue that the Spanish conquistadores’ horses encountered and bred with a remnant native population, but there’s no proof of this. ≠ Some herds are direct descendants of those brought by the conquistadores, notably the Pryor Mountain herd in Montana and northern Wyo-ming, whose centuries-old Spanish heritage was established through blood tests in 1992. These horses tend toward more primitive, exotically wild markings—they have zebra stripes on their legs and lines down their spines, and they come in camouflaging shades of dun and charcoal. ≠ But nearly all wild horses in the West are like Dot, the mustang that saved the Peruvian shepherd. They’re a mixture of breeds that made it out onto the range over the centuries [many during the Great Depression], their stock enhanced by deliberately released draft, Thoroughbred, Morgan, and Arabian stallions, with the

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weaknesses of each pureblood salted out of it and the instinct for survival whetted with each successive generation. ≠ Midmorning in early November I was hun kered down on a butte near Rock Springs, north-west of where the BLM had caught Dot, to watch horses being rounded up. “Don’t move, don’t talk,” I’d been warned, “or the horses might startle away from the corrals.” Wild horses are acutely attuned to dangers in their environment, chief among them humans. I tucked my chin against my chest and folded my arms. The ever restless Wyoming wind was loaded with winter intentions, and the water in the troughs in the corrals below had frozen inches thick. ≠ A helicopter pilot contracted by the BLM swept out across the plains, herding groups of horses into a canyon below us. The canyon shrank into a cam-ouflaged burlap chase, at the mouth of which a “Judas” horse was released, leading its wild cousins into

a metal corral, where yesterday’s wild horse catch was already waiting. At the gate, the pilot tipped his blades at a few balking horses, which shocked forward into the cloud of dust. The gate was slammed shut, and a handful of young cowboys, quick as cats, spilled over the fences into the midst of the herd. The helicopter went back out for more horses. Inside the corral the cowboys sepa-rated the stallions from the mares, the foals from all the others. Within an hour 40 to 50 horses had been skillfully processed. ≠ The horses’ panic subsided to what looked to be anxious resignation. A vet hovered near the corrals, inspecting each horse. A few had sustained superficial injuries, but none of these appeared seriously hurt, although wild horses are sometimes injured or killed during gathers. Every year 40 to 60 gathers remove between 5,000 and 10,000 wild horses from the western range. Over nine days at Rock Springs, more than 600 horses were brought in, then trucked to Cañon City, Colorado, to a prison where they were branded, gelded, doctored, and sorted by gender and age. Some would be trained by inmates for auc-tion later in the season; others would await adoption or removal to long-term sanctuar-ies. “I’m not a bunny hugger,” Jay Kirkpatrick told me, “but I’ll never attend another gather as long as I live. They’re flat-out inhumane.” He paused: “There are three reasons why these gathers are an unsatisfactory solution to the problem of numbers. Firstly, it’s genet-ically irresponsible to be constantly pulling off young horses whose genes will never get expressed; secondly, every time you pull horses out, the reproductive efficiency of the horses that remain increases. And thirdly, the behavioral consequences for the horses are profound.” ≠ Jay D’Ewart, a wild horse specialist in Rock Springs, Wyoming, said he doesn’t like to see the mustangs rounded up either, but that his agency is responsible not only for the welfare of the horses but also of

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the range. “We can’t leave horses out there to breed themselves into starvation and ruin the range for wild horses, wildlife, and livestock. We have a duty to ensure balance. So we gather with helicopters, as quietly and quickly as we can.” ≠ Limited by the carrying capac-ity of the land and tugged between the demands of ranchers, miners, and hunters on the one hand and the indignation of wild horse advocacy groups on the other, the BLM has settled on keeping 30,000 horses in perma-nent captivity [about as many as exist in the wild] at an average daily cost of more than two dollars each. This arrangement soaks up funds and provides, at best, a stopgap solu-tion to the animals’ tendencies toward prolific breeding. Every year thousands more horses are rounded up, and every year thousands more end up in long-term holding. Last year the agency said it might have to euthanize horses to reduce costs [which prompted Mad-eleine Pickens, T. Boone Pickens’s wife, to offer to adopt many, if not all, of the BLM’s captive mustangs]. “Everyone could see this coming,” said Chris Heyde of the Animal Wel-fare Institute in Washington, D.C. “Every year they pull more and more horses off the range to keep the ranchers happy. Meantime the scenario for the horses is just awful.” ≠ “The more we know about the emotional and social lives of horses, the more we realize that they draw on a powerful collective wisdom,” said Ginger Kathrens, as she pointed her cam-era at a band of mustangs on a ridge just beyond us. “They live in highly structured, hard-won family groups. If you arbitrarily pull horses out of that group, the consequences can be devastating for the remaining family members.” Kathrens is a documentary film-maker who has been observing wild horses for more than a decade in the Pryor Mountains. She’s made two films about these 170 horses and was working on third. It was a raw spring day, and we settled down with our backs to the wind and watched. A pale stallion named Cloud was keeping half an eye on his mares as they grazed the range on top of this rocky ridge and half an eye on us. Kathrens said that a stallion will fight—sometimes to the death—for the right to own mares, which he must then continue to defend from interloping bachelors until old age makes it impossible for him to carry on. As Kathrens described Cloud’s rela-tionship to his own mares and then to his

father, his mother, his brothers, and half brothers, she wove a story teller ’s tale of intrigue and interfamily squabbling, of unlikely alliances and terrible, sudden wars. There was even a case of what might be called love—a solitary and now elderly couple that broke the rules of wild horse society to be together. When the stallion that had won the mare let her out of his sight the night she was foaling, she escaped and sneaked back to her stallion of choice. “In some cases,” Kathrens said, “I’ve seen a stallion lose his mares in a BLM gather, and for that stallion, who has fought life-threatening battles for those mares, his life is over. He’ll end up on his own, and I don’t think it’s too strong to say that some stallions form of depression.” ≠ Kirkpatrick said contraception offers a humane alter-native to rounding up the animals, but that the BLM is resistant. He said the agency is spending too little studying fertility control and too much on helicopter roundups. When he suggested to a BLM official that the agency inject the mares with the wildlife contra-ceptive vaccine porcine zona pellucida [PZP], he recalled being told, “That’s not how we do it out here. We do it with horses and ropes.” According to Tom Gorey, the BLM spokesman, PZP has been adminis-tered on an experimental basis to about 1,800 mares since 2004. “The effects on population growth are being monitored,” he said. ≠ Kathrens is wary of any kind of human intervention to manage herd numbers. As we were speaking, a thin, charcoal-colored mare lay down next to her foal. Kathrens explained that the mare had been vaccinated nearly seven years earlier with PZP. When it wore off six years later, she con-ceived out of season. The foal had been born in Sep-tember, too close to the onset of winter to allow either animal to meet a cold, snowy spring in anything close to decent condition. Kathrens told me that out of sea-son births have been a sad side effect of PZP on the Pryor mares, an observation adamantly rejected by Kirkpatrick, who says that there are always some out of season births, with or without PZP. Kathrens turned the camera on the mare, whose head was now flat on the ground. The foal nudged its mother. “Oh, look at that,” Kathrens exclaimed. “If this weather keeps up, I don’t know if this pair will make it into summer alive.” When I asked Kathrens what she considered the best alternative to either gathers or PZP, she was adamant: “Nature. Natural selection by mountain lions, expo-sure, starvation. It may sound harsh to say, Let nature take its course, but it works. The health of the overall herd is far stronger when nature decides who stays in the herd and who doesn’t, rather than humans making those kind of decisions.” ≠ Kathrens owns one Pryor-bred wild horse and anticipates making room for more. Roughly 5,000 wild horses go to private homes every

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H O R S E S   R E M O V E D   V S .   H O R S E S   A D O P T E D   B Y   S TAT E

FIGURE 2.2In 2010 there is a big difference in the amount of animals removed compared to adopted.

              2 0 81

                                            7 0 5                                                                  9 9 2

                  2 9 2                        3 7 6

      1 1 0                        3 6 0

  4

        5 4                                      5 , 8 0 5

                            9 1 6        2 3

                    3 1 3                            8 9 1

          1 7 3                24 8

                            4 2 0                                      1 , 9 7 3

A R I Z O N A

C A L I F O R N I A

C O LO R A D O

I D A H O

M O N TA N A

N E VA D A

N E W   M E X I C O

O R E G O N

U TA H

W Y O M I N G

A D O P T E D               R E M O V E D

year through the BLM adoption process. [Pat O’Toole has adopted eight, including Dot.] Of those, at least 500 end up in equine rescue centers or at auctions. There they risk being sold to “kill buyers,” who sell the animals to slaughterhouses. Although the adoption agreement discourages owners from unload-ing their mustangs for slaughter, the BLM has no legal way to prevent it. Inexperienced owners overwhelmed by the wild horses’ powerful survival instinct or by the very real cost of owning a mythical part of the Old West sometimes end up sending their mus-tangs to auction, desperate to be rid of such trouble. ≠ Few people adopt horses and then sell them to slaughter purely for profit. But it does happen. In 2005 an Oklahoma man who said he wanted wild horses for a church youth program adopted half a dozen for $50 each and sold them to an Illinois slaughterhouse for a small profit. Two years later the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sev-enth Circuit upheld the decision by Illinois to ban the slaughter of horses for human con-sumption, and the last slaughterhouse in the country closed down. An unintended conse-quence of the new law is that more horses than ever before are being sent to slaughter in Canada and Mexico, and there is no way of

telling how many of those animals, exported in crowded trailers, are former wild horses. “I can’t see brands,” a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee told me under condition of anonymity. “I’m just counting bodies. It’s hard enough to figure out what gender the horses are, let alone what breed.” The way Pat O’Toole tells it, Nelson Quispe herded sheep again for him in the winter of 2006. Naturally the young shepherd insisted on riding Dot. ≠ For one person at least, the unholy terror of a Wyoming winter storm had transformed the wild horse from a symbol of nobility and survival to the actual beating heart of all that those words imply. But O’Toole didn’t have time to ponder the romance of the story. “I don’t know if we can carry on running sheep,” he told me. “We’ve been through tough times before, but this is as tough as I’ve ever seen it.” There was a long pause in which both of us contemplated what he faced—the squeeze on land from oil and gas development, competition for range with wild horses, drought, and the skyrocketing price of feed. And then we talked about what would be lost if O’Toole were to close down his operation: sheep, the rancher ’s stewardship of the open range, a use for the wild horse. Horses will likely be around as long as there are humans to attach themselves to a saddle. What is less sure is whether there will always be enough wild to allow mustangs to run in secure, functional, genetically viable herds. Driving home from the Rock Springs gather, through Pinedale to Jackson, I’d seen acres of the High Plains turned over to oil and gas development, rigs towering out of the frozen sage, the out-skirts of towns bristling with man camps and trailer parks for the roughnecks. Oil field traffic hurried out on a web of roads, seeming to skim along on a silver-rimmed mirage. Roadkill, mostly pronghorn and mule deer, lay bleaching on the verges in unprecedented numbers. ≠ Until maybe 20 years ago there used to be a herd of wild horses out here too, kicking around the edges of town in the spring and getting rounded up periodically by local ranchers. No one I spoke to could remember the exact moment they disappeared. Below is a story that is old only in date. Still today numbers don’t match, and horses don’t arrive where there suppose to. When the BLM collects horses eyes see them collect and leave and even under watchful eyes they still disappear according to the numbers. It’s the shell game and we as tax payers pay for so that cattlemen can profit off of tax payer land. Once they are rounded up and removed

MANAGEMENT    [43]

they are NOT branded at that point. Federal horses are NOT branded until they arrive at a federal facility and given shots and inspected . On the road they are no different than anyone horse to eye . This is how they can drive off with truck loads of horses and get away with it. These horses need to be branded on the spot before they are remove from any federal lands or transported. The horse rustlers: how scam artists abuse a federal adoption program for wild horses – Cover Story Wendy Williams How scam art-ists abuse a federal adoption program for wild horses. One hot afternoon in August, back in 1992, agent Steve Sederwall of the Bureau of Land Management finished his lunch and turned the wheels of his red pickup truck west onto I-10 out of Las Cru-ces, New Mexico. He was headed for the state prison’s mustang-gentling project, looking for 36 head of stolen horses. ≠“Misdirected” was what a few people might call them, but Sederwall figured what most people would call them was plain “stolen.” After all, he thought, these days, when you work for the government, the name you give something appears to be pretty flexible. He arrived too late. The stock truck with the government mustangs had pulled out an hour earlier. The horses were headed for a ranch in West Texas, and eventually for the slaughterhouse at Fort Worth. Or so an infor-mant had told Sederwall. ≠ Worth about $500 a head, give or take $100 here or there, the purloined herd might net around $18,000 at the killer ’s. Sederwall figured that was a nice chunk of change for a couple days’ effort. Driving back from the prison, he thought about that easy money,and this started him wondering if he might be in the wrong line of work. ≠ The next day, Sederwall put on his cowboy hat, drove to Texas, and picked up a Texas Ranger. Under-cover as horse buyers, they showed up at the ranch near Fort Stockton and saw the stock truck and the penned-up government horses. When a fellow came out of the ranch house, Sederwall asked to buy the horses. Nope, the wrangler said. Sederwall remembers the wrangler adding, “Those horses aren’t for sale. We’re going to breed some and sell the others to the killer ’s.” Sederwall was enraged. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard these stories. The plot usually went this way: wild horses, protected by the BLM under the 1971 Wild Horse and Burro Act, are rounded up from public land in 10 western states, funneled through the national horse adoption program, and sold for commercial uses. Somebody’s pockets get lined—probably more than one person’s. No questions asked. ≠ He began to think that the problem might amount to more than just the BLM looking the other way—that agency employees were actually encouraging traders to take the animals. The goal: get them off the range that cattlemen were clamoring to use. From time to time, Sederwall suspected, BLM employees were doing the selling themselves, pock-eting that $500 per horse. “I quickly discovered that their goal was to get rid of the horses and that the law didn’t weigh into it. It was, get rid of the horses at all costs,” he says. “The BLM—they had too many of those horses on the range. They’re mandated to take care of the animals. They got ranchers yelling at

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them. They’re caught in the middle. And when I say at all costs—you’re paying. It costs any-where from $1,500 to $2,500 to bring those animals in. If all we care about’s the money, if ever ’body just wants their money, why don’t we just shoot the damn things, give the bad guys $500 a horse, and save the government $1,000 or $1,500 a horse?” That $18,000 profit on the stolen mustangs was small change, he soon realized. Plenty of other deals went down that netted several hundred thousand bucks a shot. One was rumored at close to half a million. He and several other BLM agents down in New Mexico were pretty upset. One of those was Dale Tunnell, special agent in charge of the BLM’s division of law enforcement in Santa Fe—Sederwall’s boss. Tunnell was the man who had brought Seder-wall into the BLM, enticing him away from his job with another agency as an undercover drug cop. ≠ “I had agents,” says Tunnell, “that I’d sent to Oklahoma on some wild-horse cases who had determined that there was a lot of cover-up and falsification of reports—some pretty dirty dealings. I got my first taste of how BLM handles their internal problems. They went so far as to try to smear the reputa-tion of the agent who worked the case. They did everything they could to stop him from completing his investigation.” Sederwall, Tun-nell, and the others got a U.S. attorney over in West Texas to call a grand jury. Jurors were sworn in. Subpoenas were issued, some to BLM officials. The officials never showed. The Justice Department just stopped pushing the case. The grand jury expired. Says Tunnell, “In an investigation that lasted 14 months, with 15 agents involved, with 3,000 pieces of docu-ments identifying the corruption and fraud, at no level did we ever get to a grand jury and provide evidence.” Tunnell, who, like Seder-wall, has since left the BLM, has nothing but scorn for his former employer. In particular, he says, the idea that government employees who have daily interactions with cattlemen will protect the interests of the wild-horse herds is absolutely absurd. When it comes to rus-tling government mustangs, the greed would have made a drug lord blush, say the agents, who claim to have solid evidence, including tapes of informants saying that BLM employ-ees were taking money. ≠ “It’s pretty much a joke how the entire horse program is handled,” Tunnell says. “They’ll run one herd into

another management area and say it’s overpopulated. Then they’ll take a certain number of horses off the land. The cattle ranchers have a significant say on how those ranges are managed. The managers will do any-thing to keep those ranchers off their hind ends. The whole purpose is to remove wild horses from the public lands. If they could decimate the herds to where they could die out and become extinct, it would make the politicians and the bureaucrats extremely happy “Oth-ers confirm this. Former BLM director Jim Baca, who writes, “During my tenure as director of the BLM 1 was very concerned about the program,” called for a special administrator to assess the program. A bit more than a century ago, the national bison herd numbered upwards of 50 million. ≠ Massed and moving, they looked to the human eye like an undulating ocean of dark brown water. Colonel R. I. Dodge, driving out to Fort Larned on the Pawnee River in Kansas, recorded a herd 25 miles long and 50 miles deep. That was in 1871. He was shunned. A few years later, the railroad men decided the buffalo were in the way and put a bounty on hides. By the decade’s end, Colonel Dodge’s herd was no more. Poof Gone. Abracadabra. ≠ Just as Houdini might do, those railroad men did. As if all that buffalo meat were nothing, as if it amounted to about the size of a rabbit, the bison were stuffed into a hat and were made to dis-appear. When there was complaining about the slaugh-ter from as far away as Washington and even London, General Phil Sheridan told the Texas state legislature, “Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy.” The national mustang herd is about to go the same way, warn horse advocates. “When the BLM talks about overpopulation, I talk about under population. Some of the horses in the wild are in herd areas so small that their genetic diver-sity is threatened. Their survival into the future is in doubt,” says Ginger Kathrens, a wildlife filmmaker who has followed the horses for several years and owns sev-eral through the adoption program. ≠ When the BLM culls horses by bringing them in for adoption, the agency often disposes of a huge part of a herd, as high as 80 percent. One notice of horse culling declared that the agency would dispose of about 1,000 horses out of a herd of 1,200. Another notice declared the agency would bring in 280 animals from a herd of 330. “With numbers like those,” says Kathrens, “it doesn’t take very long to see an erosion of their ability to adapt to changes like weather shifts or grazing conditions.” Kathrens says the horses belong here. The fox-sized eohippus lived on our North American continent about 58 million years ago. It did well, evolving into the mod-ern horse, until about 8,000 years ago, when, for rea-sons that remain unclear, it died out. The Spanish

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FIGURE 2.3BLM manages 262 million acres yet only 34.5 million acres are allocated to wild horses..

A L LO C AT E D   L A N D   U S E   F O R   W I L D   H O R S E S

262 MILLION ACRES

34.5 MILLION ACRES

brought it back in the 1500s, and since then it has thrived on the high plains. ≠ The horses are much more than just feral domestic horses. Having been up there now for nearly five centuries, their genetics shifted to give them the hardiness to enable them to survive 500 winters on the western plains. In particu-lar, the mustangs have tremendous endurance. They can thrive on food that a domesticated horse would hardly touch. Their feet can take the kind of rocky ground that would make a well-bred horse go lame in five minutes. Says Kathrens, “They don’t belong in BLM’s holding corrals. They belong where they were born to be, in the wild. They have a very close family unit out there, led by a band stallion and a lead mare. The mare leads them to water; the stallion takes the rear and protects them. If you watch them, you’ll see how close they are, the mutual grooming and affection that goes on. It’s just wonderful to appreciate how beautiful of a social structure is—and then you’ll see what happens when they fly the helicopters. ≠ “BLM and U.S. Forest Service data indicate that about 3 percent of the beef comes from animals that are on our public lands. Over the years there’s been an incredible diminishment of the range for very little return. After all, two-thirds of the red meat in this country is grown east of the Mississippi. We could preserve our federal lands as the true ecosystem that it should be, not just as a place for exotic cattle to tramp around.” Kathrens is quite clear. By “exotic” she means the biological sense of the word—”foreign, “not native,” “not belong-ing,” “interloper,” “invader.” The Fund for Animals and the Animal Protection Institute, organizations that had sued BLM and won in the past for failing to protect the horses, took BLM back to court in 1997 in Reno. Terms of a negotiated settlement, announced last October, include requiring slaughterhouses to notify enforce-ment agencies when freeze-branded BLM horses come through their plant. Howard Gystal, attorney for the Fund, writes: “This settlement will halt the BLM’s ver-sion of `Don’t ask, don’t tell.’” But what about the mus-tangs stolen before they’re branded? What about mustangs “double-booked,” where one brand is put on two mustangs? What about mustangs with the brand clipped out before a sale? People involved with the horses remain skeptical. ≠ “The problem’s not solved yet,” says Sederwall. “It will never be solved.” Tunnell also is clear: “Nope. You’ve got an organization with a lot of people inside that’ve built their little freedom. It’s never going to change. They can lie about things and control information.” When you’ve got a $500 bill owned by the government walking around on four hoofs, somebody’s going to figure out a way to embez-zle it. For this reason, say advocates, it’s better to leave the animals out on the range where they were born—

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and where it’s harder to get at them. “Obviously, we would like to see the horses left where they are,” says Mike Markarian of the Fund for Animals. “There’s a lot of speculation that because horses compete with cattle, the BLM is caving in to cattle ranchers.” ≠ Bud Cribley swears things have changed. Cribley, the new wild-horse program leader, doesn’t deny that the adoption program had problems when he took it over last October. “From our point of view,” says Cribley, “about the allegations that were brought for-ward—the BLM did everything it could to cooperate in those allegations both internally and with the Department of Justice.” He contends the allegations never went forward because the grand jury never indicted anyone. He will not discuss that particular matter any further. Many of these problems, he insists, have been addressed to the best of the agency’s abilities and the agency is strongly committed to continued monitoring. But he’s hamstrung, he says, by the 1971 law because it doesn’t give him enough direction. He needs, he says, a clear answer to one essential question: who gets the grass? ≠ Horse advocate Nancy Whitaker, formerly with the Animal Protection Institute in California, has paid close attention to grass for more than 10 years. She maintains that mustang management has been based on the needs of the cows. To favor the cattlemen, Whitaker claims, wild-horse population figures are pur-posely inflated. Cribley denies this, again complaining about the act’s vagueness. “Because of the law, the horses have the same standing as the livestock. Essentially what we do is go through the land-use planning process. It’s a difficult and complex issue, a balance between the different interest groups. BLM is mandated to manage for the horses, but the law doesn’t say how much forage the horses get. It’s a

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[ 5 0 ]     F E N C E D   I N

2000      2001      2002    2003      2004      2005    2006      2007    

$45,000,000

$40,000,000

$35,000,000

$30,000,000

$25,000,000

$20,000,000

B L M ’ S   P R O G R A M   F U N D I N G , Y E A R S   2 0 0 0 –2 0 0 7

TOTAL PROGRAM  FUNDING           ENACTED FUNDING

decision that’s made on a site-by-site basis.” Would Cribley be happier if the law were clearer? Would he, for example, prefer a law that said, “Horses are to receive X amount of grass on Y sites”? “It would be a heck of a lot easier,” Cribley says. “But it’s not defined that way at all-just the fact that we will man-age for horses.” And Cribley is clear about the role of wild horse advocates: “The more they participate, the better their position in those discussions.” In other words, until Washington improves the 1971 law, his hands are tied. Cows, after all, sell at the killer ’s for a good chunk of change. ≠ Five mustangs pounded across the high desert recently, their dark manes and tails giving shape to the wind. Pursued by a helicopter, they ran into a corral — and into the center of the emotional debate over whether eutha-nasia should be used to thin a captive herd that already numbers 30,000. The champions of wild mus-tangs have long portrayed them as the victims of ranchers who preferred cattle on the range, middlemen who wanted to make a buck selling them for horse meat and misfits who shot them for sport. But the wild horse today is no longer automatically considered deserving of extensive protections. Some environ-mentalists and scientists have come to see the mustangs, which run wild from Montana to California, as top-of-the-food-chain bullies, invaders whose hooves and teeth disturb the habitats of endangered tor-toises and desert birds. ≠ Even the language has shifted. In a 2006 article in Audubon magazine, wild horses lost their poetry and were reduced to “feral equids.” “There’s not just horses out there, there’s other critters, from the desert turtle in the south to the bighorn sheep in the north,” said Paula Morin, the author of the book “Honest Horses.” “We’ve come a long way in our awareness of the web of life and maintaining the whole ecology,” Ms. Morin said, adding, “We do the horses a disservice when we set them apart.” Environmentalists’ attitudes toward the horses have evolved so far that some are willing to say what was heresy a few years ago: that euthanasia is acceptable if the alternatives are boarding the mustangs for life at taxpayers’ expense or leaving them to overpopulate, damage the range and die of hunger or thirst. The federal Bureau of Land Management, the legal custodian of the wild horses and burros, recently proposed euthanization. For years, the bureau has been running the Adopt-A-Horse program, selling mustangs from the range to those who would care for them. But 30,000 once-wild horses were never adopted and are being boarded by the agency at facilities in Kansas and Oklahoma (another 33,000 run wild). As feed and gas grow more expensive, the rate of adoptions plummets. Boarding costs ran to $21 million last year and are expected to reach $26 million this year, out of a $37

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FIGURE 2.4The Enacted  Funding is the amount alloted by governemt, the Total Program funding takes into consideration additional funds.

million budget for the bureau’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, which is intended to pro-tect the animals. And drought lingers here in northern Nevada, where the mustangs were rounded up on a recent weekend morning to prevent them from starving. The bureau “can’t do a good job of taking care of horses on the range if they have to take care of all the horses off the range,” said Nathaniel Messer, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Missouri and a former mem-ber of the federal Wild Horse and Burro Advi-sory Committee. ≠ Steven L. Davis, an emeritus professor of animal science at Ore-gon State University, said: “Many of the wild horse supporters claim that the horses have a right to be there. I reject that argument.” He added: “They damage the water holes. They damage the grasses, the shrubs, the bushes, causing negative consequences for all the other plants and critters that live out there.” For groups formed to protect the horses, the specter of euthanasia as a solution remains anathema. “It’s not acceptable to the Ameri-can public,” said Virginie L. Parant, a lawyer who is the director of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign. The mustang, Ms. Parant said, “is part of the American myth. People want to know that they can come to the American West and know that they can see herds of wild horses roaming. It’s part of the imagery.” ≠ As mustangs increasingly competed with cattle in the 1940’s and 50’s, many were rounded up and slaughtered. They found a champion in Velma Johnston, better known as Wild Horse Annie, who pushed Congress to act. In 1971, Congress gave the federal bureau the job of caring for them. Today, the fundamental rift between the bureau and its critics involves two judgment calls: how many horses can a range of 29 million acres support, and how should that level be maintained? Arlan Hiner, an assistant field manager for the bureau in Nevada, said, “We’re supposed to be managing for ecological balance.” Over all, the bureau wants to cut the wild herd by about 6,000 horses. Ted Williams, the author of the Audubon article, argued that without euthanasia such a balance would be impossible. ≠ Mr. Williams’s article infuriated the mustang advocates even more than the agency’s proposal to resume euthanasia. Ms. Parant laughs at the idea of attributing the range destruction to horses when cattle greatly outnum-ber them. Jay F. Kirkpatrick, a scientist who is the director of the Science and Conservation Center in Billings, wrote in a rebuttal to the Audubon article that Mr. Williams had not given sufficient weight to birth control options, which could make “serious inroads” on horse populations. “The issue is not that the technology doesn’t exist, but that the BLM is not investing in it,” Professor Kirkpatrick wrote. ≠ Herd sizes, the bureau says, double every four years. And the agency is working with a contraceptive that is largely effective for two years in mares. Alan Shepherd, the official who helps run the contraceptive pro-gram, said that it showed promise but had limitations. “The ultimate thing is you can’t catch them all,” Mr. Shepherd said. The horses that came rushing into the corral ahead of the helicopter were taken to a holding facility and will eventually find their way into the Adopt-A-Horse program. The bureau said it would be premature to discuss the criteria for culling horses or the means of euthanasia. Longtime observers believe that older,un-adoptable horses would be the focus of such a program. And in past mustang-thinning operations at holding facilities, marksmen shot the horses, said Dr. Messer of Mis-souri. After Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the House Natu-ral Resources Committee, raised questions this month about the euthanasia proposal, the bureau agreed

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to make no decision until after completion of a Congressional audit of the program, which is due in Sep-tember. ≠ There’s an easy solution here. “Among the most difficult horses to market, Parker says, are mares, weanlings, or yearlings of indifferent pedigree and conformation.” The changing dynamics of the horse industry in the United States can be likened to the ocean tides. At high tide there were somewhere between 25 and 27 million equines in this country. At low tide, that number dipped to under four million. Today, the tide is rising again, and the number is somewhere between nine and 10 million. The forces that brought about the high tide in the equine industry in 1915 and previous years were agriculture, war, and transportation. In that era, horses were the do-all creatures on the continent. They pulled the plows in fields across the country. They provided the power for huge wagons that were loaded with everything

from foodstuffs to beer. They pulled buggies, carriages, and other conveyances, and dur-ing war they were cavalry mounts and steeds that then transported artillery gun and car-riages. The forces that brought about the low tide arrived swiftly and somewhat merci-lessly. At the root was the gasoline engine. Tractors pulled plows. Trucks hauled goods in the cities. Tanks, planes, and jeeps replaced horses on the battlefield. Along the way the horse population plummeted, reach-ing nadir in the wake of World War II. ≠ Then came another powerful force that stimulated a rising tide that continues today: the horse became a recreational outlet. Basking in newfound affluence after World War II and enamored with romantic images from Western movies and TV shows, the American public began a continuing love affair with the horse. Population numbers were on the rise as new and increased usage was found for the horse. Horse shows prolif-erated, and it wasn’t long before definite breeding trends were established. Horses became specialists. ≠ In her area, she says, a trend toward increased breeding began eight to 10 years ago. “Ranchers were getting $350 for a calf, and colts were bringing $500, so some sold their cows and began breeding horses. Now, they’re lucky to get $250 for a colt.” At the May sale in Corsica, yearlings averaged $221 and broodmares averaged $557. Loose horses ran the gamut from an average of 19 cents per pound for horses 700 pounds and under [$133 for a 700 pound horse] to 47 cents a pound for horses weighing 1,200 pounds and more [$564 for a 1,200 pound horse]. ≠

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MUSTANG ADOPTION

MUSTANG ADOPTIONThere are new mustangs on the sanctuary. We can thank the Ford Motor Company for stepping in at zero hour to save them from death at a mid west slaughter plant. Ford sent them here and for the tired, confused animals it was the end of a long journey. They were captured in Nevada, spent months in feed lots, and made the rounds of various Bureau of Land Management adoptions. The cream of the crop found homes; the rest, considered too old, too plain, too frightened, were rejected time and again. The final rejection came at the hands of Native Americans at a South Dakota Reservation, who obtained them from the government then traded them to a horse broker who sent them to a slaughter plant. ≠ Actress and animal friend, Stephanie Powers alerted Ford officials of the plight of these wild horses. Due to Ford’s long association with wild horses through their vastly successful Mustang automobile, the company wasted no time in paying the broker for fifty two of the horses and sending them to our 11,000 acre Black Hills Sanctuary to run wild and free for the rest of their natural lives. ≠ The animals thundered out our gates to freedom, then skidded to a stop at the first grass, and lowered their heads to graze in knee high grass. It was as though they feared that the open gate was a mistake, and we humans would charge out to capture them again. Soon they had drifted off in small groups of friends to explore the great canyons and grassy plateaus of the back country. Freedom for the wild horses is what we are all about. The BLM tries its best but not all adoptions of horses by the agency are successful. While some younger horses settle readily into a life of captivity, some do not. This year we accepted over fifty head of wild horses that were loved by their adopters but did not adjust, Some had buffaloed their adopters, developed attitudes and become dangerous. At their own expense, the folks sent them here to be returned to freedom. ≠ A group of nineteen mares were remnants of a California state park herd that had run out of groceries in a canyon near the Mojave Desert where they had run for over fifty years. One of the saddest groups I have ever seen, it has been a chal-lenge to get them healthy and shiny again. We get frequent phone calls from Californians who want them back, but the horses have come to love this land and will leave here only over my dead body. We wish that we could provide homes for all the wild horses that need homes, but we have to maintain the condition of our own ranges and can accept more horses only as we are able to raise funds to acquire adjoining lands. The new horses float like oil on water amongst the existing herds. They are bonded together by shared experiences as well as a failure of the old mustang hierarchy to immediately absorb them. Yet, like some people, there are individuals who tip toe unnoticed into established herds, where others try but are immediately challenged by a boss mare, or the herd stallion. ≠ Ears laid back, yellowed teeth bared, whirling, kicking, biting, squealing, weaving toward the newcomer with head lowered, they drive them out of the herd.Some newcomers persist as outcasts grazing unobtrusively at the edge of herds until they become part of the band; others drift off to try for acceptance elsewhere with other lonely newcom-

ers with whom they can graze without ran-cor. Horses are such sociable creatures that loneliness often overcomes fear. Many a mustang, separated from its band, has jumped fences to join a rancher ’s domestic herd. Some of the Ford horses were recently gelded by the Indians. They prance up to each newcomer, neck bowed, sniffing noses

and flanks, squealing insults, or rising on their hind legs, manes flying, to box an opponent, or push in with their chests, try-ing to seize the enemy’s foreleg with their teeth. Some will even attempt to gather a band of mares, but soon, whatever traces of testosterone they have in their bodies des-ert them and they desert the mares for a love affair with good grass. ≠ While we would like to accommodate more wild horses in their time of need, we get no help from the State or Federal government and must depend for help from folks who care. Our funding comes from tourism, sale of surplus wild or registered foals,grants and dona-tions, and bequests from those whose con-tributions to wild horses will continue long after they have passed to another world. As with many other worthwhile charities, we have suffered greatly from calamities such as 9-11, Tsunami, New Orleans hurricanes, and earthquakes in Pakistan, but our com-mitment to the horses is to keep trying. The situation makes us even more appreciative of all our volunteers who, like Susan Watt and I, work without pay to keep this great project running. ≠ Autumn is a time of real-ity, a time when we have to ask for help from our friends. Despite world disasters, our responsibility to our five hundred or more wild horses here on the Sanctuary goes on. The wild horses need your help. Faced with a long winter, we will have to raise eighty thou-sand dollars to buy hay and the necessary supplements to feed our wild horse herds until the green grass starts next Spring. In simple terms that is two tons per horse or 1000 tons at $80 per ton. Won’t you please help? Your donation of $100 will help feed a wild horse for the Winter. Please purchase one ton of hay or a hundred to feed these great animals who remain so dependent upon our friendship. Thank you for your support!–Dayton O. Hyde ≠ The pounding of hooves and clouds of swirling dust that accompanies a band of wild horses as they race effortlessly across an endless plain; a new-born foal, for the first time unfold-ing his long legs and awkwardly clambering onto all fours; a peacefully grazing herd of fuzzy mares, fat with new life; the awesome power of scarred and muscled rival stallions rising to their hind legs to battle: these sights of America’s wild horses could be soon just a memory. Our American mustangs [and the wild burros, too] are being held for ransom. Government officials, armed with a new law, are threatening to kill as many as two thirds of all the remaining wild born mustangs if they do not get more money. There is a real possibility that they might succeed in this heartless scheme, if we, the American people, allow them. America’s debt to its wild horses and burros is incalculable. They have carried our burdens and died in our wars; brought our pioneer families across the vast plains, plowed our fields and carried our first mail. The horse evolved here in North America; it was re-introduced by the Spanish Conquistadors, and those magnificent horses are the progenitors of today’s wild herds. They are a living link to our past, truly, living legends. Today mustangs carry the US Marines Honor Guard in the Rose Parade, they carry our Border Patrol Agents into terrain too difficult for jeeps, they are used by police departments and for equine

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FIGURE 2.34 out of every 15 mustangs in holding pens will be euthanasias.

H O L D I N G   P E N S   =   D E AT H   P E N S

¬               ¬              ¬              ¬

assisted therapy for people with post-trau-matic stress disorder, and learning and physi-cal disabilities. There are mustang champion endurance and trail horses; and countless loyal family companions. Wild Horse Summit Convenes in Wake of Slaughter Proposal When the Bureau of Land Management, responsible for the care of America’s mus-tangs and burros, announced in July that it was considering euthanizing 33,500 wild horses due to a budget shortfall, horse advo-cates and fans went on red alert. In response, an emergency Summit was held in Las Vegas. The 100 plus people attending included leg-ends in the horse advocacy and rescue; lead-ing equine and range scientists, famous authors, filmmakers, photographers, lawyers, Native Americans, concerned citizens, and mustang adopters; on the other side of the ideological fence, representing the Govern-ment, the Director and two Deputies from the BLM. “What wild horses share with us can’t be bought or sold. It’s priceless. The striking family values they posses. We can learn much from them. In the herd, the children are valued above all and violence is banished yet we con-tinue to destroy their lives, to strip away their protection…Murder, anyone? ≠ They have done nothing Carol Walker/Living Images Mustang roundups continued in Colorado last week. Despte too few of horses left on the range, the roundups continue. “It was horrible to watch just horrible,” said Carol Walker after watching the event take place to us.”–Michael Blake, Author of, “Dances With Wolves”. At the Summit, we learned in detail that what we had suspected and feared was true. For years, horse advocates have accused the BLM of mismanagement of the wild horses and bur-ros. Chief among the claims of what some are calling “a policy of extinction” by the BLM is an aggressive round-up campaign, a brutal process that has killed and lamed horses and foals and at the very least, rips apart family groups. The rounded-up horses are suppos-edly destined for adoption. But over the last nine years, thousands more were taken than the adoption market could support. Since 1999, a shocking 70,000 horses and burros have been removed, so now there are twice as many animals standing around in government pastures, being fed with tax dollars, than there are left free on their legal ranges. These33,500 pointlessly removed horses are the

ones that now the BLM says it cannot afford to main-tain. The Round Ups. Wild horses and burros are rounded up by government contractors who use heli-copters to drive the horses, sometimes over long dis-tances, over rough terrain. Sometimes horses, notably foals, are injured, even breaking legs during the chase.Chutes are set up leading into pens. ≠ As the horses approach, a “Judas” horse, that has been taught to run through the chutes, is released, and the herd follows him into the pens. There, chaos ensues as the horses realize they’re trapped. As flight animals, they are highly sensitive to fear, and the fear is contagious. The panicked horses often injure themselves attempting to climb the rails or are trampled. Carol Walker, photogra-pher and author of “Wild Hoofbeats” has spent years observing and photographing wild herds in Colorado. Walker observed a round-up last week of Colorado’s Sandwash herd. As the contractors were forcing the horses through a chute into a trailer, a gray mare was badly trampled. “It was horrible to watch – just horri-ble,” Walker said. ≠ Once the desired number of horses is penned, the gate is shut and the others are turned back on the range. This “gate cut” separates the band. Horses live in family bands with highly evolved social structure. They are the opposite of solitary ani-mals; their herd and their position in the family is all important. “Every time we disrupt the bands, these social structures are being destroyed…we can’t con-tinue to bring them in and separate them…The wisdom of the harem stallion is so important to the health of that band,” said Karen Sussman, Summit organizer. The fragmented bands left behind can become dysfunc-tional, she explained. Dysfunction in the herds can cause birth rates to rise in compensation for the lost band members among other behaviors. A Numbers Game Another recurrent criticism at the Summit had to do with the BLM’s “numbers”. ≠ The lament that there are too many horses, and we must remove some, is rea-sonable – unless they are not telling the truth about how many horses there are, how many the range can support, and how many new horses will be added with each crop of foals. At the Summit, we heard evidence that the bureau has lied to the public about all of these numbers. “I believe these figures are being intention-ally hidden from the public precisely because they would reveal such an enormous subversion of the Wild Horse and Burro Act,” said scientist Craig Downer. The BLM reports there are currently 33,000 horses and burros on the ranges. At the summit it became clear that the number is much lower, some say there are 20,000, but some say there may be as few as 13,500 horses left. The governments herd counts are not actual; there are no helicopter pilots or range scien-tists out there counting every horse; instead, the

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counts are based on statistical models. ≠ The BLM’s Appropriate Management Levels, the amount of rangeland needed to support a wild herd, are said by critics to be “arbitrary”. But it is these AML’s that the Bureau ruthlessly pursues, to the point of eliminating whole, “healthy herds from healthy rangeland”, said Jerry Reynoldson, another Summit organizer. Many speakers expressed concerns that the BLM is system-atically reducing the herds below genetic viability. In some places, the herds have been decimated to as few as only 12 horses left after round-ups as in Nevada’s Little Humboldt; and Hot Creek Herd Area had its 128 horses culled to only 3. Equine biologists say that a healthy, sustainable herd needs to be at least 100, and even better, 1,000 animals. “BLM’s …techniques appear to be less than honest and aimed at perma-nently crippling or elimnating the majority of free-roaming herds,” said the dynamic Nevada resident Cindy MacDonald who has spent three years compiling a report on the issue. She called for a full Congres-sional investigation into the BLM’s management practices. ≠ When the American public and schoolchil-dren wrote bags of letters to Congress to support protecting horses and burros and their ranges, Congress voted unanimously, and passed the Wild and Free – Roaming Horse and Burro Act in 1971. The Act created permanent homes for the wild ones called the Herd Areas, encompassing some 53 million acres. Over the years the BLM has whittled away at these federally granted range lands – today there are a little more than 34 million acres, a loss of wild horse habitat of over 19 million acres. “To me it seems the height of ingratitude that of all the species upon which humans inflict their prejudice and spite, it should be these two, the horse and burro, who have performed such a world of service for mankind over, not just centuries,

but approximately seven millennia! Yet their truer place among unfolding life on Earth was, and remains, in the wild, and particularly here in North American where the vast majority of their evolutionary past history was experienced over many millions of years, and with prac-tically no break, right up to the present.” – Craig Downer These stolen herd areas have been leased to ranchers, whose cattle outnumber horses on public lands by 400 to 1, and to mining and oil companies, who are now riding the wave of public opinion against dependency on foreign oil. ≠ “Only one half of one percent of BLM land is left for the wild horse,” said Sussman. “This is a much bigger story than just horses; it’s about the public lands and who they really belong to.” Jerry Reynoldson, Wild Horse Summit Organizer She and others said that many believe cattle, not wild horses have a “right” to be on our public lands, but less than 3% of America’s beef comes from public range grazed cattle. Many of the 4 million cattle who graze our public lands do not belong to family ranchers who will go broke if forced to share with wild horses and burros; those cattle belong to corporations that receive our tax dollars to make up the difference in the low grazing permit fees: currently, it costs these corpora-tions only $1.35 per cow per month. Who are these “Rolex Cowboys”? According to the Animal Welfare Institute, among them are Paris Hilton, a Dutch beer company and other Forbes 400 trillionaires like John Simplot. Downer said BLM has “reduced its equid occu-pied areas by 7,658,302, or 18%, while the USFS has reduced its equid occupied areas by 5,986,112 acres, a whopping 53%.” The fences within the legal Herd Areas that are erected at taxpayer expense for the conve-nience of these corporate ranchers often interfere with the horses and burros migration to water and for-age. ≠ “I really think the wild horses are doomed if we

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continue to let the BLM manage them. At the current rate of removal – we won’t have any horses left on public land in 10 years,” – Jill Starr, Twin Oaks resident and head of Lifesav-ers Wild Horse rescue. A persistent argument against the horses on public lands is that the horses destroy the range, depriving the cattle and wildlife species. Downer blasted that as a myth. “Wild horses and burros on public land remain on the very bottom of the totem pole of priorities,” he said. He detailed how horses actually reseed the range grasses through passing seeds with their manure. ≠ Horses traverse widely during grazing and don’t con-gregate and destroy water holes and other riparian areas as the cattle do. Downer stated that California reveals that not only livestock but also big game are being given entire pref-erence both within the original Herd Areas and even more flagrantly within the greatly reduced Herd Management Areas. While for-age and water rarely seem to be an issue for the established livestock and big game inter-ests, these same resources are almost always portrayed as being too little for the relatively tiny members of our nation’s remaining wild horses and burros, he said. “Given sufficient freedom in space and time, [the wild horses and burros] prove that the equid element restores and enhances the ecosystem here in North America, as elsewhere. But they must be allowed to fill their natural niche in a natu-ral habitat of sufficient size to become a long-term viable, stabilized population,” Downer summarized. “Wild horses and burros have become the scapegoats for virtually all range deterioration, despite the fact that indepen-dent as well as the BLM’s own data show that the majority of rangeland deterioration is caused by livestock,” states the AWI. Even the adoption program, which up until 1999 was keeping up with horse gathers, came under question at the Summit. ≠ The BLM has been sabotaging the adoptions, MacDonald claims. The low adoption fee, lack of adequate screening for would be adopters and lack of follow-up on adopted animals all create a situ-ation rife with lost mustangs and burros, ones abused, starved and sent across the borders to slaughter. The low adoption fees encourage first time horse owners who do not have the expertise to gentle and train the animals. As a result many end up at rescue facilities. The Adoption Task Group formed at the Summit

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brainstormed recommendations to improve the adoption program. Other Task Groups formed including Media Relations, Education, and a Legal Team. The Wild Horse Summit brought together a highly ener-gized group that not only discussed the problems but also brainstormed solutions. Among the Summit speakers were Chief Arvol Looking Horse; Dances with Wolves author Michael Blake; Madeline Pickens, wife of T. Boone Pickens; filmmaker James Kleinert; Deanne Stillman, author of Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West; Ginger Kathryns, famous for her documentaries on the wild stallion Cloud; Le Alan Pinkerton, U.S. Border Patrol, who exclusively uses mustangs on a 303 mile stretch of the US/Canada border, and California wild horse rescue visionaries Twin Oaks resident Jill Starr of Lifesav-ers Wild Horse Rescue, Neda DeMayo of Return to Freedom. The organizers were Karen Sussman, presi-dent of the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros, the oldest wild horse and burro organization in the United States. She follows in the footsteps of Wild Horse Annie; and has devoted her life to saving America’s wild horses and burros. Jerry Reynoldon, whose presence was missed, ironically had a riding accident that prevented his coming. Reynoldson founded Best Friends and is a longtime advocate for the wilds ones. Marissa Morin was the third cohost and gave an inspiring pre-sentation on the healing powers of horses. Facilitators were Mary Ann Simonds, and John Stahl-Wert. The Summit’s organizers are working on compiling the information and people from the Summit into a Wild Horse Coalition that will take the message to the public and to Congress. “We need a moratorium on gathers and the horses returned,” summarized Sussman. ≠ As to the 33,500 horses that the govern-ment is considering euthanizing, BLM Director, Henri Bisson said at the Summit, “Contrary to reports in the media I never said euthanasia was a plan, only a legal option.” Bisson said he would be retiring early next year, which caused the comment I overheard: “He won’t be around to catch the heat,” [If the horses are euthanized.] “I talked to the BLM head,” said radio host George Knapp on the show Coast-to-Coast Sunday night following the Summit. “He said they are talking about whether to use poison, bullets or cap-tive bolt gun. It’s gone beyond talking points when they begin to talk about method.” The clock is ticking; the BLM’s sharpshooters are loading their rifles. Thirty-three thousand, five hundred perfectly healthy horses await their fate. Will they be released back onto their ranges, to be reunited with their families, to run free and live out their lives? Or will they be shot dead, by a bullet to the head, their blood staining our

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land and our conscience? Only a loud and sustained public outcry will stop the slaughter. The world will watch what we do with our horses; the horses that car-ried us across the wide country, that fought our wars, ploughed our fields, and carried with our burdens. ≠ The Prince by Dayton O. Hyde, Fall 2010. Like an eagle I sit perched on a flinty escarpment of the highest part of the Sanctuary watching the world below, a scene at this moment silent as a photograph. To the east, hun-dreds of miles of rolling prairie where once a host of covered wagons wound their way westward. To the south, the smoky haze of a Nebraska grass fire. To the west, as I watch, I see the evening purpling of Wyoming. Below me a skein of canyons, deep and dark, drain the life blood of these hills to the Cheyenne, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the sea. ≠ The slight breeze brings to me a strange perfume, crushed sage, the ter-ritorial scent of a mountain lion, the faint musk of a mule deer, pack rat, and of course, the stallion piles which adorn the highest meadows. I am watching with faint hope to see the great black mustang gelding we call ”The Prince” who pranced into our lives in a ship-ment Stefanie Powers and the Ford Motor Company saved from slaughter. When I first saw the Prince, he came at me as though to do me hurt, but turned out that he was only near sighted and wanted a closer look. Since then, we have become good friends. ≠ He was gelded somewhere back in his history, but apparently no one bothered to tell him, for he commands the pret-tiest bunch of fillies on this wild horse sanctuary. The prairie grasses have buffed his hooves to a shine. Buf-falo and blue gramma grass have given his coat a luster no show horse remedy could match. Eyes large, dark, and lustrous, with depths no man can fathom. All fire and hatred when another challenges him for his mares yet with a lover ’s softness as a filly grooms his mane. ≠ The Prince has been missing now for fifty seven days. I last saw him with his band as they lazed in the shadows of a landmark pine. I looked there a few hours ago but his old tracks in the gray dust had faded and the lone pine tree sang mournful in the persistent breeze. As I sat on the rocks overlooking thousands of acres of wild horse sanctuary, I could not help thinking of the dangers the Prince faced almost daily. Battles with younger stallions, mountain lions lying on rocks or branches waiting patiently for a passing meal. A leg broken perchance while charging down a rock-strewn slope. With the cool of evening wild horses left their lounging places and began threading their way toward water on a favored meadow for grazing. Groups of friends perhaps or the favored few of an amorous geld-ing led by a wise old mare respected for her wisdom. Hopefully I watched those distant groups but the Prince was not amongst them. Deer came out of hiding and

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grazed amongst the mustangs unafraid. Far off, I heard the thunder of wild turkey wings as they lofted their heavy bodies into the air and flew upwards toward nighttime perches in some tortured cottonwoods. I was about to quit my search and head for home miles away, when I felt that I was being watched. Startled, I whirled as though a mountain lion was snarling at my back. There in a tiny meadow stood Prince and his band of mares staring at me as though I was an enemy. The Prince snorted an alarm, and circled to catch my scent. For a moment his band seemed frozen in time. Then he nickered softly and came toward me as his fillies low-ered their heads to graze. It has been twenty-two years since I left my ranch and family in Oregon with the madcap idea that I could make a difference in the lives of wild horses. ≠ I knew that I’d be criticized and called a fool, but it was all worth the gamble. I had grown up with wild horses in Oregon and owed them for

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a great deal of joy. In the past, some of the financial support for the Sanctuary came for the sale of foals from our registered quarter horse and paint mares. That market has now tanked and we are forced to seek other income to pay the Sanctuary bills and raise money for the $75,000 hay bill that we owe for this year ’s winter hay. Like other non profits, we have seen gifts from major donors wither away, while our fixed expenses such as fencing material, tractor repairs, fuel and taxes go on. I check the mail daily in hopes that those wonderfully caring folks who have dug deep in the past, will remain loyal to the mustangs and help us again. ≠ Samson is an 11 month old Mustang stud colt that I adopted from the Bureau of Land Manage-ment [BLM] on March 24th, 2001 and this is his story... ≠ The little black colt was living with his mother and their herd in Northern Nevada on the Owyhee Herd Management Area, near the Idaho border. ≠ At two months old the little black colt’s life changed for-ever... Most of his herd was captured by the BLM. The herd was first moved to Palomino Valley, Nevada, where they were freeze branded and vaccinated. A BLM wrangler told me they do not separate a foal from it’s mother until he or she was at least 5 months old. After he was weaned they moved him to Carson City, Nevada and then Elm Creek, Nebraska where he stayed until March 21st or 22nd when he and about 100 other Mustangs of all ages were trucked to Dills-burg, Pennsylvania, just outside of Harrisburg, for an auction. After his capture and until he was send to auction my little black colt had been living in a large holding pen with other colts his age, away from human contact other than when the tractors brought hay into the holding pens. ≠ March 23, 2001 Friday evening, 4:30pm: I arrived at the BLM auction location; Diamond Seven Ranch & Arena, Dillsburg, PA. I viewed the Mustangs and watched a demonstration with David Seay [pronounced “sea”], Progressive Horsemanship Trainer. ≠ As I previewed the mustangs I realized that there aren’t many 2 year old’s my prefered age to adopt so I would not have to wait too long before I could ride my new horse. There were quite a few yearlings and a lot of 5-8 yr. old, even a few 12 year old. ≠ March 24, 2001 Saturday morning, 8:00am: Ryan Coaxum, friend and horse trainer/gentler met me at Diamond Seven Ranch and Arena to help me pick out my Mustang. There were some last minute changes that resigned me to the fact that I would not be able to adopt a mustang at this auction – the horse trailer I planned on transporting my mustang home with became unavailable at the last minute. The BLM requires stock-type trailers with rear swing gates to transport adopted animals; drop ramp, divided two-horse trailers, and trucks with stock racks are not acceptable. There was only one person I knew that owned this type of trailer and now it was no longer at my disposal. ≠ Ryan and I were wandering around and talking with previous adopters about their experiences with their mustangs. Everyone had very positive feedback for us. One woman suggested that we speak with owner of Diamond Seven Ranch & Arena. She told us that he is very helpful individual and that possible he would allow us to keep a mustang overnight at his facility until we found a shipper [if we found a mustang to adopt]. Well, he went one step further; he graciously fixed us up with a shipper. It was literally a last minute decision to go for it! I had about 5 minutes left to get a bid number. I decided to go with a yearling as this was my first time owning a horse, and a Mustang no less! I asked Ryan to pick a yearling for me from a pen with about 8 or 9 yearlings in it. He picked an 11 month old black colt. When I asked why he chose this particular colt, Ryan said it was a gut feeling...he just read some-

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thing in him. Samson wasn’t afraid, nor was he aggressive. Ryan had been watching him for about 45 minutes before I arrived. Ryan felt that this colt would not become herd bound so, when I needed to get him from the pasture, he would not give me a hard time [a year and a half later this has proven to be so true – thank you Ryan!]. Samson was social but also independent. He spent time mutually grooming another colt and also spent time alone. Some of the other yearlings were getting in minor squabbles and tried to bring Samson into it. He walked right through the disturbance, unafraid, unintimidated, but did not involve himself in the squabble either. Ryan felt this colt had a good mindset. We stood outside the pen and watched him for about 15 minutes and then checked out the other pens. I came up with three choices, the little black colt being my number one choice. We then went back to Samson’s pen to check his bid number, which was tied to his neck with twine. As I was leaning over to get a better view of his number, Samson came right over to me and gently nuzzled my hand! For me, that was the deciding factor...I turned to Ryan and we smiled at each other as if to say “This was meant to be”. I really didn’t pick Samson...he picked me! ≠ Samson’s pen was the last pen to be auctioned off and he was in the last group from that pen. The routine was to herd 2 or 3 mustangs into the auction ring at a time. I started bidding immediately but when the bid reached $300.00, my original stopping point, I declined. Luckily, I was drawn back into bidding three more times by the auctioneer and by Ryan’s gentle urging. I felt every-

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one eyes on me and there was an energy in the air – I really felt as if everyone at the auc-tion was rooting for me! I was swept away by the energy surrounding me and before I knew it, Samson was mine [really I’m his is more accurate]. Samson turned out to be the high bid of the day – $465.00. After the auction was over, one of the BLM specialists came over to congratulate me and said “You got yourself a great horse there!” I couldn’t have been more pleased. ≠ Most of the adopters were having the BLM specialists put halters on their mustangs as they went into the load-ing chute. I watched the horses load up, most of them afraid, rearing or kicking. The BLM people thought I was a little reckless for not putting a halter on Samson, but I didn’t have one. I really hadn’t expected to be able to adopt a mustang because of the trailer issue so I went totally unprepared. As it turned out, not putting a halter on Samson wasn’t such a bad idea; Samson did not spook in the chute and loaded on the truck without a hitch. ≠ After giving the trucker directions to Quaker town, I followed him all the way [I wasn’t about to let Sammy out of my sight for even a minute] to his new home, a 10 acre ranch 4 miles from my house. Two hours later we were ready to unload Samson. He unloaded as easily as he had loaded two hours previously. I gave him water and hay and then left him alone so he could settle into his new surroundings. ≠ Exhausted and terrified, a herd of wild mustangs gallop around the side of the mountain, miracu-lously managing to skirt the treacherous prairie-dog holes and deep crevices as they try to escape the screaming, whirling preda-

tor on their tail. Their instincts tell them they can out-run most any animal,but this one is relentless. You wish a director would yell “Cut,” and the horses would be led to a plush Hollywood stable for rest, food, and water. But it’s not a movie, and the pilot flying the helicopter is not an actor. He works for a govern-ment program to round up wild horses from public lands. The target horses this week are from the Sand-wash Basin herd, in northwestern Colorado. ≠ As the horses hit a straightaway at full stride, a camouflaged fence gradually funnels them into a trap. Close to the neck of the trap, the roundup crew releases a “Judas horse,” which runs to the front of the pack and leads the mustangs directly into a tiny corral. Once inside, the horses screech to a stop, piling up on top of one another as dust flies, the gate slams, and the helicopter pulls away to go back for more horses. When the crew is finished, a few of the horses will be released back onto the range, some will be put up for adoption, but most will be relocated to government holding facilities, and a large number will be eligible to be sold to slaughterhouses, thanks to Senator Conrad Burns. Senator Conrad Burns last year. ≠ In 1971, Congress passed a law that banned the inhumane treatment of wild horses and put safeguards into place so they couldn’t be sold for slaugh-ter. That law was the result of a two-decades-long crusade by Velma Johnston, better known as “Wild Horse Annie.” But in December 2004 that law was gutted. ≠ Just days before the Thanksgiving holiday recess, when most of Washington was getting ready to leave for the long weekend, Senator Burns put the

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final touches on his rider No. 142, which removed all protections for wild horses that were over the age of 10 or had been offered unsuccessfully for adoption three times. Such animals could now be sold “without limitation, including through auction to the highest bid-der, at local sale yards or other convenient livestock selling facilities.” Burns inserted his one-page rider into a 3,300 page budget-appropriations bill on the eve of the bill’s con-gressional deadline, and there would be no opportunity for either public or legislative debate. The following week rider No. 142 was uncovered, thanks in part to a tip from the Government Printing Office. Animal advocates and politicians from both major parties were outraged. Representative Ed Whitfield, a Republican from western Kentucky, observed, “The thing that is so damaging about this Con-rad Burns amendment is that he passed it on an appropriations bill that no one knew about.… It is precisely the way the legislative process should not work. I don’t know his motivations, but more than likely he was pro-tecting the ranchers who have leased those lands.” ≠ Despite protests, President Bush, who likes to borrow the imagery and ethos of the American cowboy [and whom Burns once praised as having “earned his spurs”], signed the rider into law, capping a series of policy moves at the Bureau of Land Management, the government agency in charge of managing the horses, that have sought to diminish the pro-tected status of these “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West,” as the 1971 law called them. The rider caused such anger that in May 2005 the House of Repre-sentatives overwhelmingly passed a biparti-san bill to restore the original intent of the 1971 law. A similar amendment in the Senate had to make one stop before its confirmation vote: the appropriations subcommittee for the Department of the Interior, which has jurisdic-tion over all federal lands and the National Park Service. Burns is chairman of that com-mittee. Proving again that one man can make a difference, he blocked the amendment from going to vote. ≠ The BLM, Department of the Interior, is responsible for administering America’s 261 million acres of public land. His-torically, it has worked closely with ranchers and other commercial interests, such as gas and oil, coal, and timber, in the management and use of these lands. Overseeing the wild

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horses is one, small part of what the bureau does, but to the general public, which has an emotional attachment to them, it is one of its most important responsibilities. Celebrated in film, literature, and our nation’s history, the mustangs helped Lewis and Clark complete their historic expedition, and during the opening of the frontier, they pulled plows, delivered mail, and carried soldiers in battle. Senator Robert Byrd summed up the feelings of many when, in his speech to overturn the Burns rider, he criticized the BLM’s management of the wild horses. ≠ “Surely there are actions that can be taken by the BLM to ensure the proper operation of the wild horse and burro program without resorting to the slaughter of these animals. “When you drive up the dirt road to Karen Sussman’s double-wide trailer, in South Dakota, you are greeted by two dogs, 12 cats, and the 300 mustangs that roam her 680 acres. Suss man meets you at the door, and the first thing she asks is “Have you eaten?” An intern who worked for Sussman once called her “the mother of all living things.” But she is no pushover. As president of the 750 member Inter-national Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros, Sussman, 59, is a fiery activist who also works part-time as a nurse, in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, for the Indian Health Service. Small and ener-getic, with short hair that stays in place when she moves, she looks like a former gymnast and seems always ready to jump to the next task. Her home is packed with the late Wild Horse Annie’s personal items, making it a kind of unofficial museum—she even has Annie’s saddle resting on a sawhorse. Suss-man, who never knew Annie personally, grew up in rural Pennsylvania. In 1981, she adopted her first horse and began volunteering for Annie’s organization. She became president of it in 1989, and both president and executive director in 1993. During these years, she worked closely with Helen Reilly, who was Annie’s good friend and personal secretary. [Reilly passed away in 1993.] Sussman knows Annie’s story inside out, and so, at one time, did many other people. By the time her 1971 law passed, Annie had been featured in countless newspaper articles, on national television, and in popular magazines as diverse as Reader ’s Digest and Esquire. At age 11, while living outside Reno, Annie contracted a severe case of polio and underwent an experimental operation, after which she was hospitalized in a body cast for nearly nine months. A bright spot in her day was looking at a large painting of mustangs entitled Roaming Free, which hung in the hospital hallway. “I studied it with all my senses. I could just feel what it was like out there, winging along with the herd,” Annie wrote. When Annie’s cast was removed, it turned

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out the constricting plaster, which covered much of her neck and head, had not allowed space for her face to develop evenly, and while she would grow to a height of five feet seven inches, she was twisted out of alignment by the polio. Annie’s disfigurements proved to be traumatic. Kids taunted her, so she retreated into her studies, wrote poetry, drew, and helped her father take care of the animals on their ranch. Her best friend was a rodeo horse named Hobo, which her father had given her when she got out of the hospital. ≠ “Then there’s her most famous story,” Suss-man says, “the one that changed her life.” On a beautiful morning in 1950, Annie was driving to her secretarial job in Reno when she approached a truck pulling a livestock trailer—a common sight. As she pulled closer, she saw blood dripping out of the trailer. Through the wooden slats she saw it was jam-packed—not with cattle, but with horses. Trampled under their feet was a young foal, no more than a few months old. When the truck turned off the highway onto a dirt road, Annie followed it. Its destination was a slaughter-house that processed horse meat for pet food. The truck parked next to a holding pen, and a man unlocked the trailer gate. As the gate swung open, a tight pack of mustangs untan-gled and scrambled to get out, falling over the trailer ’s edge, landing on top of one another, fighting to get to their feet, running into the holding pen. ≠ The horses were battered and bloody. Most had wide swaths of flesh torn from their sides, which were oozing blood. Annie would later learn that such wounds were inflicted when the horses were roped, pulled off their feet, then dragged up a ramp into the cattle trailer. Many were spotted red from shotgun blasts fired by wranglers in planes. Still in the trailer was the foal, tram-pled to death. Annie gasped and leaned for-ward, sick to her stomach. She received the nickname “Wild Horse Annie” a few years later, as her reputation as a mustang advocate grew. In Carson City, Nevada, she entered a packed room in the state-senate building to speak before a committee about banning the airplane roundup of wild horses. As she walked down an aisle, a local rancher, in an attempt to ridicule her, said in a loud voice, “Well, if it isn’t Wild Horse Annie.” The press in the room picked up the nickname, and in a genius public-relations move, Annie adopted

it. As a result of her activism, “Annie faced regular death threats,” Sussman says, “and answered the door at her ranch outside Reno—the Double Lazy Heart—with a pistol behind her back.” Before she faced the U.S. Senate, in 1971, Annie orchestrated one of the larg-est letter-writing campaigns in U.S. history, and Con-gress was flooded with letters, many written by children and teenagers, on behalf of the horses. Widespread, unregulated commercial exploitation had brought the mustang numbers from two mi lion in the early 1900s to fewer than 18,000 in 1971. Arthur Miller and John Hus-ton’s 1961 film, The Misfits, depicted the increasing desperation of the down-and-out cowboys who traf-ficked in the few remaining wild horses. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act passed both houses of Congress unanimously. It protected the mustangs “from capture, branding, harassment, or death.” The BLM was main agency assigned to enforce this law. ≠ Annie died of cancer at age 65 on June 27, 1977, but Sussman and others continue her work, which they believe is far from over. “The BLM has consistently exploited the intent of the law,” says Sussman. “They have constantly chipped away at key provisions. The horses on my ranch come from two herds—one of which comes from the BLM—that were zeroed out. The total land that was set aside for mustangs in the 1971 law has been reduced by over 10 million acres.” Sussman, like many wild-horse advocates, thinks that the mustangs, under the stewardship of the BLM, could one day reach numbers so low that their ability to survive in the wild would be at risk. ≠ By the late 70s the population of wild horses had increased to 44,000, and changes were made to the 1971 law, adding provisions for “excess animals” to be removed from the range—the excess to be determined by the secretary of the interior when he saw a threat to “a thriving natural ecological balance and multiple-use relationship in that area [i.e., ranching].” A 1976 amendment to the law allowed for mechanized roundups (helicopters and trucks), and roundup numbers began to increase dramatically. More revisions in 1978 allowed for old, sick, and lame ani-mals “to be destroyed in the most humane manner pos-sible,” a measure Annie supported, according to Sussman. “Annie wanted to create an airtight bill, and she foresaw population problems in the future,” she says. “She wanted to deal with such problems on the range and to avoid the roundups and slaughterhouse horrors.” The 1978 revisions also specified how the horse-adoption program should dispose of healthy excess animals: “qualified individuals” were allowed to adopt no more than four horses each [for which the BLM charged a fee of $25 a horse]. After proving they had treated the animals humanely for one year, the new owners were given title. The four-horse limit and one-

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year probationary period were intended to eliminate the economic incentive for ranchers to take large numbers of horses to sell to slaughterhouses. ≠ Thanks to for-mer Nevada Republican senator Paul Laxalt, however, a loophole big enough to drive a truck through—one straight to the slaughterhouse—was also included in the revisions. It stated that wild horses and burros would lose their protected status once the new owner received title. The implications of this became all too clear after Ronald Reagan installed the pro-ranching-and – mining James Watt and later the lesser-known but like-minded William P. Clark and Donald Hodel as secretaries of the interior. In 1984 the BLM instituted a fee-waiver program, whereby most anyone willing to take at least 100 wild horses would get them for free, and from 1985 to 1987, after Congress appropriated $51 million for roundups [thanks mostly to Republican senator James McClure, of Idaho], the BLM began enthusiastically removing wild horses from the range—around 40,000 between 1984 and 1987. ≠ Journalist Tad Bartimus, in an article for the Associated Press, revealed how ranchers and the BLM had gotten around the four-horse adoption limit: dozens of individuals would adopt four horses each, then give the ranchers power of attorney. Bartimus quoted a Montana rancher who had gotten 1,100 horses this way, which he planned to sell to the slaughter house. The rancher said, “We have powers of attorney from people in Arizona, Califor-nia, Texas and Montana Of course, they went to slaugh-ter. Everybody knows what’s happening, but nobody will admit it.” ≠ According to a 1990 report by the GAO [the General Accounting Office, now the Government Accountability Office, which does independent, nonpar-tisan reports at the request of Congress], 20,000 wild horses were placed with “79 individuals and 4 Native American tribes…We found that hundreds of these horses died of starvation and dehydration during the 1 year probation period and that many adopters, primar-ily ranchers and farmers sold thousands more to slaughter after obtaining title from BLM” The GAO report concluded, “By its very design the fee-waiver program was a prescription for commercial exploitation of wild horses.” The Animal Protection Institute of America and the Fund for Animals took the BLM to court in response to such abuses, and in 1988 a federal judge ruled that the BLM could not issue a title if it knew the adopter intended to sell an animal to slaughter. This terminated the fee-waiver program. But in the 1990’s abuses under the adoption program were still being reported, becoming more of an internal BLM issue. In a series of articles for the AP, published in the mid 1990’s, Martha Mendoza documented how the BLM had falsified records used to identify and track horses, and how bureau officials were selling horses to slaughter

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after enlisting their friends and relatives to adopt them to circumvent the four-horse-per-person limit. ≠ In 1997, to address these abuses, President Clinton’s BLM announced additional regulations to protect the horses, including checking with adopters and spot-checking slaughterhouses. Buyers now had to sign an affidavit ensuring they had no intent to sell the horses for slaughter or processing. Under the Bush administration things would again take a turn for the worse. ≠ The mustang is a relatively small and sturdy horse, measuring close to five feet [15 hands] high and weighing on average 900 pounds. Its chest looks narrow from the front but deep in profile, more substantial than an Arabian’s but not as bulky as a quarter horse’s. Its legs spread out from its body in a distinctive slight “A” shape. Mustangs come in all colors, from black to brown to dun to cream, some reddish, some bluish, and in many these are mixed with whites and grays to produce roans, speckles, paints, and other patterns. ≠ One of the best places to observe mustangs in their natural habitat is the Pryor Mountains, in Senator Burns’s home state of Montana. And one of the best guides to take you through this territory and teach you about mustangs is documentary-film maker Ginger Kathrens. Kathrens is a rock star in the wild horse world. Driven and tough, she lets out frequent sparks of good humor. You’d never want to get on her bad side, though, or she would stare you down with her intense blue eyes. For her PBS series, which began in 2001 with Cloud: Wild Stallion of the Rockies, Kathrens is filming Cloud, a majestic white mustang stallion. She has fol-lowed him for more than 10 years, from his birth. Now he is lead stallion of his own family. The Pryor Mountains are rugged and beautiful, filled with steep canyons and expansive valleys. The Big Horn Can-

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yon cuts across the plains as far as the eye can see. To film the latest installment in Cloud’s life, Kathrens treks on foot to find him. She is loaded down with gear: an Arriflex Super 16–mm film camera, a large Canon digi-tal video camera, a heavy tripod, a Nikon 35–mm still camera, and binoculars. Pointing to a tree-filled valley that leads to the main water-ing hole, she looks through her binoculars, and a smile breaks across her face. “There’s Cloud,” she says. “He’s making his way to the watering hole.” ≠ “The lead mare chooses when and where to feed and water,” Kathrens explains. Cloud waits on top of a low hill just above the water hole. “Cloud typically takes the rear guard position to make sure it is safe for everyone else before he goes down to water.” She checks the view through her tele-photo lens as she explains the makeup of a family band: a stallion, a lead mare, plus sev-eral other mares, and all of their offspring under three. Usually, when the stallions are two years old, the lead stallion kicks them out and they join a bachelor band. “Made up of horses ranging in age from two and up, the bachelor bands serve an important role in wild horse society,” says Kathrens. “The bachelors join up with one another for pro-tection and social activities. They don’t have family responsibilities, so they can hang out and cause mischief. The younger bachelors spar with the older ones to hone their fighting skills. A bachelor ’s ultimate goal is to steal a mare and start his own family.” “He’s still letting Flint stay around,” observes Kathrens. Flint is Cloud’s four-year-old stepson. “When they stick around this long, we call them ‘lieutenants.’ They help protect the band and scare away the bachelors. Cloud has always liked Flint.” Other family bands arrive at the top of the hill above the water hole. They wait until Cloud’s family is done. Kathrens’s camera rolls as Cloud and his family drink and play, then head off. The next family band comes down. “The hierarchy among the families is deter-mined by the status of the stallion,” Kathrens explains. Each new group drinks for about five minutes and moves on. Then the next family comes down. The process works in a peaceful and orderly way. As the sun sets, Kathrens packs up and begins to hike back to camp. “This area is primarily the herd’s summer area. To protect the health of the range the BLM wants to lower the numbers of the Pryor herd from 153 horses to 95. When the BLM originally determined the size of this range area, they didn’t take into account the historic use area of the herd, which is far larger than the designated range. We’re trying to get the herd area increased to include the horses’ historic range, which they’re legally entitled to in the 1971 Wild Horses and Burros Act. Increasing the size to include this land would keep the herds at a healthy number. The numbers are already so low that the health and future of the herd is in danger.” [The BLM says it did incorporate the historic use area of the herds.] Kathrens points to the research of Dr. Gus Cothran, a leader in the field of equine-population genetics at the University of Kentucky. He uses DNA analysis to study wild horses. His research concludes that for long-term health and survival of the herds a minimum size needs to be between 150 and 200 horses. Otherwise, interbreeding will create genetic weaknesses, leading to serious health problems. More than 70 percent of the herds the BLM manages fall below Cothran’s minimum number. [The BLM maintains that these numbers are high. They are monitoring genetic diversity in the herds, and they say that “at present, there is no immediate cause for concern about inbreeding.”] ≠ In 2001, President Bush appointed Kathleen Clarke as director of the BLM Before that she had served as executive director of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources, where she built a

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reputation for favoring mining and drilling interests. At the BLM she has been at the cen-ter of controversy. According to sworn testi-mony by the public-lands chairman of the Utah Cattlemen’s Association, she encour-aged ranchers to sue her own agency, after having failed in an effort to prevent Interior from issuing grazing permits to a conservation group. [At the time, Clarke denied she did any-thing inappropriate.] The Bush administration has rounded up wild horses at a record-set-ting pace, including more than 50,000 under Clarke’s aegis. The Department of Interior building, on Washington’s C Street, is a stone monument to permanency and power, one of the first buildings constructed by the Public Works Administration during the Depression. As you walk down the wide main corridor, with its high ceiling, you feel safe, but small. In a back office of this landmark building, sitting around a table, Tom Dyer, until recently the BLM’s deputy assistant director of renewable resources and planning, Dean Bolstad, its wild horse and burro operations lead, and Tom Gorey, a BLM spokesperson, look at the num-bers on their chart. They are confused. They have just applied their own formula to calcu-late the wild-horse population. The calcula-tions don’t match their official census sheet. “These numbers have always been a little con-fusing,” Bolstad says. The current census numbers for 2006 seem disproportionately high, estimating 9,000 more horses on the range than their formula could account for. Gorey says, “We think our count is accurate. It is an estimate; we can’t say it is the literally correct number.”When asked its position on the Burns rider, Gorey says, “The BLM has not taken a stand on the Burns rider. We see it as another management tool.” Horse advocates say this is merely added proof, as if any were needed, that the BLM is more or less in cahoots with Burns. “They [at the BLM] are not upset that one man, Burns, covertly set the horses up for slaughter,” says Chris Heyde, a deputy legislative director for the Society for Animal Protective Legislation, located in Alexandria, Virginia. A big question is why Senator Burns has inserted himself so prominently into the wild-horse controversy when the issue is not even an important one in his state. The only wild horses in Montana are the 153 mustangs at the Pryor mountain range, and they’re a tourist attraction. [Of the

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approximately 31,000 wild horses counted in the BLM’s 2006 herd-area data were 13,384 in Nevada, 3,166 in California, 4,615 in Wyoming, 2,545 in Utah, and 2,113 in Oregon.] The senator has given several reasons. They include to prevent the horses from starving on the range, to protect the health of the range, to push the BLM to get serious about its adoption program, and to cut the costs of boarding horses in holding facilities. Critics claim that these issues are already addressed by the law. Burns grew up on a farm in Missouri, and as a young man he moved to Montana, where he sold ads for a livestock magazine and worked as a livestock auctioneer. In this world, horses are bought and sold like cattle. What do you do with old and lame horses? You sell them to a slaughterhouse to recoup a little money. It is just business as usual. Burns once explained to a journalist, “I’m in the livestock business, and I’ve bought and sold horses my whole life. Basically, the marketplace works.” The ranchers believe they should be the ones to control the use of their leased public lands. In many cases, they have worked these public plots for generations and regard them as their own. They see the wild horses merely as pests, consuming food and water that are meant for their livestock and tearing up fences. Steve Raftopoulos, a rancher in northwestern Colorado, faces the daily challenges of running livestock on public land. He grazes sheep in the Sandwash Basin with the wild horses. His family has been ranching in the area since 1934. “What it comes down to is proper management of the range,” he says. “In managing anything you have to have flexibility. We can control how much livestock we are going to put on a range area. We have no control over the wild horses, no matter what the range condition is. Horses can really tear it up. I’m dependent on the BLM” Raftopoulos speaks with clear determination. He is suspicious of reporters and environmentalists, but once he gets talking about public-land issues he doesn’t slow down. “Everyone is caught up in the emotion of this, and they can’t look at it logically. When the range is in great shape and the rain falls when it’s supposed to, the horses and the livestock can coexist. But when there’s drought, the range can be permanently damaged. Right now we have drought. And now the government wants to make it illegal to slaughter horses. This leaves no management flexibility, except to just let the horses die in an expensive government holding facility.” ≠ In the basement of the Forest Service of fice in Red Lodge, Montana, range specialist Wayne Burleson pulls down a projection screen and then turns off the lights. Burleson, 64, has studied the eating behavior of cattle and horses for more than 20 years, photo-

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graphing and documenting their habits. He clicks through his slide show, illustrating how the eating ten-dencies of each animal impact the range. “The truth is they’re both right,” he says. “A cow can destroy the range and so can a horse. A horse can pinch out the whole grass plant with its teeth, and the cow can wrap his long tongue around a plant and pull it out. Any ani-mal will overgraze if he doesn’t have enough territory to graze or isn’t properly managed.” To evaluate the impact of grazing on public land, consideration needs also to be given to big game [elk, deer, antelope]. Most calculations estimate that more than four million head of livestock and three million big-game animals graze on public land. This means that wild horses account for less than one half of 1 percent of the large animals graz-ing on public land. The most comprehensive indepen-dent study of this issue, done in 1990 by the GAO states, “Wild horses are so vastly outnumbered on fed-eral rangelands by domestic livestock Even substantial reduction in wild horse populations will, therefore, not substantially reduce total forage consumption.” The GAO report also states, “BLM could not provide [the General Accounting Office] with any information dem-onstrating that federal rangeland conditions have sig-nificantly improved because of wild horse removals.” The study concluded, “The primary cause of the degra-dation in rangeland resources is poorly managed domestic livestock (primarily cattle and sheep) graz-ing.” Senator Burns refused to meet with VF to discuss his rider, but Chris Heggem, Burns’s point person on this issue, says, “He did it because other people asked him to.” Senator Burns has a history of being sensitive to the needs of those who donate large amounts of money to his campaign. Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who arranged for, by some estimates, close to $150,000 to go to Burns, told VF’s David Margolick, “Every appropriation we wanted [from Senator Conrad Burns’s committee] we got.” From 2001 to 2006, the senator received $380,512 from agribusiness, which includes the livestock industry. He receives more money—$69,800 so far for his 2006 re-election bid—from livestock interests than all but one senator, Texas Republican Henry Bonilla. ≠ In Slate magazine, Deanne Stillman theorized that Montana rancher Merle Edsall may have been instrumental in getting Burns to

act, because “the language in the Burns rider was the exact same wording floated by Edsall at a meeting of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board.” Edsall denies this connection to Burns. He says he wanted to take 10,000 wild horses in order to create a tourist-attraction sanctuary in Mexico. He claims that the White House and the BLM wanted to privatize the wild-horse program, to which the BLM’s Gorey responds, “We did receive a proposal, and we turned it down.” Edsall explains, “I had a three-part plan. Part one was to give the Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board authority over the wild-horse program. Part two was the sale authority. You have to have a threat before you solve a problem. The sale authority would allow the horses to go to slaughter. [I thought], People will go through the roof, and they did. But don’t make a threat without a solution. Part three was the solution: Mexico and giving the horses to 501(c) non profits.” ≠ Last February the BLM initiated a program similar to the Reagan-era fee waiver. For the mustangs that have lost protections because of the Burns rider, it makes the adoption fee “negotiable,” and drops both the one-year probationary period and the limit of four horses going to one person in any one-year period. In a letter of February 21, 2006, Clarke appealed to 15,000 ranchers with BLM grazing permits to take the horses. Thanks to the Burns rider no one will be able to stop the program with a lawsuit this time. Now the BLM will deliver loads of 20 or more horses free of charge to any destination. Although recipients of these horses have to sign an agreement that they do not intend to send the horses to slaugh-ter, wild-horse activists doubt the BLM will do much checking up to see that the ranchers are keeping their word. [Gorey says the BLM has compliance guidelines that range from inspections to phone check-ins.]

The rationale for the fee-reduction program, as it was the last time, is to save money by removing horses from government holding facilities. But Chris Heyde says, “If the BLM and the administration want to talk about money, they should look at their grazing program. According to the government’s latest GAO study, in 2004 the grazing program lost almost $115 million a year. The ranchers pay a nominal fee of $1.56 a month for each cow-and-calf pair to graze. The free-market rate for ranchers to lease the same amount of private land to graze their cattle is a little over $13 a month. It’s a giveaway. ≠ “This does not include the million spent each year on behalf of ranchers for predator control, to kill coyotes, foxes, and mountain lions to protect cattle and sheep,” he adds. “These are the animals that would naturally help control wild-horse population. All of this when less than 3 percent of America’s beef is raised on federal rangelands. And economically, livestock grazing on federal land produces only a tiny percentage of income in western states, between 1 and 3 percent. The irony is that most of the land is leased to millionaires.” He is referring to a nine-month investigation in 1999 by the San Jose Mercury News, which revealed that the top 10 percent of those holding grazing permits control 65 percent of all livestock on BLM land. One of the larg-est livestock lessees of BLM land is a company founded by one of the richest men in America, John Simplot, who is worth an estimated $2.3 billion. He lives in Boise, Idaho, and supplies half of McDonald’s French fries. Other major holders of government grazing leases include the Hilton Family Trust. Heyde and other advocates outline their solutions. Give the wild horses back all their original acreage and herd areas. Keep herd sizes large enough to maintain the future health of the herds. If the range is in crisis, support the horses with water and hay. Manage the herd areas

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principally for mustangs, not sheep and cattle. Keep roundup and adoptions in sync. “Just enforce and follow through on the legal guidelines of the 1971 law. After all, it is a law,” Heyde says. ≠ On September 7, 2006, the House of Representatives voted 263 to 146 in favor of a bill sponsored by John Sweeney, a New York Republican, and Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican, to ban the slaughter of horses for human consump-tion. There are currently three horse slaugh-terhouses in the US, one in Illinois, and two in Texas. They sell horse meat primarily to Europe and Japan, where it is regarded as a delicacy. Chris Heyde has been inside a slaughterhouse, and he has been to horse auctions. “The majority of horses are not sold to slaughter by their owners,” Heyde says, “but instead arrive via livestock auc-tion, where ‘killer buyers’ purchase them. Owners are often unaware of their ultimate fate. And most of the horses are not old and lame. They are healthy racehorses, riding-school and show horses, stolen horses, and federally protected wild horses.” Horse advocates are hopeful the anti slaughter bill will pass the Senate and become law. In Washington, DC, the politicians fight. In South Dakota, Karen Sussman faces the daily challenges of managing her mustang herd. This morning an old mustang with a surgically repaired leg has fallen in her stall. This is a life-threatening situation for a horse. Sussman made a deal with this old mustang. “As long as she has the will to live, I’ll stick by her.” She is not sure if Janie Grayce, named after the two donors who paid for her surgery, wants to go on or give up. With the help of Denny, a part-time worker from the Lakota tribe, Sussman has rigged a series of ropes to help lift the horse to her feet. She talks to the old mustang. “You tell me what you want to do.” Sussman has been dreading this moment. But she is prepared to put the mare down if she won’t fight to get up. “It is going to happen one day,” she says. Janie Grayce lies motionless on her side with each attempt to raise her. “Let’s give her one last try,” Sussman says as they pull the rope taut around the horse’s body. The mare’s eyes brighten. She begins to struggle, kicking her legs, trying to fight to her feet—suddenly she’s up. A little unsteady, but she’s up. “Good girl. Good girl,” Sussman says, petting her. Janie Grayce lets out a whinny, as if she’s saying thanks. “She’s a tough old mustang. She wasn’t ready to go,” says Suss-man. ≠ A multimillion-dollar federal program created to save the lives of wild horses is instead chan-neling them by the thousands to slaughter houses where they are chopped into cuts of meat. Among those profiting from the slaughter are employees of the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that administers the program. These are the conclusions of an Associated Press investigation of the US Wild Horse and Burro Program, which has rounded up 165,000 animals and spent $250 million since it was created by Congress 25 years ago. The program was intended to protect and manage wild horses on pub-lic lands, where they compete for resources with grazing cattle. The idea: Gather up excess horses and offer them to the public for adoption. However, nothing in the law prevents the new owners from selling

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the horses to slaughter houses once they take title to them. It is common for horses to go to slaughter when they grow old or fall lame, but nearly all former BLM horses sent to slaugh-terhouses are young and healthy, according to slaughterhouse operators. Under the pro-gram’s rules, anyone can adopt up to four horses per year, paying $125 for each healthy, government-vaccinated animal. If the adopt-ers properly care for the horses for one year, they get legal title to them in the form of hand-some BLM certificates bearing individual identification numbers that are freeze-branded into each horse’s hide. “We’re work-ing toward helping people develop pride in their horses,’’ said Deb Harrington, a BLM spokeswoman in Oklahoma. “These titles are suitable for framing.’’ Using freeze-brand numbers and computerized public records, the AP traced more than 57 BLM horses that have been sold to US and Canadian slaughter-houses since September. ≠ Eighty percent of those horses were less than 10 years old and 25 percent were less than 5 years old. Ten years is not considered old for horses, which are often ridden well into their 20’s. At the Cavel West Slaughterhouse in Redmond, Ore, for example, proprietor Pascal Derde pulled a sheaf of BLM certificates from a folder and explained that they were for horses he recently processed at his plant and sent to Belgium for human consumption. Nearby, the carcass of a BLM horse dangled on a hook while butchers sliced the lean meat into pack-age cuts. “Killed on Friday, processed Monday, Thursday we load the truck and then it’s flown to Europe,’’ said Derde. “Monday it’s sold in Belgium, Tuesday eaten, Wednesday it’s back in the soil.’’ “The sad thing,’’ said Pete Steele, a former BLM employee living in Montecello, Utah, “is you’ve got a bunch of wild horses rounded up and nobody wants them except for some folks who see there’s some money to be made here.’’ Asked about the AP’s findings, Tom Pogacnik, director of the BLM’s $16 mil-lion a year Wild Horse and Burro Program, conceded that about 90 percent of the horses rounded up—thousands of horses each year go to slaughter. Has a program intended to save wild horses as a symbol of the American frontier evolved into a supply system for horse meat? “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,’’ Pogacnik said. “Recognizing that we can’t leave them out there, well, at some point the

critters do have to come off the range.’’ Clifford Han-sen, a former U.S. senator from Wyoming who intro-duced the bill to create the program, now wishes he could remove his name from the legislation. “The law was intended to recognize the significance of wild horses and burros, but talk about a waste of public funds,’’ said Hansen, now 84. “It’s become the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of.’’ The government spends an average of $1,100 to round up, vaccinate, freeze brand, and adopt out a horse. Adopters pay $125 for each healthy horse, and can get lame or old horses for as little as $25, or even for free. After hold-ing the horses for a year, the adopters are free to sell them for slaughter, typically receiving $700 per ani-mal. The government spends $1,100. The adopter can make $575 or more. The sellers find no shortage of horse meat buyers. The demand for American horse meat has long been strong in Asia and Europe, where few share the common American compunction about eating the animal. ≠ Today, demand is up in Europe because of fears of mad cow disease, said Luc Van Damme of Zele, Belgium, whose 100- ear-old Velda horse meat business owns the Cavel West slaughter house. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 42 mil-lion pounds of horse meat were exported in 1995 at an average price of 62 cents per pound. In 1996 prices were up to 80 cents a pound and rising. France and Belgium were the biggest buyers, with others including Japan, Switzerland, Italy, Netherlands, Mexico, Can-ada, Sweden, New Zealand, Austria, Russia, Bahrain, Argentina and China. While nothing in the law prevents sending an adopted horse to slaughter, government officials offer conflicting opinions whether it is legal or ethical for BLM officials to adopt and sell horses. ≠ The Associated Press matched computer records of horse adoptions with a computerized list of federal employees and found that more than 200 current BLM employees have adopted more than 600 wild horses and burros. Some of these employees, when contacted by the AP, could not account for the whereabouts of their animals. Others acknowledged some of their horses were sent to slaughterhouses. In Rock Springs, Wyo., the BLM corrals are run by Victor McDarment, whose crew rounds up horses from open ranges in Wyoming, freeze brands them and arranges adoptions. It’s a job that gives them access to thousands of horses. According to BLM database records, McDar-ment adopted 16 horses. His estranged wife adopted nine. His children adopted at least six. His girlfriend adopted four. His ex-wife adopted one. His coworkers in the corrals and their families adopted an additional 54. Most of the horses they adopted were discounted from the normal $125 fee. Some were free. Discounting is allowed if a horse is injured, old, or otherwise

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unlikely to get adopted. Because he’s in charge, McDarment decides if a horse should be discounted. A discounted paint won a first prize for the McDarment’s at a national show last year. McDarment said the horse had been discounted because it had a leg injury. On a sub-zero day, as steam rose from troughs where the wild horses drink, McDarment sat in a snow-covered BLM office with his manag-ers and said he could not account for all the horses he adopted. “I don’t keep track,’’ he said. McDarment’s estranged wife Carol McDarment, a hotel maid, said she never saw most of the horses adopted in her name. “I just signed the forms and Vic drove them out,’’ she said. Some ended up with Dennis Gifford, a Lovell, Wyo., rancher and rodeo contractor who was barred from BLM horse adoptions because he was rounding up wild mustangs illegally and adding them to his pri-vate herds. According to court records, he has also been convicted of selling livestock without state brand inspections. He said he has tried to breed McDarment’s horses for bucking stock, and said he’s sure some of McDarment’s horses were slaughtered. “They got to end up somewheres,’’ Gifford said. Some of McDarment’s co workers know where all their animals are. Jim Williams, for exam-

ple, has leased land and is breeding burros from Arizona that he and his friends adopted. He sold addi-tional horses at an auction to be used for roping cattle. He’s hoping to make several thousand dollars a year off the foals. “Of course, I want to make money off this,’’ said Williams, stomping mud off his boots in a frozen corral. “Is there anything wrong with that? It’s legal, ain’t it?’’ he said. According to federal law, U.S. government employees are not allowed to use public office for private gain. The U.S. Office of Government Ethics said this means BLM workers may not participate in bureau programs that affect their financial interests. But Gabriel c, the Department of the Interior ’s designated ethics official in Washing-ton, DC, said there is nothing wrong with BLM employees adopting wild horses, keeping them until they get the title, and then selling them for profit. ≠ In fact, an internal BLM memo issued in November, 1995, “encourages employees to adopt and train wild horses and burros for their personal use.’’ “They’re not doing this as public officials,’’ Paone said. “They’re doing this as private citizens.’’ ≠

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INDEXA

Adoption 54-89

B

Bureau of Land Management [BLM] 1-89

Burns, Conrad 27, 33, 34, 69, 70, 75, 78, 79,

81, 82

C

California 29, 49, 51, 55, 62, 63, 74, 79

Carvel West Slaughterhouse 86

D

E

Edsall, Merle 34, 82

F

G

General Accounting Office [GAO] 74, 81, 82

Gifford, Dennis 89

H

Harrington, Deb 86

Heyde, Chris 40, 78, 82, 84

I

J

K

L

M

McDarment, Victor 87, 89

Montana 17, 22, 33, 34, 38, 74, 75, 78, 79

N

Nevada 17, 22, 29, 30, 33, 35, 52, 60, 66, 72,

74,89

O

P

Paone 89

I N D E X     [93]

Pogacnik, Tom 86

Q

R

S

Simplot, John 60, 82

South Dakota 54, 71, 84

Sussman, Karen 58, 60, 63, 71, 72, 84

Sweeney, John 84

T

X

U

U

US Government 15, 20, 33, 44, 46, 48, 55, 56,

58, 63, 69, 70, 74, 79, 82, 86, 70, 74, 79, 82,

86, 89

V

W

Whitfield, Ed 34, 84

Williams, Jim 44, 52, 89

X

Y

Z

This Book was designed by Josi Kimbrel. It was printed on a Canon Pro 9000, and then bound by The Key Printing and Binding, Oakland, California,

The typeface used in this book is Knockout, designed by Hoeftler & Frere–Jones,The paper is Entrada Rag Natural 190gsm by Moab by Legion Paper.