By Amy Alonzo
Part 1 of 2
Jute panels strung between T-posts fan out in a funnel shape, with juniper bushes flanking the fencing on one side, a sea of sagebrush on the other. At the apex of the funnel, a makeshift horse corral sits empty and waiting.
As the sun crests the horizon and lights up the Clover Valley and nearby Ruby Mountains, the corral is filled with the first of the many wild horses rounded up by contractors hired by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the federal agency tasked with managing most of the nation’s 83,000 wild horses and burros.
The herds of horses are directed toward the trap by a helicopter buzzing behind them, and by mid-afternoon, the last of the horses are transported from the corral to a holding pen in a remote corner of the eastern Nevada desert. The jute fencing and T-posts are taken down. With all signs of the day’s events erased, “the only thing you’ll see is tracks,” said Garrett Swisher, wild horse and burro specialist with the BLM’s Winnemucca office.
Amy Alonzo – Wild horses at a temporary holding facility about an hour and a half southeast of Wells on Aug. 2, 2023. The horses were gathered from the Antelope Complex North herd management area.
This is the Antelope North Complex, one of the largest BLM wild horse gathers in the nation this year.
It is also the scene of one of the West’s greatest debates — if and how wild horses should be managed.
The gathers, also known as roundups, are the BLM’s attempt to keep wild horse and burro populations in check across the West. According to the agency’s estimates, more than 40,000 reside in Nevada. Left unchecked, the agency says, their populations can double in four to five years, causing habitat loss and negatively affecting other wildlife.
With nearly 7,000 horses in an area that can reasonably provide food and water to anywhere from 300 to 650 horses, Antelope North has too many horses to sustain, according to Jenny Lesieutre, wild horse and burro public affairs specialist for the BLM.
But roundups using helicopters like the Antelope North Complex are called an inhumane relic of the past by wild horse advocates.
The roundups are monitored daily by their watchful eyes and cameras as they document every movement of the horses, the contractors and federal employees. The advocacy groups also regularly file lawsuits seeking to block the gather of wild horses, including one this year seeking to halt operations at the Antelope North Complex.
The lawsuits vary from year to year with a similar underlying theme — stop the helicopter gathers and ensure the humane treatment of the horses.
The BLM reports a death rate of under 1 percent at its gathers. Some of the deaths were caused by the gathers, but the majority — 28 — are what the BLM calls “chronic” — former injuries to the horses that the BLM decides warrant euthanasia.
While death is not the intended outcome, the agency touts that a 1 percent mortality rate is extremely low for working with wildlife.
By the end of the Antelope Complex gather, which spanned north and south units across more than 852,000 acres of public and private land, roughly 3,000 horses had been removed. Thirty-nine died.
“Nobody wants to see the death of a horse,” Swisher said. “But if they’re suffering, we’re going to put them down.”
For advocates, even one death is too many.
“Our opposition to the helicopter roundups is they are outdated,” said Suzanne Roy, executive director of American Wild Horse Campaign (AWHC). “It’s time to modernize this approach to wild horse management and manage them in the wild where they belong.”
Earlier this year, Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) introduced legislation that would ban the use of helicopters in wild horse gathers, while multiple rural Nevada counties declared states of emergencies over excess wild horse populations.
Amid the debate over best practices for management of the horses between the agency tasked with their management and privately funded advocacy groups calling for reform of those practices, nobody is winning, a report by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) points out.
“Science alone, even the best science, cannot resolve the divergent viewpoints on how best to manage free-ranging horses and burros on public lands,” the report states.
A healthy range means healthy animals
Debate about the West’s wild horses goes back as far as the origins of the equines.
Advocates like AWHC cite research the group helped fund from University of California, Santa Cruz that states the West’s feral horses are descended from horses domesticated in Asia around 5,500 years ago.
The BLM acknowledges some wild horses are descendants of those that came to North America with European settlers in the 15th and 16th centuries, but maintains that most of the horses are direct descendants of domestic animals that escaped captivity in the 19th and 20th centuries, as documented by other institutions, such as Colorado State University.
Now, the agency and advocates are at odds on virtually every aspect of their management — much of it revolving around the original federal legislation governing management of wild horses.
In 1971, Congress passed the Wild Horse and Burro Act, declaring the animals “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” The act states that the animals were disappearing quickly — at the time, there were around 25,000 wild horses and burros left nationwide, while also declaring they “shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death.”
The act gives the Department of the Interior (the agency that oversees the BLM) authority to manage the wild horses and burros “to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance on the public lands.”
Under that direction, the BLM monitors wild horse populations, removes excess animals and places them up for adoption. The act also states that excess wild horses and burros that cannot be adopted out “be destroyed in the most humane and cost-efficient manner possible.”
The BLM has not used its authority to destroy healthy animals since 1982. Since 1988, most appropriations bills approved by Congress have included provisions that prohibit using federal funds for the destruction of healthy animals or for selling them for processing into commercial products such as dog food.
But horse advocates argue that just because horses aren’t being directly sold to slaughter doesn’t mean they are being treated humanely.
In the mid-1970s, the Wild Horse and Burro Act was amended to allow motorized equipment such as helicopters and trailers. The population of wild horses had grown to around 60,000.
By 2007, that number dropped to about 29,000 and, for several years, the agency only gathered as many animals as it could adopt out. Now, the agency gathers thousands of horses each year. Between 2004 and 2017, the agency gathered more than 40,000 horses and burros.
Every four years or so, the BLM flies over herd management areas — HMAs — to count the number of horses while also performing ground surveys.
Some wild horse advocates assert the BLM overexaggerates its numbers, but the 2013 NAS report estimated the BLM’s counts could be up to 30 percent below the actual number of horses. Now, the numbers are cross-checked by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to determine a more exact population. The final numbers are used to make management decisions.
The methodology of the BLM and USGS to determine the number of horses is scientifically sound, according to Tamzen Stringham, a professor at UNR’s department of agriculture, veterinary and rangeland sciences, and a rangeland ecologist.
“Some people are going to argue the numbers are too low, some are going to argue the numbers are too high,” she said. “So, when you have both sides fighting, you probably have a pretty good number.”
For Stringham, the bigger concern is the overall health of the rangeland. The BLM last updated its appropriate management levels — the number of horses each herd management area can sustain — decades ago, and rangeland carrying capacity has deteriorated substantially since then, Stringham said.
Wildfires have devastated much of the landscape — more than 8.8 million acres have burned in Nevada over the past 20 years.
“We need to reevaluate these HMAs and evaluate their current conditions. Where are the waters, how much forage is out there, have they burned, what other animals are out there — we really need to take a hard look at the overall carrying capacity of where we’re running horses, whether there’s livestock on there or not,” Stringham said. “If we really want to have healthy horses, we need to have healthy rangelands. If we’re just focused on the animal, we’re not focused on the habitat. Any time you become single species focused, you lose an understanding of the habitat.”
Wild horses are what Stringham calls an “apex grazer … the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of rangelands because they move faster, consume more forage and aggressively defend access to their watering holes.
“In Nevada, the limiting resource is typically water,” she said. “They’ll just stand on it, to the detriment of the other wildlife that’s out there.”
Part two of this story will appear in next week’s edition
