Tehachapi News

Wild horse activists fighting to head off a slaughter 'option'

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The Bureau of Land Management is considering its lawful option of euthanising wild horses it is holding in captivity - and two Caliente women are on a mission to make sure that destruction never happens.

Writer Kate MacDonald and Jill Starr, who is president and founder of Lifesavers, Inc., a nonprofit horse rescue rehab and retirement ranch in Lancaster, came home fired up after an “Emergency Summit” Oct. 11-13 in Las Vegas that aired the issue.
BLM Deputy Director Henry Bisson floated the euthanasia option at the June 30 meeting of the Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Council, a panel of volunteers who represent a cross-section of interests. Bisson said there is not enough money to take care of too many animals that the agency has rounded up in its job of rangeland and herd management.

The exact number of wild horses in captivity is at least 30,000, according to the BLM, and as high as 33,500, according to horse rescue advocates.

Starr said Bisson had promised the horse rescue advocates at the Las Vegas summit that his agency, under his watch, would not slaughter the horses.

“He said, 'The BLM would not be killing those horses - at least while I'm in charge.'

But then, he's retiring next year. He said it was a 'ridiculous notion and a bad idea' and that the BLM is exploring other options. 'Exploring' is the operative word. He did appease us, but he's a government guy and the government has been known to lie.”

The conflict goes to the heart of the BLM mandate under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, which is to manage the wild burros and horses that live on herd areas where they were found when Congress passed the Act in 1971. To that end, the BLM regularly culls the herds to prevent overpopulation and starvation and offers them for adoption.

More than 220,000 wild horses and burros have been adopted by private citizens since the advent of the program, according to the BLM web site.

The advocate organizations contend that the horses never should have been removed from their historic rangeland, and should be returned there.

“It's a no-brainer for me,” Starr said. “Put them back on public lands you took them from.”

Dean Bolstad, deputy division chief of the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program, said the agency's initiative in 2001 to reduce the numbers of wild horses running free on BLM range land from 45,000 to a target of 27,000 and a commensurate drop in adoptions has produced a captive population of 30,000 horses.

By law, the BLM has the authority to euthanize the animals or sell them to anyone, including meatpackers, but, Bolstad said, “We have chosen not to implement these provisions.” The result, he said, is that “75 percent of our budget goes to the care and feeding of 30,000 horses in captivity.”

The government agency, Bolstad said, “Can't afford to do anything but feed animals. We can't afford to carry out the rest of the mandates. We have to continue to gather animals.”

The projected price tag for the care of .the captive animals in the coming year, according to the BLM, is $26 million of the agency's $37 million budget.

Contributing to the financial crunch is the price of hay, Bolstad said, which doubled in a year and a half from $140 a ton to $285 a ton, and has dropped back to $240 a ton.

Tom Gorey, spokesman for the BLM, said the agency is caring for 22,000 horses five years and older in long-term holding facilities on private land, where they will live out their lives. Another 8,000 are adoptable and are being kept in short-term facilities.

One of those short-term facilities is at Ridgecrest, where more than 500 horses are kept on BLM land.

Bolstad said the BLM estimates the number of wild horses living free in herds on their designated rangeland to be 33,000 as of February, 2008 - “Probably more now. We estimate 37,000 with the new crop of babies.”

Wild horse advocates dispute that number, saying the agency has depleted the herds to as few as 20,000 or even 13,500, and they accuse the BLM of clearing horses off the land to make way for cattle and mining interests.

The advocates go further, accusing the BLM of mismanagement and of pursuing an aggressive “policy of extinction.”

“Over the last nine years,” MacDonald wrote in an article dated Oct. 26 about the summit meeting, “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 on their legal ranges. These 33,500 pointlessly removed horses are the ones that now the BLM says it cannot afford to maintain.”

MacDonald wrote, “The lament that there are too many horses, and we must remove some, is reasonable -- unless they are not telling the truth about how man horses there are, how many the range can support and how many new horses will be added with each crop of foals.”

Summit organizer Craig Downer, quoted in MacDonald's article, said, “I believe these figures are being intentionally hidden from the public precisely because they would reveal such an enormous subversion of the Wild Horse and Burro Act.”

MacDonald also wrote, “Many speakers expressed concerns that the BLM is systematically reducing the herds below genetic viability.”

Bisson's June announcement and the BLM's solicitation of public comments triggered a flood of responses through its web site, 75 percent of which are vehemently opposed to euthanasia or sale of the horses or both, according to the BLM.

“There's a great deal of emotion about the issue,” Bolstad said. “For some, there is one choice - take care of the animals no matter what the cost.”

Amy Dumas of the BLM office in Sacramento said the BLM-managed wild horses and burros in California are in 16 herd management areas, and all are on east side of the Sierras.

“Most of the numbers are up north in the Susanville area,” she said, and most of the herd management area is in Nevada.

“A lot of areas are self-managed,” Dumas said, although the diminution of predators shoved aside by human development makes it easier for herds to overpopulate.

“The horns and antlers are maintained by hunters,” she said.

Starvation, she said, “is a horrible thing for anyone [animals] to go through. I don't think people who say, 'Let them die on the range' really understand.”
Whatever the BLM plan turns out to be, she said, “There will be no euthanasia on the range.”

A small herd of wild horses lives in the Tehachapi mountains, protected by the private landowners on whose land they roam. The major landowner built a fence and gate for the black beauties several years ago after someone slaughtered three of them for dog food.

The BLM has not announced a specific plan to deal with their 30,000 captive animals, and a plan is not likely to come before the end of the year.

The next meeting of the BLM's National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board will meet Monday, Nov. 17 in Reno at the Silver Legacy Resort Casino Ballroom. The agenda for the public meeting can be found in the Oct. 16 Federal Register, page 61436.

Comments may be e-mailed to Ramona_DeLorme@blm.gov., with the identifier “WH&B.” For more information, contact Wild Horse and Burro Administrative Assistant Ramona DeLorme at 775-861-6583.