From my home in Los Angeles, California, it is just a few hours’ drive into the deserts of Nevada to see wild horses. If you are lucky, as I was, you might see a lone mustang on the range, galloping over powdery snow, just a few hundred metres from the highway.
According to the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM), there are about 95,000 wild horses and burros – small donkeys – on public lands across the US, half of which are in Nevada. The horses are not truly wild, as they are descendants of domesticated animals brought to the continent by Spanish explorers in the 1500s. I planned to join a round-up in Fish Creek in which the wranglers are in helicopters. The use of these vehicles is part of the controversy over managing wild horses in the western US.
Wild horses are seen by some as a nuisance and by others as animals in need of protection. Drought and wildfires have shrunk their habitat, sparking conflict with ranchers, oil firms and miners. While the BLM has tried to corral the horses, experts say its methods aren’t working.
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“What you have right now is a history, since 1971, of using round-ups as the sole solution,” says Greg Hendricks, who spent seven years at the BLM before joining the American Wild Horse Campaign (AWHC). “BLM isn’t set up to do fertility control.” Helicopters are often used in round-ups to chase herds into pens, which causes panic, injury and even death, says Hendricks. Most captured horses never return to the wild. Some are shipped to crowded pens where they are auctioned or adopted.
The argument for corralling the horses is that mustangs regularly eat themselves to starvation, leaving the land barren. They graze for an average of 16 hours a day and travel wide. Yet Kate Wall at the International Fund for Animal Welfare says there is no evidence that the horses starve. What’s more, they also have a high reproduction rate, which suggests they are thriving.
Herds can double in just three years, so regular thinning makes sense. But it isn’t easy or cheap – in 2020, the programme’s budget was $101 million. Doug Furtado, the BLM’s district manager in Battle Mountain, Nevada, says the aim of round-ups is to “protect the range from the deterioration associated with overpopulation”.
Horses and burros really are hard on the land – I could easily see that in the deep hoof prints and chunks of grass they regularly kick up – but a recent found that this isn’t all bad. One benefit of burros are the small wells created when they dig and tap into desert springs for a drink, which are also used by other species.
A 2013 US National Academy of Sciences that was funded by the BLM found that round-ups are “expensive and unproductive”, partially because herds actually grow faster after them. The report concluded that fertility control would help, but nearly a decade on, using helicopters to wrangle them is still seen as a panacea.
Grace Kuhn at the AWHC calls round-ups “archaic”, and says they are more to do with ranchers and miners wanting access to the land than horse health. The BLM has previously denied this.
In small towns like Eureka, Nevada, round-ups are big entertainment. Ranchers, looky-loos and the odd journalist cluster on Highway 50 at dawn, trailing BLM agents with binoculars at the ready. At the last minute, the Fish Creek round-up I am due to attend is cancelled after one of the helicopter pilots tests positive for covid-19. With the cold getting colder and snow soon to pile up, Jess Harvey, the BLM’s regional public affairs specialist, says he isn’t sure when the next round-up here will be.
The original plan was to release 60 of the horses captured in the round-up. The mares were to be injected with a birth control drug called porcine zona pellucida (PZP). Not many captured horses are currently given PZP.
Attempts to mandate fertility controls for wild horses have been making their way through the US Congress, but efforts have stalled. Across Nevada, some ranchers and groups like AWHC aren’t waiting. They have bought land adjacent to the federal land where horses roam and they are administering birth control themselves.
“There’s hope on the horizon,” says Hendricks, who is overseeing a pilot programme funded by the BLM that has just started to dart mares with PZP. In his work with AWHC, he has led a programme darting 1300 mares with PZP on more than 1200 square kilometres of private land. “We’re getting ranchers to do fertility control – who better to have skin in the game? If the government was smart enough, it’d pay each time a ranch hand darts a horse. It could save billions,” he says.
Article amended on 17 December 2020
We clarified that the fertility programmes run by BLM and AWHC are separate, and the origins of the wild horses.
