By Dr. Kelly Dunning, Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming and ACC Board Member
Background
There are 10 Western states with about 61,500 wild horses and approximately 23,900 burros. Most are located in Nevada, Wyoming, and Oregon. Wild and free-roaming horses are federally protected under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. This federal protection says that wild horses cannot simply be captured, killed, harassed, or sold like ordinary stray livestock. The law also gives the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) management authority over 175 Herd Management Areas across ~25 million acres. The U.S. Forest Service has management authority for horses on Forest Service land, a smaller role than the BLM. The agencies must maintain healthy populations while making sure public rangelands stay healthy as well. If populations become too large, the government can remove excess animals and make them available for adoption or other authorized placement. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act does allow culling of wild horses as a management tool, but Congress traditionally has used appropriations restrictions to prevent such a cull, and wild horses are not allowed to be sold for slaughter.
It’s become apparent that the status quo is not working for American wild horses. Their numbers exceed BLM management targets. Livestock can be moved seasonally, but wild horses remain on the range year round, which has negative impacts on vegetation, soil, water resources, and the overarching health of rangelands. These same rangelands support iconic western species like elk, pronghorn, mule deer, and sage grouse. Because an introduced grazer is allowed to be this abundant without any seasonal restrictions/movements, they are destroying habitat for native wildlife. Unlimited population growth is often presented as the humane thing to do. But, eventually the numbers become so big that there isn’t enough food or water. Simply allowing horse populations to grow without effective management is not necessarily the humane alternative. Eventually, populations can exceed available forage and water, resulting in declining body condition, starvation, dehydration, and death.
Protecting wild horses therefore also means keeping herds and the landscapes that sustain them healthy.
Managers should have access to a broad range of humane, science-based management tools, including removals and adoption, fertility control, sterilization, and, where other approaches are inadequate, consideration of humane lethal removal as a last-resort management tool. Managers can use fertility control and sterilization. However, these tools have not yet been deployed at a scale sufficient to control population growth across most large western herds. Fertility control is particularly difficult and expensive in large, remote herds and works best once populations have already been brought closer to management targets. In other words, contraception alone can’t solve a herd that’s already twice the desired population. The goal should not be eliminating wild horses from the American West. It should be maintaining healthy, free-ranging herds at levels that the landscape can sustain while protecting the native wildlife, waters, and rangelands with which they coexist.
Reforms
Policy reforms that could enable managers to have access to a broad range of responses could include beginning with and prioritizing severely overpopulated herds. BLM already has authority to gather and remove excess horses, but limited adoption demand, limited holding facility capacity, and the cost of a lifetime of off-range care constrain the scale and speed of removals. Congress should address this bottleneck by expanding successful adoption, training, sale, and transfer programs while developing a financially and ecologically sustainable policy for excess horses that cannot be placed in private care. Rather than continuing to rely on indefinite taxpayer-funded holding, managers should have access to additional humane options for addressing animals that cannot be adopted or otherwise placed. Congress should provide dedicated funding and clear targets for contraception and other fertility-control programs. Fertility control should be used aggressively to maintain herds once they have been brought near sustainable population levels, reducing the need for repeated gathers and removals in the future.
Where herds remain substantially above sustainable levels and adoption, transfer, and other nonlethal options are insufficient, Congress should consider allowing carefully regulated humane lethal removal as a last-resort management tool. Finally, managers should have access to humane lethal removal as a carefully regulated last resort. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act already provides authority for the humane destruction of certain excess animals, but Congressional appropriations restrictions have prevented BLM from using federal funds to euthanize healthy horses that cannot be adopted. Congress could modify these restrictions so that humane lethal removal is available only when clearly defined ecological and animal-welfare thresholds have been met and reasonable nonlethal alternatives (such as adoption, transfer, fertility control, and other placement options) are inadequate. This would not become the default method of managing wild horses, but neither should managers be forced to choose between degraded rangelands, animals facing starvation, and maintaining excess horses in taxpayer-funded captivity indefinitely.
The long-term objective should be to shift federal resources away from maintaining tens of thousands of horses in captivity and toward maintaining healthy, sustainable, free-ranging herds on healthy western rangelands. Reforms aimed at scientific transparency could also help managers determine sustainable herd sizes in a way that won’t cause public backlash. BLM should regularly review and update its Appropriate Management Levels (AMLs) using current data on vegetation, drought, native wildlife populations, livestock, and horse populations. The agency could also clearly explain to the public how those factors are weighed when establishing herd targets. This would help address criticism that AMLs can appear arbitrary or primarily designed to accommodate competing land uses, while also providing managers and the public with greater confidence that wild horse population reductions are based on demonstrated ecological conditions.
Dr. Kelly Dunning is an Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming. She is also a member of ACC’s Board of Directors.