Wyoming roundup brings scrutiny to new BLM wild horse policy emphasizing fertility control

The mares received the equine equivalent of the pill and the stallions remained intact. The dust has settled from a government roundup of nearly 700 wild horses in southwest Wyoming in which the U.S. Bureau of Land Management injected six dozen mares with a fertility control drug before returning them to the open range. The roundup south of Eden, a tiny town amid a sagebrush sea that stretches to the Wind River Range, marked the start of a new federal policy that puts more emphasis on fertility control and less on horse removal to manage the wild horse population throughout the West. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management policy calls for scaling back its removal of wild horses from Western ranges from 10,000 to 7,600 a year. An initial plan to spay all mares and geld all stallions before releasing them to the wild would have spelled doom for the herd, according to wild horse advocates who fought the Wyoming roundup. Ranchers counter that the number of wild horses in the West, estimated at 38,500, is more than 40 percent above the BLM’s target of 26,600. They worry that fertility control won’t do enough to limit rangeland damage. “There’s only so much grass produced and I have to control my cow numbers,” said Gary Zakotnik, a rancher in the Eden area and member of the BLM’s National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board. “I don’t know of any ranchers, or very few ranchers, that are opposed to horses. But they’re like anything. Their population has to be controlled.”...more