BLM wild horse ranch plan draws fire

Some Madison Valley landowners are voicing concerns about a plan to place up to 1,500 wild horses on a ranch north of Ennis. A lawyer representing several clients in the Ennis area says 1,500 horses would be far too many for the 15,000-acre Spanish Q Ranch to support. And a rancher has questioned what impact wild horses would have on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. In a letter dated Oct. 12, Big Timber attorney Jim Lippert argued to the BLM that given the climate in Madison County, every horse living there would need five acres per month to give it enough food to graze on. At that rate, 1,500 horses would quickly run out of grass, he said. “A more reasonable number of horses ... would be 250 horses,” he wrote. “The land could sustain this number of horses without damaging the land, and I would not have to refer to this program as ‘warehousing’ wild horses.” Overgrazing, Lippert wrote, would also hurt wildlife like the elk that graze on private land. Lippert said in a phone interview his numbers come from speaking with “an old time resident.” But a survey by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a federal agency, also suggests a 15,000-acre Ennis-area ranch would support hundreds, not thousands, of horses. Numbers provided by Carrie Mosely at the NRCS in Bozeman show a ranch the size of the Spanish Q could support a maximum of 375 horses during the seven-month growing season...read more

I guess in certain instances, overgrazing is fine with BLM and the enviro's.