Wild Horse Havens: Ecotourism coming to a pasture near you

The Cost of Insanity

Wild Horse Havens

Ecotourism coming to a pasture near you

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            His original name was Choctaw.

            We called him Chalky probably because it fit him better. He was a flea bitten gray with coal black feet. Since only kids rode him by the time I came along, there was no good reason to shoe him, but he probably didn’t need shoeing anyway. I wish now I had known what I was looking at when I was around him with the opportunity to study his feet.

            He was the cause of my first real horse wreck. I was with Grampa one day down the Mangus and he had fallen with me. I was laying there under him when Grampa came riding back up over the creek bank.

            “Looks like you’re in a bad place there, son!” he had said.

            Chalky had wallowed around and got up without more damage, but I was running on adrenaline. I remounted and within seconds my head was spinning.

            “I don’t feel so good,” I told my grandfather.

            “Well, go on to the house then,” he said.

            I can remember heading back up the road to the house before everything went black. The next thing I knew I was waking up lying on my back looking skyward. The old horse had dutifully stopped and was assessing me. His muzzle was in my face. I remember smelling him.

            My head was clearing by the time I got to the house and unsaddled. Grandma greeted me, diagnosed the situation and had me lay down in the shade. She brought me a Pepsi to drink … her remedy for lots of ailments.

            Chalky was the only horse from wild horse origin I knew personally in my youth. Grampa and Tom McCauley had trapped a bunch of remnant wild horses at the pot holes in Davis Canyon and roped him as a colt. They broke him and he had lived a long and productive life. He had long been a family pet. Every Wilmeth grandchild of my generation learned to ride on that horse.

            He had fallen not by tendency, but by frailty of age.

            The end of his life came when Grampa found him hung up in a fence going out onto the Forest. He put him down. He was 31.

            We were heart broken.

            Wild horses

            Today, there are an estimated 70,000 wild horses in the West largely on federal lands. More than half are in Nevada.

Some 37,000 of them are free roaming. The others are in jail … that is they are in what the primary governing land management agency, the BLM, terms ‘short term corrals’ or ‘long-term pasture’.

            By their own admission, the agency reveals the horses are on a growth path that is clearly unsustainable. They said the same thing back in 2009 when they told Congress they would have the free roaming population down to 29,500 by 2011 if Treasury would just spring for $57.4 million to fuel their horse management efforts for the upcoming fiscal year. Depending on how you want to calculate that expanding black hole, that equated to $831.88 annually per living wild horse or $1,793.75 for every animal incarcerated.

            That promise, of course, went the direction of the sucking sound and today’s dynamics are on a glide path to hit $1,304.64 and $2,468.24, respectively. Should we have expected anything different from our government?

            The agency has a plan, though.

            Their strategy continues to herald the adoption process where the price point of adoption reaches the trigger point of acceptance rather than actual value of the horses. That program has put 100,000 horses over the last decade into backyards and households that are not the best alternatives for once wild, free roaming animals.

            The heart of the current plan has more advocacy appeal. It consists of three components. Those detailed plans are fertility control, the establishment of new wild horse preserves, and the acceleration of special designations for ‘selected treasured herds’ in the West.

            Congress is being assured that wild horses on western lands will come into balance with their ranges.

            In the matter of fertility control, the plan is to put mares on a drug plan. The horses are going to get free birth control. A review of the history of the birth control tests that drove this concept reveals that conception dropped from 80% to 28% in 2006. In the successive two year periods thereafter, it produced similar decreases of 84% to 38% and 69% to 29%.

That sounds alright other than the fact the process has to be done year after year and the Fed horse wranglers might never gather a wishful target of 80% of their horses and need a 90% capture rate to make the process hit its mark.

            The second stage of the strategy is to expand federal domain out of the West and establish horse parks in the East and Midwest. The Secretary has assured that acquisition of these lands would only be ‘productive grasslands’. Furthermore, it would be “an excellent opportunity to showcase these historic animals with the potential for boosting eco-tourism in rural communities”.

            In addition to the necessary increase in annual operational funding of the horse program, the agency also wants money to acquire those expanding productive grasslands. The last annual request was for $42.5 million.

            It seems the Feds are intent to add wild horse parks to their growing array of national monuments, national conservation areas, areas of critical environmental concern, national forests, wild and scenic rivers, and, of course, the gold standard of all … wilderness. 

            The ‘treasured herd’ assignment alternative seems to be a contradiction of the expansion of horse parks into areas east of the 100^th Meridian. In this expansion of budget, the Secretary is going to designate recognition status of certain showcase herds. By such designations, western rural communities in the overpopulated, depleted ranges of those resident populations will start enjoying expanded eco-tourism just like their eastern counterparts!

            Of course, the treasured herd designations will require hiring some kind of specialist the Feds reference by the acronym FTE. Certainly that FTE will have to have a staff, gooseneck trailer depository and field headquarters as well. He or she will be assigned the duty of population inventory, fertility control, other population management actions, removal operations, administering adoptions, sale of excess animals, and … the care of those horses that are incarcerated.

            This all sounds like the original dictate of the legislation that has been driving this whole equine welfare program from the onset … the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burro Act of 1971.

            Insanity management

            When the Act was passed, Congress had been convinced by the wild horse advocates that, without action, the free roaming herds would become extinct. The tide was turned on any fear of disappearance, and, the herds not only increased, they bred right through the carrying capacity and the promises by the managing agencies.

Much of the money spent today is in breach of the law. Section 1333 of the Act mandates the Secretary of Interior “shall immediately remove excess animals from the range so as to achieve appropriate management levels” when available information to him determines overpopulation exists in any given area.

The intention is this Act, along with similar environmental acts passed by Congress and assigned to the cabinet level secretaries for implementation and management, is altered, modified, adjusted, ignored, or reinterpreted constantly through agency management and regulation creep.

This is another example of the American citizen being pillaged by special interests and agencies that exist in a parallel universe without substantive oversight from any authority. Of course, they always complain about budget.

Last week BLM made the announcement they were going to remove only “1300 mustangs and burros from range across the West this summer” because of budget constraints and overflowing holding pens. Even this statement reeks of double speak. The entire matter was predicated on the plea to maintain “these symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” in a wild free-roaming state. Over crowded jails don’t seem to pass muster within the spirit of the law.

What about the matter of killing an animal for the unwritten contract of humane and ethical treatment of a natural system?

The protectionists turn crimson with those words. Ultimately, that is exactly where this leads. In the fine print of the BLM has disclosed the agency intends to adjust sex ratios within the herd. That means one thing and that is the termination of lives of mares for the benefit of the stallions.

My goodness … wait until the feminists get that message!

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico.