Every year, wild horses are killed in accidents with vehicles.
“Around 600, right?” No, that’s the number of Virginia Range mustangs the PZP zealots got rid of in 2021.
How many years would you have to go back to count that many collisions?
If you get rid of them with helicopters, bullets or sterilization, that’s bad. But if you get rid of them with clipboards and darting rifles, that’s good.
The greatest threat to wild horses, next to the public-lands ranchers and their allies in government, is not the oil companies, not the mining companies, but the so-called advocacy groups.
Map 2 in the appendices of a 2019 EA for resource enforcement actions in the Beaty Butte HMA shows the 434,000 acre HMA (purple boundary) inside the 575,000 acre allotment (brown boundary).
Approximately 19,000 AUMs per year have been allocated to livestock inside the HMA, according to page 55 in the EA, compared to 3,000 AUMs for wild horses.
The forage allocation to wildlife is 762 AUMs per year. The area of interest is in southern Oregon.
The 2021 Silver King roundup ended with 284 horses gathered, 256 shipped, 25 returned and three deaths.
Wild horses require 12 AUMs per year of forage and ten gallons of water per day, on average. The resource requirements of wild burros are about half of those for horses.
Water liberated = (Horses gathered – Horses returned) × 10
The roundup reduced forage consumption by (284 – 25) × 12 = 3,108 AUMs per year and reduced water consumption by (284 – 25) × 10 = 2,590 gallons of water per day.
Roundups usually occur when the horses are consuming more than their allocated share of the resources, not because they are outpacing resource availability.
That is the working definition of ‘overpopulation.’
The missing elements are wildlife and other mandated uses of public lands—code words for privately owned cattle and sheep.
The management plan for the typical HMA assigns four to five time as much forage to livestock as it does for horses, with a small amount reserved for wildlife.
Resources consumed by ‘excess’ horses can be shifted back to their rightful owners, the public-lands ranchers.
The same concept applies to wild horses eliminated by contraceptives, IUDs, sex ratio skewing and sterilization.
Not because most of the land is privately owned or that the horses are managed at the state level, but because of the stocking rate.
The article in Tahoe Quarterly noted that a survey conducted in early 2018 (when the Nevada Department of Agriculture wanted to transfer ownership of the horses to a private entity) found approximately 2,900 wild horses in the area. The article also noted that the Virginia Range covers around 300,000 acres.
Those numbers yield a stocking rate of roughly ten wild horses per thousand acres.
NDA says the range can support 600 horses at most, with 300 horses representing the ideal amount, according to the story.
That last figure yields a stocking rate of one wild horse per thousand acres, in line with the target rate for wild horses on federal lands.
Now you have a driver for a fertility control program—in lieu of roundups.
And the turncoats at AWHC were only too eager to help.
One woman, commenting on the use of PZP in a Facebook page for the Fish Springs horses, located a few miles south of the Virginia Range, said “Hey, look at it this way, they get more sex without the consequences!”
This is what passes for advocacy in the wild horse world.
You can’t have government telling the people that the land can only support one wild horse per thousand acres when the Virginia Range is carrying ten. Not when you’re biased in favor of ranching interests.
The program is a disgrace and an insult to Velma’s legacy.
The incident happened this morning at the Glen Grove Equestrian Center in Morton Grove, IL, according to a story by the Chicago Tribune. Authorities said the failure was the result of heavy snowfall. No people or animals were hurt.
The incident began on January 6. Gather stats through February 15:
Horses captured: 1,070, up from 1,004 on Day 35
Goal: 1,131
Returned: 0
Deaths: 29, up from 27 on Day 35
Shipped: 939, up from 895 on Day 35
One death occurred on Day 37 as a result of the roundup and another on Day 41 due to pre-existing conditions.
The overall death rate is 2.7%, same as Day 35.
Three foals have been caught to date. Roughly 45% of captured adults are male and 55% are female. Some of the mares may have foaled in the off-range corrals.
The gather page says 28 deaths and 940 horses shipped.
The operation has liberated 12,840 AUMs per year for other mandated uses in the Complex. Demand for water has been reduced by an estimated 10,700 gallons per day.
The location of current activity is not known. Three HMAs are involved in the roundup.
The number of unaccounted-for animals is 102, up from 82 on Day 35.
Some of the mares will be treated with contraceptives and returned to the range but no such activity has been reported. Some may receive GPS radio transmitters.
The number of unaccounted-for animals is 34, down from 37 on Day 7.
Some of the mares will be treated with contraceptives and returned to the range, but no such activity has been reported. The effect on pre-born foals is not known.
The Rock Springs Grazing Association, petitioner in the consent decree and instigator of the RMP amendments, owns some of the land it uses in the Wyoming checkerboard and leases other parcels, originally from the Anadarko Corporation, which was acquired by Occidental Petroleum. Occidental sold the land to Orion Mine Finance in 2020.
What would happen if Orion told RSGA that the land is designated for wild horses?
The Virginia Range is ‘ground zero’ in the wild horse preservation movement.
Today, it is home to the largest darting effort in the country, sponsored by the ringleader and standard-bearer of the wild horse prevention movement, the American Wild Horse Campaign.
An undated article appearing in the winter 2020-2021 edition of Tahoe Quarterly leads the reader from Velma’s first encounter with the mustangers in 1950 to the current fertility control program, which has no adverse effects according to an adherent interviewed for the story (see trailcam photos below).
Along the way, it considers rangeland health, including comments by J.J. Goicoechea, a proponent of the rancher-friendly ‘Path Forward,’ a plan for achieving and maintaining AMLs on public lands inhabited by wild horses.
That means eighty to ninety five percent of the forage going to the ranchers.
Western Horse Watchers was able to find two grazing allotments associated with Mr. Goicoechea and his father, Pete, one managed by BLM’s Tuscarora Field Office and the other by the Bristlecone Field Office.
The Allotment Master reports [Tuscarora | Bristlecone] show both in the Improve category, with the Goicoecheas holding most of the active AUMs in each allotment.
Western Horse Watchers Association 