A 2020 post about the Salt River habitat explains why you can’t find any recent videos of wild horses at Butcher Jones: They were moved across the highway to another area.
The map refers to it as the protected habitat, shaded dark green.
The yellow, red and pink areas have been lost, although the yellow area may become accessible again if an overpass is built at Coon Bluff.
An eyeball estimate of the loss is forty to fifty percent of their land.
The pink area is referred to as the Butcher Jones Habitat, which the ArcGIS Viewer reveals as the Sunflower Allotment.
The stated reason for removal was access to water and conflicts with recreational use.
Were there other reasons?
A keyword search of the page yielded no results for Sunflower, allotment, livestock and permitted grazing.
The Forest Service has not posted the AOIs for the Tonto allotments but Table 1 in a 2018 report on forage availability indicated that Sunflower offered 10,020 AUMs on 158,000 acres, equivalent to 835 wild horses or 5.3 wild horses per thousand acres.
Why not start a fundraiser to purchase the base property tied to the allotment or at least the pastures where the horses roamed?
Then ask the Forest Service to change the preference to horses.
RELATED: Butcher Jones and Sunflower.
Western Horse Watchers Association 