How Many Wild Horses Can Snowstorm Mountains Support?

The HMA lies within the Bullhead allotment.

Its southern border stops short of a checkerboard area and the western edge omits a slice of public lands, but the rest of it coincides roughly with that of the allotment.

The 140 wild horses allowed by plan require 1,680 AUMs per year.

The stocking rate allowed by plan is 1.3 wild horses per thousand public acres, slightly more than the target rate across all HMAs of one wild horse per thousand acres.

The allotment offers 12,050 active AUMs on 142,361 public acres, equivalent to 7.1 wild horses per thousand public acres.

The allotment master report puts it in the Improve category, with 7,233 AUMs in the suspended column.

The HMA should be able to support 1.3 + 7.1 = 8.4 wild horses per thousand acres.

Given that it covers 103,802 public acres, the estimated carrying capacity is 872.

Under the current management plan, the BLM collects $11,858 per year from grazing activity inside the HMA while it spends $1.6 million per year to care for 872 – 140 = 732 wild horses displaced thereby.

Nobody in the private sector would do that.

The advocates would solve the problem by sterilizing the mares, eliminating the need for roundups and off-range holding while ensuring that most of the authorized forage goes to livestock in the lawful home of wild horses.