How Many Wild Horses Can the Bald Mountain HMA Support?

The HMA is 100% inside the Carico Lake Allotment according to Table 4 of the Final EA for the Callaghan Complex.

The 215 wild horses allowed by plan require 2,580 AUMs per year.

The allotment offers 24,954 active AUMs per year on 562,465 public acres, equivalent to 3.7 wild horses per thousand public acres.

If the resource is evenly distributed across the parcel, it’s present in the HMA but was allocated to livestock.

To estimate the carrying capacity, shift it back to the horses. Forage assigned to wildlife stays with wildlife.

The HMA covers 139,693 public acres so the forage assigned to livestock should support 139,693 × 3.7 ÷ 1,000 = 517 wild horses.

The HMA should be able to sustain 215 + 517 = 732 wild horses if it was managed principally for them, as specified in the original statute.

The advocates, eager to beat the horse populations down with PZP, oppose the concept.

The allotment master report puts Carico Lake in the Improve category, which could be due to overgrazing, but there are no AUMs in the suspended column.

The allotment would not make a good wild horse preserve because it overlaps areas already identified for wild horses and there is more than one authorization attached to it, so you’d have to acquire or control several base properties to access all of the AUMs.