Western Horse Watchers Association
Exposing the Hypocrisy, Lies and Incompetence of the Wild Horse Advocates
A report by The Salt Lake Tribune says that 126 of the 433 horses shipped from the HMA will be returned, including mares treated with PZP. The 307 remaining will be offered for adoption or placed into long-term holding.
An official acknowledged that most of the horses taken off the range exhibited fairly good body conditions, contrary to earlier reports that many were suffering from lack of water and forage due to overpopulation and drought.
RELATED: Onaqui Roundup Over.
The operation began on March 9, a resource enforcement action that follows a wild burro removal in 2020. Gather stats through July 18:
The cumulative total on the gather page is 306.
Foals represented 14.9% of the burros gathered. Of the adults, 61.6% were male and 38.4% were female, not what you’d expect to find in a sample of n = 303 taken from a simple random process centered at 50% males / 50% females.
Do these results tell you anything useful about the herd at large?
There were 94 burros in the unaccounted-for category.
The incident is not open to public observation.
Supplemental statistics:
RELATED: Black Mountain Roundup, Part 2, Day 122.
UPDATE: The limits of variation for males and females should be based on n = 258 adults, not n = 303. The observed percentages are still outside the calculated limits with n = 258. The formula for computing the limits can be found in this Wikipedia article.
Gather operations ended July 15 with 228 burros captured, 227 shipped and one death, according to figures at the gather page.
The goal was 200.
The gather page said 230 animals removed.
Foals represented 12.7% of the total. Of the adults, 44.7% were male and 55.3% were female. The number of unaccounted-for animals was zero.
The incident was not open to public observation.
Everybody gets darted in this project. Test results could pinpoint ‘undesirable’ traits, leading to selective removals and certain ‘enhancements’ to the birth control program.
The herd is a unique genetic resource and irreplaceable treasure, so why can’t they leave it alone? The horses have been there for 500 years!
RELATED: DNA Testing of Currituck Wild Horses Underway.
Refer to the column titled ‘Wild Horse Tales,’ starting on page 19 of the online edition of Horse Tales, July issue.
Good work, guys.
Gather operations ended today with 435 horses captured, one death and one returned, according to figures at the gather page.
The goal was 400.
Foals accounted for 10.8% of the total. Of the adults, 47.9% were male and 52.1% were female. The number of unaccounted-for animals was zero.
The incident liberated 5,208 AUMs per year for other mandated uses of public lands.
RELATED: Onaqui Roundup Day 4.
UPDATE: The AUMs liberated will be reduced by the horses returned to the HMA, including those treated with contraceptives. The final figure may be closer to 4,000 AUMs per year, assuming 100 horses returned.
A film by The Wild Beauty Foundation.
A rescue in West Fulton, NY has increased capacity to take in former wild horses that ended up in kill pens. The woman running the operation pays 75 cents per pound to get them out and $1,000 or more to ship them home, according to a story posted yesterday by The Daily Gazette of Schenectady, NY.
She said that one of the mustangs brought in last year was supposed to be in long-term holding with the government paying a rancher for her care but she was handed off to kill buyers instead.
RELATED: Adoption Incentive Backfiring or Working Exactly as Planned?
Comments on the 2018 EA for resource enforcement actions in the Onaqui Mountain HMA suggested that forage on public lands generates an economic benefit of about $100 per AUM per year.
If that’s true in other areas, a wild horse, who consumes 12 AUMs per year, represents an economic loss of $1,200 per year.
A wild burro, who devours six AUMs per year, represents a loss of $600 per year.
The AML for Twin Peaks HMA is 758 wild horses and 116 wild burros, for a total economic loss of $979,200 per year.
For simplicity, let’s assume the 27,000 animals allowed by plan on your public lands are horses only. The economic loss is $32.4 million per year.
The current population of 95,000 represents a loss of $114 million per year.
As Archie D. Ryan of the DOI stated many years ago, “The wild horse consumes forage needed by domestic livestock. They bring in no return and serve no useful purpose.”
RELATED: Value of Forage in HMAs?
The authorization use report shows five out of ten:
The number of animals on the permits, along with the available AUMs, tell you what the advocates are trying to defend.
It ain’t about the horses, folks.
RELATED: Value of Forage in HMAs?, Advocates Frustrated with Onaqui Roundup?
The herd will not be forced to swim across the channel this year but the mares and foals will be trailered to the carnival grounds after roundups and sorting on July 25 and 26, according to an announcement by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company.
The foals will be auctioned and the mares returned to their home territory (Virginia side of Assateague Island).
The announcement did not say if any of the foals would rejoin the herd and provided no information on long-term trends in herd sizes, sex ratios and genetic diversity.
RELATED: Chincoteague Pony Swim Called Off Again.
Dateline July 18, 2036.
The darting program is now in the terminal phase, with only a few horses remaining.
The advocates left the area to ruin another herd after the mares became sterile.
Visitors can’t understand why the horses are so hard to find.
RELATED: Salt River Darting Program Taking Its Toll.
The incident began on July 14. Gather stats through July 17:
One death occurred on Day 3, related to the roundup.
Foals accounted for 10.2% of the horses gathered. Of the adults, 48.9% were male and 51.1% were female.
There were no unaccounted-for horses.
Some of the mares will be treated with contraceptives and returned to the HMA along with some of the stallions.
Gather operations will likely conclude in another day or two.
Supplemental statistics:
RELATED: Onaqui Roundup Day 2.
That’s a hard question to answer, for the reason noted in this post, but the number of cattle and sheep in the Onaqui allotments is easy.
Go to the Authorization Use report in RAS.
Click Apply to run the report. How do you know the field office? Look at the news release for the roundup.
You can download the report by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right or you can view it here.
Western Horse Watchers recommends that you work with resource allocations, not the number of animals, to get the best understanding of the way our wild horses and burros are being managed.
Refer to items [12], [13] and [14] of comment #1960 in the Onaqui Comment Report, starting at the bottom of page 136 in the pdf.
The 19,235 AUMs in the grazing permits provide roughly $1.9 million in benefits to local economies. That’s about $100 per AUM per year in economic activity.
Now we can put a price tag on wild horses.
The Onaqui AML is not 210, but 210 × 12 × 100 = $252,000 per year in lost economic value.
The pre-gather population of 500 represents 500 × 12 × 100 = $600,000 per year in lost economic activity.
The answer is obvious: Remove the horses and give their food to the ranchers.
This is an area where the advocates can unite with the cattlemen in their desire to get rid of wild horses.
Must be tough. They’re watching a contractor get rid of the horses with helicopters when they could be doing the same with their darting rifles.
Most of them want the mares treated with PZP, a pesticide, to keep the herd in check without having to resort to sterilization or roundups, according to a report posted this morning by The Salt Lake Tribune.
Nobody’s talking about land-use plans, resource allocations and the reasons for wild horse removals.
Nobody except Western Horse Watchers.
RELATED: Status of Onaqui Allotments, Wild Wednesdays at Onaqui Mountain HMA.
The organization supports a hands-off management philosophy, according to this news release, but how will that fly when the management priority is livestock?
The 2018 EA for resource enforcement actions in the HMA provided little information about livestock grazing, as noted by some of the commenters.
Table 1 in the Comment Report shows ten allotments that intersect the HMA, along with size, available AUMs and grazing seasons.
Unfortunately, the percentage of grazing land (or forage) falling inside the HMA was not provided, so a ‘Short End of Stick’ report is not possible.
All of the data in following table were taken from the Allotment Master report in RAS except the 2018 AUMs, which were sourced from Table 1.
The AUM figures in Table 1 for West Lookout Pass appear to be for the number of animals on the permit, not the amount of forage, per the Authorization Use report for the allotment. The grazing seasons may also be incorrect, so the 2018 allocation was assumed to be the same as 2021 and that’s why the value is marked in red.
The HMA contains about 205,000 public acres according to the EA. The allotments contain about 267,000 public acres, so some of them must extend beyond the HMA boundaries. The map provided with the EA does not show their boundaries.
Six of the ten allotments do not meet standards for rangeland health.
Eighty six percent of the public acres in the allotments do not meet standards for rangeland health.
For every public acre in the Maintain category, there are six acres in the Improve category.
There is no category for blaming substandard conditions on wild horses.
Suppose that 80% of the permitted forage falls within the HMA, about 15,700 AUMs per year.
The horses allowed by plan receive about 2,500 AUMs per year, so livestock would be receiving six times more forage than the horses—on land set aside for the horses.
The HMA would be managed primarily for livestock.
The forage assigned to livestock would support an additional 1,300 wild horses, for a True AML of 1,510.
The pre-gather population was about 500, so there were no excess horses in the HMA and no justification for a roundup or fertility control program.
The 1,300 wild horses cheated out of a spot on their home range account for 2.6% of the 50,000 horses in off-range holding. How many more HMAs would you have to look at to account for all of them?
Earlier reports said she struggled to bond with her mom and later had to be rescued from a canal, the subject of this video by WCNC News of Charlotte, NC.
The story did not say if the advocates have darted the mom to prevent any more such mishaps.
RELATED: Currituck Herd Adds Foal #7.
