She thinks she’s helping wild horses, according to a story posted yesterday by Oil City News of Casper, WY.
The management plan for the HMA assigns 5,772 AUMs per year to privately owned livestock (77%), compared to 1,680 AUMs per year for wild horses (23%), according to an environmental assessment from 2012. Refer to Figure 2. The AML is 140.
This is how you show your love for wild horses: Reduce their numbers with pesticides so they’ll fit into the tiny boxes the government has created for them, allowing most of their food to be sold to public-lands ranchers.
It’s not management at the minimum feasible level, per the statute, and it’s certainly not management principally for wild horses.
It should be obvious to even the casual reader of these pages that the problem on western rangelands is not too many wild horses and burros but too many cattle and sheep, privately owned, of course.
Advocacy groups that push for contraceptives are allies of the ranchers. Get away from them as fast as you can. The ranchers already receive eighty percent of the forage on lands set aside for the horses and these people want to drive the ratio higher!
You don’t need an eleven-point plan, such as this PZP Manifesto from 2018, to save America’s wild horses and burros.
As noted earlier this month, the stocking rate allowed by plan for the Spruce-Pequop HMA is a miniscule 0.3 wild horses per thousand acres, which is what you’d expect for an area where livestock receive almost nine times as much forage as the horses.
Does that pattern hold for other areas? Would it be a reliable indicator of management priorities on lands set aside for wild horses?
Now, let’s plot the forage allocated to livestock as a function of the stocking rate.
All of the data points are in the upper third of the chart, meaning that none of the areas are managed primarily for horses. Most of the data fall below the target stocking rate of one wild horse per thousand acres (across all HMAs).
The highest forage allocations to livestock occur at the lowest stocking rates for horses, the same pattern observed at Spruce-Pequop. This is called an inverse relationship, denoted by a line with negative slope.
The line, known as the ‘least-squares fit,’ is of the form y = mx + b.
There are no outliers in the data (remote values in the y-space) and no influential observations (remote values in the x-space), but there could be an issue involving the scatter of the data around the line.
That problem might go away with more data. But how many areas would you have to review to find larger numbers of horses (higher stocking rates) and permitted livestock grazing?
A few of the lower forage allocations to livestock appear at lower stocking rates, so the relationship is not ironclad. But coming across stocking rates below 1.0 should prompt you to dig a little deeper to find out how bad things are for the horses.
Trailcam photos of some Virginia Range mustangs, at a time of year when they tend to be thin. Is this what you’d expect to see for a herd that’s overpopulated?
At a stocking rate of approximately ten wild horses per thousand acres, you’d have to search one square mile to see six or seven of them. Maybe.
And that’s ten times higher than your typical HMA.
Some ‘advocacy’ groups push contraceptives not because they care about the horses, but because they’re frauds.
A new filly joined the herd about a week ago, according to a report posted today by WVEC News of Norfolk, VA. Color is black with no dilution factors and no markings.
Earlier this week the Forest Service announced a proposed update of the management plan for wild horses at the Big Summit WHT, according to a report by KTVZ News of Bend, OR. The preferred option will reduce the AML from 55 – 65 to 12 – 57.
The WHT covers 25,434 acres in central Oregon. The current AML yields a stocking rate of 2.6 wild horses per thousand acres. The target rate across all areas managed for wild horses is one per thousand acres.
Management actions for controlling the herd size include gathers and contraceptives.
The management plan allocates 2,322 AUMs per year to livestock, compared to 780 AUMs per year for horses under the current AML. Refer to Table 21 in the draft EA.
The disparity will be greater under the preferred option, with 77% of the forage going to livestock and 23% to the horses. On land to be managed principally for the horses.
Project documents are posted here. A link to the online comments form can be found on this page. Comments can be submitted through May 18.
The Carolina Coast Online said today that 111 wild horses were living on Shackleford Banks at the end of 2019, with 38% males and 62% females. Ten foals were born and fourteen deaths occurred.
The best way to protect the herd is public education, according to the story.
The report by NPS said contraceptives had been in use on the island since 2000.
The disparity between males and females, noted as longevity of mares and not mortality of stallions, was linked to the fertility control program.
Unlike the Assateague horses, these results could be produced by a simple random process centered at 50% males / 50% females.
There are approximately 3,000 wild horses roaming an area that can only support 700, according to a story posted today by Nevada Current.
Sound familiar?
How did they come up with 700? With a stocking rate of roughly ten wild horses per thousand acres, the Virginia Range sticks out like a sore thumb compared to public lands managed for wild horses by the federal government.
It doesn’t fit the narrative. The people might even think the government is lying.
Therefore, we have to bring the number down. The involvement of a so-called advocacy group makes the project seem legitimate.
Photo showing the ‘as left’ condition of the corral, after cleaning. Note the underside of the oak tree on the left, pruned straight across. Wonder who did that?
Two of the five HMAs located within the county are below their AMLs, according to an opinion piece posted yesterday by the Elko Daily Free Press, but three are way above their government-mandated limits.
The overpopulated HMAs belong to the Antelope Complex, reviewed on these pages back in August, where the management plan assigns 89% of the forage to livestock.
That tells you that the available resources are far greater than those required by the AMLs. In other words, AMLs represent the number of wild horses the land can support after most of the resources have been diverted to privately owned cattle and sheep.
That’s what makes the writer grumpy: He can’t stand the thought of horses roaming freely on lands designated for them, enjoying resources that were set aside for them.
Such a waste!
The Spruce-Pequop HMA, one of the offending areas, was the scene of a wild horse shooting at the beginning of a gather in 2018. Multiple rounds to the abdomens.
BLM knows who did it but to my knowledge there have been no arrests in the case.
The HMA intersects the massive Spruce Allotment, to which Madeleine Pickens has grazing preference. Not for cattle but for wild horses. Initially the BLM agreed with the plan but has since blocked every attempt to effect it. Because of the crybaby ranchers.
The AML for Spruce-Pequop yields a stocking rate of 0.3 wild horses per thousand acres, almost nothing, which is what you’d expect for an area where most of the food has been allocated to public-lands ranchers.
Horses on the Goshute HMA, which is 1,184% over AML (not 1,284% as stated in the article) must be skin and bone.
Same for the Antelope Valley horses, which are 272% over the limit (not 372%).
Except they’re not. Resources are more than adequate. They’re just not being distributed in a manner that satisfies the ranchers.
