The Allotment Information report in RAS for all districts and field offices in Wyoming yielded 3,563 unique rows after filtering out 636 duplicates.  Those rows corresponded to allotments with more than one permit.

The breakdown by category includes a large number of allotments with custodial status:

• Improve: 837
• Maintain: 805
• Custodial: 1,911
• Unclassified: 10

Approximately 23% of the allotments are in the Improve category, suggesting that rangeland health in Wyoming is fairly good, although the condition of the custodial allotments is not known.

The breakdown by public acreage tells a different story:

• Improve: 10,727,886
• Maintain: 4,954,637
• Custodial: 1,746,089
• Unclassified: 15,157

Almost 62% of the land does not meet standards for rangeland health.

The guest column published yesterday by The Hill pinned most of the problems on global warming, not on stocking rates, resource allocations and management priorities of America’s public lands.  In fact, it didn’t even acknowledge public-lands ranching!

Privately owned livestock can access over 17 million acres of BLM lands in the state, compared to slightly less than five million acres for wild horses.  That acreage will ratchet down if the Rock Springs RMP amendments are approved and carried out.

RELATED: Allotment Status in Utah.

She was born on the Maryland side of the island last week, according to a report by the Maryland Coast Dispatch.

Another census is in progress.

The fertility control program was shut off in 2016 but the herd was still declining as of a year ago.

RELATED: R.I.P. Assateague Horse Census?

The Allotment Information report in RAS for all districts and field offices in Utah yielded 1,391 unique rows after filtering out 946 duplicates.  Those rows corresponded to allotments with more than one permit.

The breakdown by category has a fairly even distribution across the defined classes.

• Improve: 447
• Maintain: 412
• Custodial: 518
• Unclassified: 14

With about one third of the allotments in the Improve category, public lands in Utah must be in pretty good shape, right?

The breakdown by acreage tells a different story:

• Improve: 12,092,759
• Maintain: 7,018,773
• Custodial: 2,038,767
• Unclassified: 206,335

Approximately 57% of the land does not meet standards for rangeland health.

The condition of the custodial allotments is not known.

Privately owned livestock can access over 21 million acres of BLM lands in the state, compared to a little more than two million acres for wild horses and burros.

RELATED: Status of Allotments in Oregon.

The housing development will be built on 81 acres east of Damonte Ranch High School, according to a report by FOX11 News of Reno.

Some of those opposing the project were concerned about the impact on wild horses.

Given the current stocking rate of approximately ten animals per thousand acres, the development would displace slightly less than one horse.

A fence will be built around the community to keep the horses out.

BLM removed three wild horses from the Calvada Eye today, according to a report in the Pahrump Valley Times.

The animals will be taken to the off-range corrals in Ridgecrest, CA.

RELATED: Don’t Feed Pahrump Horses.

UPDATE: Added video.

The Allotment Information report in RAS for all districts and field offices in Oregon yielded 1,952 unique rows after filtering out 389 duplicates.  Those rows corresponded to allotments with more than one permit.

Duplicate rows should not be removed if you want to compute the total AUMs permitted on BLM lands in the state.

Western Horse Watchers has not found a reporting system for allotments managed by the Forest Service.

The breakdown by category includes a large number of allotments with custodial status:

• Improve: 427
• Maintain: 392
• Custodial: 1,131
• Unclassified: 2

Approximately 22% of the allotments are in the Improve category, suggesting that rangeland health in Oregon is not that bad, although the condition of the custodial allotments is not known.

The breakdown by acreage tells a different story:

• Improve: 8,342,328
• Maintain: 4,279,579
• Custodial: 753,636
• Unclassified: 99,939

Approximately 62% of the land does not meet standards for rangeland health.

There is no category for blaming substandard conditions on wild horses and burros.

Privately owned livestock can access over 15 million acres of BLM lands in the state, compared to three million acres for wild horses and burros.

RELATED: Allotment Status in Idaho.

Twenty five mares that have been treated with contraceptives will be returned to the HMA on March 12, according to a BLM news release posted today.

The event will be open to public observation.

RELATED: Silver King Roundup Over.

At or near the Big Summit WHT with Dan Cady.

The Allotment Information report in RAS can supply data for all allotments in a state by selecting the state and choosing all of the districts and all of the field offices.

After hitting OK, scroll to the bottom of the bottom of the report and save the results by choosing Export > Data > CSV, which will generate a comma-separated file that you can save to your computer.

Opening the CSV file in Excel should launch the Text Import Wizard, which will copy the data into the rows and columns of a new spreadsheet.

In step 1, choose Delimited.  In step 2, put a check mark next to Comma, clearing any other choices.  In step 3, hit Finish to complete the process.

Allotments with more than one permittee will appear multiple times in the list but you can use the Remove Duplicates tool to filter them out.  Filter on the Allotment Number column only.

A pivot table can be added to the spreadsheet to compute statistics from the dataset.

The filtered list had 2,111 allotments, as of today, with the following breakdown:

• Improve: 787
• Maintain: 614
• Custodial: 703
• Unclassified: 7

The condition of the custodial allotments is unknown.

With a little over one third of the allotments failing to meet standards for rangeland health, grazing activity may not seem to have a very large impact in Idaho.

But if you look at the public acres, you get a different picture:

• Improve: 7,968,881
• Maintain: 2,878,052
• Custodial: 508,111
• Unclassified: 7,217

Seventy percent of the land is in the Improve category!

Given that wild horses in Idaho can access only 418,000 acres in six HMAs, they are probably not responsible for much of the damage.

RELATED: Rangeland Conditions In Horse-Free Areas.

Some HMAs are managed for horses and burros.  Some allotments are permitted for cattle and sheep.  Sometimes you know the number of animals allowed by plan and other times you know the active AUMs and grazing seasons.

An HMA may fit within an allotment or intersect a large portion of it, resulting in a common area.

What do the resource allocations tell you about the management priorities in that area?

The trick is to put everything on a consistent basis.  Don’t try to compare burros to cattle and horses to sheep.

Convert burros to horses and sheep to cattle.  The resource requirements of horses and cattle are said to be equivalent, allowing a direct comparison.

Consider this example.  The HMA and allotment occupy the same 88,000 acre parcel.

HMA

• AML for horses: 42
• AML for burros: 92
• Grazing season in months: 12

Allotment

• Cattle on permit: 224
• Sheep on permit: 640
• Grazing season in months: 6

Start by converting burros to horses and sheep to cattle.

Two burros are equivalent to one horse and five sheep are equivalent to one cow, so the equivalent number of horses allowed in the area is 42 + (92 ÷ 2) = 88 and the equivalent number of cattle is 224 + (640 ÷ 5) = 352.

The horses require 88 × 12 = 1,056 AUMs per year and the cattle require 352 × 6 = 2,112 AUMs per year.

Horses receive one third of the authorized forage, neglecting wildlife, and cattle receive two thirds.

The stocking rate for horses is 88 ÷ 88,000 × 1,000 = 1 animal per thousand acres and the stocking rate for cattle is 352 ÷ 88,000 × 1,000 = 4 animals per thousand acres.

The HMA is managed primarily for livestock.  The forage assigned to cattle would support an additional 2,112 ÷ 12 = 176 wild horses, for a True AML of 264.

The new AML could be distributed any number of ways among horses and burros, for example, 150 horses and 114 × 2 = 228 burros, as long as the total AUMs are 3,168.

State legislators have proposed SB 385, a measure that would include wild horses in animal cruelty laws, spell out the disposition of seized animals and clarify that they are not livestock, which means they can’t be sold, slaughtered or dispatched like stray livestock.

The state Bureau of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Protection Voters of New Mexico support the bill, according to a report by the Carlsbad Current Argus, but the New Mexico Cattlegrowers and the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau oppose it.

The bill allows wild horses to be captured if they’re a physical threat, need veterinary care or the land has reached its carrying capacity.

The story did not indicate if carrying capacity referred to horses only or horses and livestock.  Wildlife would likely be included in both cases.

Commissioners voted yesterday against the idea, according to a report posted this morning by The Nevada Independent, an online news service based in Las Vegas.

The “Smart City,” to be built on 67,000 acres owned by Blockchains LLC, would include up to 15,000 dwelling units and would almost certainly necessitate the downsizing of the wild horse herds that currently inhabit the area, beyond what the PZP zealots are trying to accomplish.

RELATED: Storey County Autonomous Zone in the News.

On Sand Wash Basin HMA with Steve Hostetler.

The fossil record suggests that horses evolved in North America and nobody disputes that they were brought to the New World by Spanish explorers around 500 years ago.

But was the disembarkation a reintroduction or a supplementation?

The official storyline says it was a reintroduction.

A summary of comments on a new management plan for the Big Summit WHT includes a reprint of an article by Craig Downer on the subject, beginning on page 49 of the pdf.

At the top of page 53 is a remark about the discovery near Winnemucca Lake in Nevada that was mentioned in the Holy Grail post.  The evidence contradicted the wild horse narrative and “appear[s] to have vanished under suspect circumstances,” according to Mr. Downer.

RELATED: Wild vs. Feral: Are America’s Horses a Re-Introduced Species?

Did you know it involved horses?  Kim Harris has the story on page 9 of the February edition of Horse Tales.

The list was updated yesterday, with the Sand Wash roundup currently in progress.

Six burros were removed from the Lake Pleasant HMA in a nuisance gather on February 2, according to the schedule, but Western Horse Watchers was unable to find an announcement on BLM’s main news page.

Next up is nuisance gather in the Piceance-East Douglas HMA (may have already started) and a planned gather in the Black Mountain HMA, home of the Oatman burros.

Onaqui Mountain is on the list for July, with Beatys Butte in August.

More information at the WHB gather page.

The project involves water systems in two grazing allotments that intersect the Piper Mountain HMA near Deep Springs, CA, according to a BLM news release issued today.

Comments will be accepted through March 29.

The EA says the current burro population is zero and horses are very seldom seen.

The management plan for Piper Mountain allows 17 horses and 82 burros on 96,261 acres, for an equivalent stocking rate of 0.6 wild horses per thousand acres.

Horses can be found in the Fish Lake Valley HMA, according to the EA, where an estimated 120 animals live.  See page 30 in the Nevada wild horse maps.

The Allotment Master report shows most of the allotments in the Maintain category.

The hearing is set for today, according to a story by AP News.

Not all native peoples are defenders of wild horses.

The Yakama in Washington state have been sending their horses to slaughter for years, including pregnant mares.

Rescue of the foals, born in feedlots while the horses await shipment, has turned into a full-time job for the folks at Chilly Pepper Miracle Mustang of Golconda, NV.

RELATED: Haaland to Head Interior?, Yakama Nation, Champions of the Horse.

The story is behind a paywall but if you press CTRL+A after dismissing the signup box you can read a few sentences.

The area of interest—consisting of nine former HMAs—is now managed almost exclusively for livestock.

RELATED: BLM Urged to Fight Caliente Legal Action, Moriah’s Cousins.

UPDATE: Oral arguments can be heard in a 22-minute audio segment published by Court Listener.  Are the judges suggesting that the RMP amendments that zeroed out the HMAs are now unassailable, no longer subject to legal challenge?

BLM has decided to implement the Proposed Action (Alternative A) in the Final EA, subject to a 30-day appeal period, according to a report by the Craig Press.

The EA and DR can be found in the top section of the project documents.

RELATED: Decision Expected Next Week in Piceance-East Douglas EA?

UPDATE: BLM news release just posted.