Above: Black Mountain HMA, March 2024.

This time of year our team is busy with investigative work, litigation and addressing lawmakers and creating comments to engage proposed plans like mining EISs and roundup EAs. The massive removal schedule may still be active with bait trapping, but the helicopter won’t fly again until July 1. To the public it may seem like we get some type of downtime. But that is far from the truth.

One of the things our team is doing is checking in on herds where large roundups and, in most cases, massive hits of GonaCon were applied during helicopter capture. GonaCon is a long lasting hormonal infertility agent. Most of the mares the drug was applied to won’t live long enough for the drug to wear off.

One of the places this type of roundup took place was Black Mountain, Hardtrigger and Sands Basin Herd Management Areas (HMAs). BLM rushed from draft Gather-EA to roundup in less than 4 months. The roundup began while the ink was still wet on the final EA and the Appeal process had not even ended.

The three HMAs encompass more than 128,000 acres of BLM-managed public, state and private lands in southwestern Idaho. BLM says only 129-254 wild horses are “appropriate” for the area that is managed primarily for domestic livestock. Forage is allocated: livestock allocated 135,116 AUMs and wild horses 2,304 AUMs. In other words, wild horses get only 1.7% of the amount of forage allocated to livestock.

If you use the BLM website as your only source of information, you will not have any idea of all that transpired. It has been 5 months since the roundup ended and BLM has not updated their website to include the final numbers, GonaCon and numbers released.

At the Black Mountain HMA in Idaho, mares and stallions were released back to the range (17). We are still waiting for BLM to publish final numbers of the full release into the HMAs (this is the only one they allowed observation).

Mares were given a two-dose regime of GonaCon ensuring infertility for 5-10 years. Of the mares released, at least 2 are not from these HMAs, one captured in Nevada and having spent considerable time in holding. She is older and we do not know how she is going to survive as a now infertile mare on a landscape she does not know. She was put in this HMA to deal with the “genetic diversity” issue of such a small population; how she can contribute after two does of GonaCon is something BLM can’t explain either. Only a handful of mares were left in these ranges that were not treated. This herd may not keep up with the ratio of any births (and survival of foals) to death rates. Simplistically, this herd may not be viable anymore.

Above: Black Mountain, March 2024. The little one in this video may have been born to a mare treated with GonaCon while pregnant and be her last foal, or born of one of the handful not treated. Either way, this baby is one of the very few that will be born in these HMAs in the next 7 years. We will keep you posted.

This type of hard hit was done in numerous HMAs over the last 3 years. Our teams are checking in on them as well. We are checking game cameras and doing field observations.

Our offsite team is really busy tracking as well. Wild horses and burros that have entered the system of holding need to be tracked as well. Things like death rates and deficits in humane handling are also important.

Our investigative team is hard at work. You can see one if the team reports that analyzes 5 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to determine an average death rate during capture and the first few months in holding. The average is about 12% mortality. (more HERE)

Our team has uncovered some anomalies that need further investigative work and may require the Government Accounting Office (GAO) to handle. We will have more on that soon.

Onsite and offsite, March is a month for checking in on range and in holding facilities.

When the helicopter is not flying our team is very busy.

We will have an update from our legal team soon to bring you up-to-speed on the active cases we have in federal court. From addressing on range planning, transparency and gaining an enforceable welfare policy, our team is working hard for our beloved wild ones.

We need your help to continue to document, expose, work toward reform with lawmakers and litigate. Our wild ones deserve to live free on the range and free from abuse.

Thank you for keeping WHE on the frontline in the fight to protect and preserve our treasured wild ones.