Sands Fire, 2024. Scorched landscape.
This long Memorial Day holiday weekend is a good time to remind everyone that we have entered wildfire season.
May is Wildfire Awareness Month. Weather reports this week in wild horse country are already adding “fire warnings” to their reports. Dry conditions, low humidity and wind, create the perfect conditions for fire and the spread of fire.
It is a good time to review your fire preparedness in your home. Remove dry vegetation, check fire extinguishers, review your evacuation plans.
If you are traveling out onto public lands please take precautions. Stay on roads, do not park on vegetation and carry shovels and a fire extinguisher. Track any active fires before heading out.
You can find more fire safety tips and checklists for your home, barn or on-range experience by clicking HERE.
As advocates for wild horses and burros on our public lands, our concern over wildfire extends beyond traveling safe as we travel to see them.
Black Mountain, Hardtrigger, Sands Basin Roundup, 2023
As helicopter roundup season officially begins on July 1, this is also a good time to focus on this subject and, specifically, how it impacts removals.
There is a correlation between large removals of wild horses and an uptick in wildfire. All you need is a plot map of roundups and historic wildfires.
In 2024, BLM did emergency roundups of all the horses they left on the range after the 2023 roundup of Sands Basin and the 2021 roundup of Four Mile. These areas burned within a short time post-removal.
In 2018, after massive roundup-after-roundup of wild horses in the Owyhee Complex, the Martin Fire burned over 440,000 acres. This was the largest single site-specific loss of wild horse habitat since the 1971 Act passed. Nearly 2000 wild horses had been removed in 2016, nearly 1000 in 2013 (that roundup garnered BLM an Order from the courts over abuse), In 2010 over 1,200 were captured (and advocates were chased around and threatened with arrest, even though they held a court order to view operations) and additional roundups done via bait trapping. Nearly 5,000 wild horses had been removed in the few years leading up to the Martin fire.
After the Martin fire, BLM removed all but around 500 wild horses with roundups in 2018 and 2021, planted livestock feed, increased areas for privately owned cattle. BLM never looked at how the removal may have created the massive fuel load for the fire.
The “orphan” pen after the 2018 Owyhee roundup.
There are many instances where a removal of wild horses precedes a fire. This subject is something BLM needs to take a serious approach to and stop dismissing it.
BLM does NOT include analysis in creating “Appropriate Management Level” OR in determining how any removal will impact fire fuels in roundup plans.
Last year, as part of our fight to gain real management of the Pancake Complex, the Court ruled that BLM failed to analyze the impact of removals on wildfire. The court also found that the creation of Herd Management Area Plans (HMAP) had been illegally delayed.
We are now in another legal battle at Pancake as BLM (basically) tries to turn an HMAP into a roundup plan.. We will write more as this case moves forward. It is always a fight just to get BLM to do anything beyond a removal of wild horses and burros.
“The pilot can see” should not be the only parameter BLM follows to allow capture; particularly during extreme health risks from smoke blowing in from far away fires.
Welfare and Wildfire Season
Wildfire season brings Heat Index and Air Quality Index (AQI) the forefront
The fight simply to gain concise and enforceable welfare rules is a long and twisted tale. Litigation pushed BLM to create a draft policy in 2015. They were supposed to do annual reviews and place a revised draft out for public comment to complete the process of formalization (to create enforceability). Our ongoing litigation has begun to prove, beyond any doubt, that the reviews never happened. In other cases we have that remain active, BLM has actually asserted that there was time for public input, but it expired (and this is simply not true). The two cases are working toward gaining an avenue to provide the final critical steps to obtain an actual enforceable welfare policy.
A shortcut would be for Congress to step in. If Congress simply created a budget line-item designating a small dollar figure for formalization through Rulemaking of a welfare policy we would not have to keep taking this issue (repeatedly) to court. It should be simple. Even if your representative is against wild horses and burros on the landscape, how can they continue to condone abuse? You can help. Send a letter to your representatives. Just click HERE.
BLM likes to tout that UC Davis helped craft the draft Comprehensive Animal Welfare Program. UC Davis was paid to provide BLM input. UC Davis has been publishing Heat Index and Air Quality Index information about equines for over a decade. Yet none of that made it into the welfare policy for wild horses and burro? Biologically, physiologically, a horse is a horse. Something is not right here (maybe being under contract and strict limits impacted the work?).
Air Quality
The National Collegiate Athletic Association lists the following recommendations on their website: “Specifically, schools should consider removing sensitive athletes from outdoor practice or competition venues at an AQI over 100. At AQIs of over 150, all athletes should be closely monitored. All athletes should be removed from outdoor practice or competition venues at AQIs of 200 or above.” These guidelines are NOT guidelines for populations that include old and very young individuals like you find on the range, but are for horses used in performance activity.
At the roundup in the Shawave Mountains at the Blue Wing Complex in 2020, the AQI hit well over 300, but the roundup just kept going. In 2024, BLM repeated that performance where the smoke was so thick it was hard to track what was goin on (the PM2.5 particles, the “bad stuff” in wildfire smoke, were 13 times the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines).
Heat Index
Our team has the largest library (coupled with individual experience) of wild horse and burro roundups in the world. WHE started documenting roundups (using digital video and photography tools) before BLM did.
One of the things that documentation has shown is that a Heat Index rise means catastrophic injury is right around the corner. An extended Heat Index rise means a cluster of catastrophic injury and deaths.
During the roundups of wild horses at the Antelope Complex in 2023, nearly every catastrophic death took place during a Heat Index rise. We begged BLM to postpone before the first heat index rise and they refused. The first death in the cluster was the horse known as Sunshine. We were forced to file litigation against the manner in which BLM approved the roundup and welfare issues (the case is still active in the courts). There were 39 deaths onsite. Deaths from heat related illness skyrocketed in the first days post removal at facilities and FOIA requests showed that there were horses that did not survive simply trailer from range to facility.
Mare falls during high speed and relentless chase in August at the Antelope Complex
Heat Index is NOT temperature. The heat index is what the temperature feels like to the body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature. A Heat Index rise is when there is change that impacts “what it feels like.”During extended rises, particularly when normal patterns of going to water are disrupted (a roundup), the impacts compound.
In addition, Heat Index rises impact the ability of the human brain during decision making.
A jump in Heat Index (even if outside the “danger zone) and those into the danger zones show direct correlation to injury and death.
Even though Heat Index is a tool used by nearly every horse owner and veterinarian, it is a basic tool BLM continues to ignore.
BLM refuses to allow any comment period on CAWP to address deficits, vague parameters and lack of consequences for violations. (There never was a time for public input.)
BLM refuses to allow comments on how roundups are done as part of actual roundup plans.
BLM refuses to address these issues as part of the Mandatory Motorized Vehicle Use Hearing.
WHE is in the courts on this issue (as well as many other issues). However, you can help!
Congress could put an end to this ongoing battle by simply creating language in the Appropriations bill directing BLM to formalize a Welfare Policy through open public process (called Rulemaking).
As Wildfire Awareness Month comes to a close, and issues of AQI and Heat Index come to the forefront, can you take action to gain a concise and enforceable welfare policy?
Send a letter to your representatives. Just click HERE.
All of our work is only possible with your support.
We thank you for being a vital part of the work of WHE at this critical time. You support keeps our teams in the field, our investigations running and our litigation alive. Together, we will take a strong stand for our wild ones.