Wild horses in Adobe Town after the roundup where our team was onsite advocating for welfare issues and obtained changes where wounds would be treated and electrolytes given to stressed foals.
There are 177 Herd Management Areas (HMAs) managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and 34 active Wild Horse Territories (WHT) managed by the United States Forest Service.
That might sound like a lot, but it is not. The vast majority of these areas have very few horses.
Breakdown of AML for the BLM HMAs nationwide. Only 3 HMAs in the U.S. have an AML over 500. Only 31 have an AML over 150. These same ranges support thousands of cattle and massive extractive industries. (An AML stands for Appropriate Management Level” or the number allowed to live on the range.)
The goal is to reach about 10,000 fewer wild horses and burros than were found in the wild when Congress unanimously passed the 1971 Act stating horses and burros “were fast disappearing” from the landscape. In 1971 it was estimated that there were around 27,000 wild horses and burros.
The target today is 16,360: 14,259 wild horses and 2,101 wild burros fragmented throughout ten western states. If there were any other species sitting at numbers so low they would be listed on the endangered species list. This is not management.
Boundary lines have no basis in reality. These were a political construct created in Washington during debate on the 1971 Act. The boundary lines were then drawn to avoid as much conflict with livestock as possible… even allowing a “claiming period” where, without proof of ownership, someone could kill or capture horses in any given livestock grazing allotment claiming them as “property” so that they would not face “interference” when the Act began to be enforced by BLM. The claiming period was shutdown in 1975.
When the Act was codified into law, actual management plans were supposed to be done to transparently disclose how things like boundary lines and AML are set and to allow public input. Instead, BLM and USFS set these things in agreement with livestock permittees.
This is the flawed framework. Congress is not taking steps to fix any of it. Congress is just trying to find ways to make maintaining this charade sound more palatable (like saying “get to AML and then keep it there with vaccines” instead of addressing the fact that the numbers are not sound).
So we need to litigate herd-by-herd. Under law there is no avenue we can address all herds in one lawsuit. So we are stretching as far as we can go.
What are we fighting for? Justice. The wrongs of the past must end. The abuses that continue today must end. The sheer lack of transparency must end.
Stone Cabin and Saulsbury outside Tonopah, Nevada, are an important herd to the history of advocacy itself (and the Stone Cabin grey was one of Velma Johnston’s (Wild Horse Annie) favorite horses. The very first official roundup and the first lawsuit took place at Stone Cabin. We are continuing that battle today.
After the permittee filed suit to force a removal, we fired back. The permittees case lost. Our case won part of what we were after (the need to create and update management plans) and we have filed an Appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court to fight for the enforceability the lower court will not uphold.
This case is active and may be the most important case we all need to set caselaw that creates enforceability missing in Wild Horse Program.
Carter, outside of Cedarville, California, is one of the most unique herds of wild horses you could ever visit. Lumping them in with Buckhorn and Coppersmith, far to the south, to complete a sweep of the entire NW corner of Nevada, BLM created a roundup plan to slam the population down into genetic bankruptcy of only 30 wild horses.
WHE has joined with CRMI and are jumping our litigation up the court system to stop this madness.
The fight for Pancake, between Ely and Eureka in Nevada, continues. A massive court win sent the roundup plan back to BLM and found that the actual management plan had been illegally delayed.
Now we are fighting back in the courts as BLM simply tries to pass off a removal plan (again) claiming it is management.
With less than 2 weeks notice a roundup was announced of wild horses in Devil’s Garden outside of Alturas California by the United States Forest Service.
We have scrambled and are in court, right now, fighting to stop the rest of this roundup and get horses returned. This roundup runs a very real risk of leaving just a dozen horses on the range and long-acting fertility control that will set this herd on a path to die out.
Abuses during and after capture continue. BLM refuses to complete formalization of an actual welfare policy that has enforceability and plays a word game instead.
We are fighting in court to show how they have failed one of the most basic mandates of the 1971 law to treat horses humanely and have failed to even create a policy to ensure preventable injury and death stop happening and provide consequence for offenders.
These are just some of the cases we have in court, right now.
We are also fighting to gain mitigation for a massive mine eating 30% of the Territory at Triple B, the eradication of burros in Tassi-Gold in Arizona and many more.
A generous donor has issued a matching challenge—every contribution this month will be doubled, dollar for dollar. Another donor will match the match!
Your gift will be tripled!
WHE stands independent—without corporate sponsorships or federal funding, beholden only to the wild ones who depend on us. Together, we can protect their freedom, their families, and their future.
Your support fuels every mile, every courtroom battle, every victory for the wild.
We are fighting so that our wild ones have a future on our public lands before it is too late.
None of our work is possible without your support.
Thank you for keeping WHE running for our wild ones!
Categories: Lead, Wild Horse Education
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