Fires and Droughts Endanger Wild Horses

Aug. 20, 2000 -- As wildfires char more than a million acres of the West, conservation officials are trying to save a much-loved part of its heritage: the wild horses and burros.

About 42,000 wild horses and up to 5,000 wild burros roam in herds through just about every state west of the Rockies. But this year, with a record drought stealing their water supply and wildfires roasting their habitat, this already large population faces its hardest times ever.

The Bureau of Land Management is trying to help, speeding up a program that rounds up some of the animals and finds ranchers to adopt them.

“I’ve been in this program now for 17 years, and this is unusual,” says Tom Pogacnik, a senior specialist in the BLM’s national wild horse and burro program. “Springs that have never dried up before are drying up.”

While the herds are unlikely to actually get burned alive, he said, they are having to travel long distances out of fire areas to find food and water. Some, especially mares with foals, are suffering.

Pogacnik said his agency, which typically rounds up about 1200 horses per year for adoption, has already picked up more than 1,300 this year, and could add about 5,000 more if their water sources keep drying out. He was in Nebraska this week, making sure facilities would be ready for these “emergency gathers.”

The herds descend from horses brought by Spanish Conquistadors (the real mustangs) or set loose by ranchers, miners, or the U.S. Cavalry. In the 1950s and ’60s a secretary named Velma Johnston but known as Wild Horse Annie mounted a letter-writing campaign to have them protected from slaughter; it is said only the Vietnam War drew more letters to Congress.

“The public is not very receptive to the idea that these animals are out there dying a slow and terrible death,” Pogacnik says. “The public wants us to step in and help these horses.”

Population Running Wild

Even before this season’s fires and droughts, BLM horse and burro officials had their hands full.

The agency is charged under a 1973 law to protect, maintain and control the wild horse and burro herds in their areas. Its protection programs have worked so well that the population has almost tripled in those 25 years, reaching a level almost double what the land can support.

“We feel the range can sustain 27,000,” Pogacnik says. “And each year the habitat is depleted by drought or a population that’s too big, that number goes down.”

Worse, the horses are “an aggressive species,” scientists say. They are not native to North America and, since they lack natural predators, would expand to the point where they stress the land and force other species out. They compete for habitat with some endangered species, including the desert tortoise and the willow flycatcher.

Then the wild horse and burro populations would start encroaching on human settlements, ruining ranches and getting themselves shot or hit by cars. Finally, when they depleted the food and water supplies, the entire overly large wild horse population would die out.

“We don’t want to gather them all up, we just want to gather up enough so the ones who were left out there would have a reasonable healthy life,” says Terry Lewis, a BLM spokesman. The bureau is also testing a contraceptive vaccine for wild horses, he says.

A Special Relationship

The BLM’s horse and burro adoption program, which has placed more than 160,000 wild horses and burros since 1973, makes the animals available to most anyone who wants them and owns a sturdy enough corral.

After a year’s probation period, the adopter can do whatever he wants with the horse or burro, except “exploit its wildness,” in a bucking-bronco show for instance. Prices start as low as $125, and the bureau will even pay for gelding.

But there is a catch: the animals are entirely wild, and can take up to six months to domesticate.

“I can guarantee that when one of these animals gets off the range, no one will put a halter on it and lead it off the trailer,” Lewis says. “It’s not for everyone. And we discourage some people. If they haven’t had a horse before, we would suggest they may want to start with a horse that has already been domesticated.”

Some who have adopted BLM animals say “gentling” them (the term now used instead of “breaking,”) is well worth the effort.

“It’s a unique experience to have a wild animal and really be able to bond with it and gain its trust,” says Joyce North of Loleta, Calif., who adopts one to four BLM horses and burros per year. “Anyone can go and buy a horse and throw a saddle on it and ride. But with a mustang you build its trust. It’s just a very special friendship.”

The BLM program is a sensible way to keep the wild population down and has noticeably improved the quality of the wild herds, says Willis Lamm, who heads a network of wild-horse adopters in 22 states from Wyoming to Florida and who sometimes retrains other adopters’ problem cases.

And inexperience is not necessarily a problem.

“Some of the best adopters we’ve ever had, the wild horse is their first horse,” Lamm says. “The ones we’ve seen had the worst time with … come in with a little bit of horse experience, enough to think they know it all but not enough to know what they’re doing. They have a macho attitude, they try to walk in and intimidate that horse.”