Horsing around
A friend of mine asked me to look into this particular bill, which, according to the title, is intended “[t]o amend the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act to improve the management and long-term health of wild free-roaming horses and burros, and for other purposes.”
The Bureau of Land Management, in charge of these critters, doesn’t much like the idea. Ed Roberson, Assistant Director, Renewable Resources & Planning, testified in March [pdf]:
H.R. 1018 would require the BLM to continue to identify appropriate management levels, but the legislation repeals the requirement in the 1971 Act that excess animals be removed if these levels are exceeded. Under H.R. 1018, the BLM would be required to “exhaust all practicable options to maintain populations on the range” before removing any animals. H.R. 1018 would also require that an adoption demand exists before removing animals. Without a clear mechanism to trigger removals, wild horse and burro populations could grow exponentially. As we noted before, adoption rates have declined substantially in recent years. In 2008, only 3,700 animals were adopted. If gathers are limited to only animals that can be adopted, wild horse and burro populations on the range could increase sharply and cause severe destruction of rangeland habitats (including wildlife and fish habitats).
Considering that they’re having to compete with livestock for grazeland and water, I doubt there’s going to be any huge upsurge in the population, and if there is, these things tend to be self-correcting — assuming the BLM isn’t also messing with the predator population, which may be a lot to assume.
Madeleine (Mrs. T. Boone) Pickens proposes to take some of the animals off the BLM’s hands by establishing a privately-operated sanctuary in northeast Nevada, which strikes me as an excellent idea. But while this will reduce the BLM’s inventory, it presumably won’t do anything to improve the lot of horses not yet sequestered by the Bureau.
This bill isn’t a cure-all by any means: it doesn’t do much of anything for the grazeland and water issues, and nothing in it is likely to increase the number of adoptions. (If anything, they’ll decrease at first, since the Bureau would have to get statements from the adopters to guarantee the animals won’t wind up on the dinner menu somewhere.) Still, it seems to be a step in the right direction.
fillyjonk »
23 April 2009 · 8:10 am
My first thought: what preys on wild horses?
(Mountain lions, it turns out. Especially the foals).
Not sure whether there are enough mountain lions to take care of a surging population. Hrm. I wonder how horse reproductive rates compare to deer, that’s the only model I have to go by.
I hope Pickens gets his sanctuary, but as you pointed out, that doesn’t help ones still in the wild.
I’d hate to see, some ten years down the road, lots of outraged news stories on the “poor starving” wild horses because they overpopulated.
McGehee »
23 April 2009 · 11:36 am
The bill seems to be aimed at addressing the outrage over what happens to removed wild (really, feral) horses that aren’t adopted. I think we’d be better off with a bill to thin the human herd, to get rid of people who would rather those horses die miserably of starvation and disease int he wild than quickly in a slaughterhouse (for pet food, in case anyone wonders).
And feral horses don’t only compete with domestic livestock; in many parts of the horses’ range they also compete with indigenous wildlife such as pronghorn, desert bighorn sheep and mule deer. Some of the same people who don’t want feral horses sold to slaughter, also don’t want those big game species hunted — and they’d rather crash those populations with competition from burgeoning herds of hooved rats, than have them be so plentiful that they have to be hunted for their own long-term survival.
Gabrielle Dolly »
24 April 2009 · 7:52 am
Considering that horses are an introduced (i.e., alien) species, one would expect that the Usual Suspects would be calling for their removal by any means necessary. Just like they’re doing for humans.
GFD