Twenty miles east of Cody are the McCullough Peaks, named for a
nineteenth-century rancher, but otherwise misnamed because they are
only a low range of desert hills rising above 110,000 acres of
sagebrush overseen by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
That surrounding vastness is home to the McCullough Peaks Wild
Horse herd, currently numbering 300 head and roaming the range in
small groups of a dozen or so mares, foals, adolescent males, and
one dominant stallion. A colorful and diverse lot of grays,
sorrels, bays, strawberry roans and splotchy paints. The official
line from the BLM is that the herd is “beyond objective,” and
should number approximately 100. This is significant because
Wyoming (and the entire Intermountain West) is in the fourth
consecutive year of drought, and sections of the public range are
leased to ranchers, their cattle competing with the wild mustangs
for grass and water.
There are 40,000 wild horses scattered across federal rangelands
in the West, roughly half of them in Nevada, which is 86% public
domain. Nearly every western state has wild horses. Wyoming’s 7,000
are concentrated in the southwestern part of the state, and in the
Big Horn Basin up north, namely the McCullough Peaks herd and the
Fifteenmile Creek herd near Worland. There origins are varied. Some
bloodlines are Arabian and are traced to the sixteenth century
conquest of Mexico, others to stray ranch stock of just the last
few decades.
When people think of the roundup (or “gathering”) of wild horses
they might be reminded of John Huston’s 1961 film The
Misfits, starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in their
final roles. In the movie an airplane is used to drive the horses
into a corral in a remote box canyon, where “mustangers” rope and
drive them onto cattle trucks destined for a cannery, where the
horses are slaughtered and made into dog food. Those days are gone.
Today the BLM is forbidden to “put down” any excess horse
population on the range. That’s thanks to the 1971 Wild
Free-Roaming Horses and Burro Act (Nevada and Arizona have large
herds of wild burros).
Nowadays, the mustangs are gathered much the same way
(helicopters instead of planes), but are now trucked to regional
BLM corrals, where they are offered to the public for adoption
after the proper paperwork is completed and a fee is paid ($125 per
horse or burro; $250 for a mare and foal). Since 1973 150,000 wild
horses have been adopted this way. On the surface this sounds like
a great idea: federal altruism at its best.
But the aforementioned three-decades-old legislation is now
having a devastating effect (along with drought) on the range, if
not the herds themselves. In recent years, millions budgeted to the
BLM for wild horse management have been diverted to fight forest
and range fires. The McCullough herd, which used to be culled on a
yearly basis, has only been thinned twice in the last eight years
(1995 and 1999). Meanwhile, the average annual reproduction rate is
a normal 18%, doubling the size of the herd every three or four
years. Then there’s the taxpayer boondoggle.
It costs the taxpayers about $1,800 per horse to put them
through “the adoption pipeline”: $600 just to gather them, and up
to $1,200 for feeding, transportation costs, and a veterinarian
check (teeth, worming, an examination for Equine Infectious Anemia,
and a vaccination for West Nile Virus). Foals are kept with mares.
All this red tape keeps an expensive and inefficient system in
place, with attendant job security for local BLM bureaucrats. The
taxpayers get less than a 10% return on adoptions.
The BLM isn’t entirely to blame for this mess. Like its sister
federal agencies — the Forest Service, the National Park Service,
et al. — it is subject to endless litigation by environmental and
animal rights groups. For instance, People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Fund for Animals maintain that
the herds should be left on the range in an unmolested wild state.
These legal actions — like similar ones concerning logging on the
national forests — are designed as stalling tactics against
herd-thinning and range improvement, and as a weapon against leased
livestock grazing on public lands, the great bogeyman hindering
politically correct wild horse management, which is no management
at all.
Over the last couple of years there has been a problem with wild
horses being shot surreptitiously in remote areas. Separate
incidents in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado have resulted in the deaths
of scores of horses. This may be the work of deranged people, or of
disgruntled ranchers holding federal grazing leases and whose
cattle compete with wild horses for drought-stressed range. The BLM
has offered a $30,000 reward for help in solving the killings.
There’s no excuse for them, but the shootings highlight the fact
that there are too many mustangs on the federal range.
As they graze the grass down to the dirt in our drought-stricken
West, we see that the wild horse gathering and adoption program is
a good candidate for the new Bush Administration federal contract
privatization program. I know of a lot of out-of-work Wyoming
cowboys who would work for “wages,” which I think would suit the
American taxpayer just fine. As for litigation-happy enviros and
animal rights wackos: the answer is tort reform.
