BLM needs to find a better way to manage wild horses.© iStock.com

By anyone's calculation, The Bureau of Land Management's handle on the Wild Horse and Burro Program has been a debacle. 

The agency, charged with implementing Congress' intent to protect the wild animals "as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands," has effectively cut that land by half and the herd size by nearly as much, from 48,000 horses and burros to 28,000.

The agency now has more horses in long-term holding facilities than it manages in the wild and expends more than two-thirds of its budget to care for the horses it has collected with no long-term plan for their care or adoption. Add to that the climbing price of hay and fuel, and the agency is not surprisingly at a crossroads.

They didn't get there by accident. Year after year, the agency has protected the interests of livestock ranchers over wild horses by subsidizing the grazing of livestock and taking wild horses off the land to make room for cattle. Their "long term holding program"—implemented a decade ago as a purported "stop gap" measure to deal with a burgeoning captive population—was won by their insistence that they grossly reduce both the numbers of horses and the land available to them.

Immunocontraception and Wild Horses

A form of immunocontraception known as PZP was first shown to prevent pregnancies in wild horses at Assateague Island National Seashore, Maryland, in 1989. The National Park Service (NPS) has been using PZP to stabilize the wild horse population at Assateague since 1994. At Cape Lookout National Seashore, North Carolina, the NPS began using PZP to stabilize the wild horse population at Shackleford Banks in 2000. In collaboration with The HSUS and our research team, the Bureau of Land Management has tested PZP extensively on wild horses living on public lands in the western United States. Policy guidelines and biological models have been developed for the use of PZP as a wild horse management tool on public lands, but none of these herds are formally managed with PZP at this time.

It turns out, unsurprisingly, the program is no stop-gap measure; it is the only area where the horse population is growing under the agency's care.

Time to Try Immunocontraception

There was, and is, a solution.

As early as 1982, the National Academy of Sciences called on the agency to use PZP immunocontraception, finding it effective and proactive. In 2004, the U.S. Geological Survey found that the use of PZP reduced the cost of wild horse management and would allow wild horses to stay on the land.  Had the agency adopted an aggressive contraception program then, the cost of long-term holding would be minimized and there would be no crisis today. 

In 2006, the Bureau of Land Management signed a memorandum of understanding with The HSUS to begin working on promoting PZP as a management tool.  Yet, even today, the use of contraceptives remains only an "option"  at the discretion of  individual herd managers, and is seldom used.

The position of The HSUS is that no horse should pay the ultimate price for the agency's mismanagement and that killing horses is not the answer. The Bureau of Land Management made a social contract with Americans when it placed horses in long term care: The horses would be cared for life, and the commitment was unbreakable.

The agency, horse advocates and policy makers are paralyzed from working toward a solution as long as the agency considers killing horses an option. The HSUS will not participate in any program to remove more horses as long as killing horses remains a possibility. We do not believe Congress will, either.

The Solutions:

1. The agency should immediately institute a mandatory policy that no horse captured in a roundup is returned to the range without a PZP contraceptive vaccine.
2. The agency should expand the range areas available to horses back to their original acreage.
3. The agency should begin an aggressive program of opportunistic darting (the process of injecting the contraceptive with a dart from a distance) of horses in the field and separate from any roundup schedule.
4. The agency should cease from rounding up any more horses from the range than it reasonably estimates it can adopt out to caring, responsible families.

First, the agency should publicly and clearly take the lethal option off the table. With no change in management, they could kill 30,000 horses today and have 30,000 "excess" horses five years from now. It is not a solution. It is a stop gap measure to relieve the pressure so they can continue their same failed management strategy. It prevents organizations and policy makers from working out a solution that will benefit the horses, the agency and the taxpayer.

What You Can Do

Contact the director of The Bureau of Land Management and your congressional representatives. Click here to take action.