A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 , 2019
Three horses were later eutha-
nized because of injuries, the BLM
said.
Watching from a distant hill
were a few activists, including
Laura Leigh, who has sued the
agency over its treatment of wild
horses during roundups and oth-
er policies and won. When asked
about the proposal, she scoffed. It
did not address overgrazing by
livestock and ignored mining and
gas projects that squeeze horses
out of public land, she said.
“They don’t even know what’s
going on out here. They’re drug
salesmen,” she said of the Hu-
mane Society, which holds a feder-
al registration for PZP but insists
it does not profit from it. “They
sold the wild horse down the riv-
er.”
Other critics, including a for-
mer chief executive of the Hu-
mane Society, have been similarly
scathing. The proposal is vague,
they say, and could allow surgical
sterilization of mares, a procedure
viewed by horse advocates as bru-
tally invasive. Eventually, the cost
of feeding a ll the horses in holding
would provide an opening for
mass euthanasia, they say.
The criticism has hit Return to
Freedom, a California-based
horse advocacy group that signed
onto the plan. It has lost donors
and battled accusations that it
supports roundups and steriliza-
tion. But Neda DeMayo, the
group’s CEO, said the plan is an
opportunity to prove fertility con-
trol can work, even in large areas
where horses are difficult to
reach.
“The fact that we have a chance
at shifting management to move
away f rom these traumatic, s ense-
less roundups and move toward
better solutions in the near future
is critical,” DeMayo said. Ranch-
ers, she added, “are not going to
say, ‘ Thanks, guys, we’re just going
to take our cows off now.’ A huge
step forward is that there is con-
versation.”
Whether Congress will agree is
an open question. House appro-
priators budgeted $6 million for a
pilot version of the proposal — a
“not serious” sum, according to
Lane, of the beef association. The
Senate has yet to weigh in.
The day after the roundup near
the mine, three semis pulled up
across the state outside Reno, at
the largest BLM horse holding
and adoption center in the coun-
try. Inside the trucks were
the horses captured the day be-
fore.
Workers separated the animals
into groups — stallions to one
corral, nursing mares and foals to
another, “dry” mares to another.
Among the dry mares was the
white one Goicoechea had recog-
nized.
Over the next few weeks, she
would be branded and vaccinat-
ed. She might be adopted here.
But more likely, she would be
shipped out to a federally funded
corral or pasture — one more
horse off the range and into gov-
ernment storage.
[email protected]imals w ere hazards to workers at a
nearby gold mine, a BLM official
said: There had been 14 horse-ve-
hicle collisions since December.
Shortly after 9 a.m., a helicop-
ter emerged over a faraway ridge.
Like a buzzing sheepdog, it herd-
ed a band of frightened mustangs
running below toward a “Judas
horse” — a domestic animal that
led its wild cousins down a bur-
lap-lined corridor that dead-end-
ed in a pen. Among the horses was
the white mare.
Over four hours, two helicop-
ters pushed 117 horses into the
trap. Foals, some w eeks old, strug-
gled to keep up. A lone black
stallion stumbled u nder t he chop-
per before relenting and heading
into the pen, the gate clanging
behind him.Goicoechea, who is also Ne-
vada’s state veterinarian, insists
he likes wild horses. But he said he
has seen them starve in dry years,
and he’s seen land he claims they
ruined.
“I know that white mare, and I
can tell you when she was born —
two years ago,” he said, pointing to
a horse whose tail whipped l ightly
in the midsummer wind. But, he
said, “they have to be managed
appropriately.”‘Traumatic’ roundups
The next day, the BLM began a
three-week roundup in the area.
The agency said the 1.6 million-
acre swath of eastern Nevada was
home to more than 3,300 wild
horses, or four times the “appro-
priate management level.” The an-found the modeling convincing.
“Those graphs, it hits you hard.”
Goicoechea said he was “very
skeptical” when approached in
2015 by the Humane Society, an
organization best known among
ranchers for campaigns against
slaughterhouses and for “Meat-
less Mondays.” He agreed to at-
tend a meeting in Reno, but he
didn’t tell peers.
Initial meetings fell apart over
horse advocates’ refusal to enter-
tain euthanasia, participants said.
After ranching representatives
agreed t o take killing off the table,
meetings resumed last year in
Utah, w ith a push from Rep. C hris
Stewart (R). Goicoechea now talks
up the plan at county meetings,
and he testified about it in July
before a Senate subcommittee.tary to euthanize older and un-
adopted animals or sell them for
slaughter, Congress has for much
of the past three decades blocked
those powers in annual appropri-
ations bills.
But as the free-roaming and
fast-reproducing horse and burro
population mushrooms — from
40,000 in 2013 to 88,000 last year,
according to the BLM — support
for the animals has wobbled. Pres-
ident Trump’s budget has called
for sales and killing, as have
House appropriators and the
BLM’s wild-horse advisory com-
mittee. The status quo, a bureau
official told lawmakers in July,
could r esult in half a million hors-
es on the range by 2030.
“We heard from key members
of Congress that... they were
leaning more and more toward
letting the agency have the au-
thority to kill horses,” s aid Gillian
Lyons, a senior legislative special-
ist for the Humane Society Legis-
lative Fund.
The ranching groups say they
had come to believe the opposite
— that Congress, regularly be-
sieged by impassioned pleas from
horse lovers, would never permit
the culling of a symbol of the
American spirit.
“We don’t see the world the
same way,” E than Lane, vice presi-
dent of government affairs for the
National Cattlemen’s Beef Associ-
ation and executive director of the
group’s P ublic Lands Council, said
of animal welfare groups. “The
only way this has been successful
is us recognizing their concerns
over how these horses are man-
aged and them recognizing our
concerns over how the rangelands
are managed.”
Fertility control could be a com-
promise. Neither ranchers nor the
BLM have ever bought into con-
traception as a large-scale solu-
tion. Last year, the bureau treated
just 702 wild horses.
But modeling by ecologists and
economists — brought in by the
American Society for the Preven-
tion of Cruelty to Animals, an-
other member of the alliance —
found that if fertility control were
administered to about 90 percent
of mares that remain o n the range,
then roundups could dramatical-
ly slow after four years. After
10 years, it says, about 38,
horses would roam the West,
much closer to the government’s
target population of 27,000. By
then, roundups w ould be rare and
the few gathered horses could be
adopted out, the plan posits.
“I believe in this proposal,” s aid
Goicoechea, who participated in
negotiations on behalf of the beef
association and Eureka County,
Nev., where he is a commissioner.
He s aid he thinks i t would require
the development of long-term
co ntraception such as horse intra-
uterine devices, or IUDs, but hethree times what the fragile ter-
rain can handle. To address this,
the BLM, which is charged with
managing most of the animals,
periodically rounds up horses and
now has nearly 50,000 in holding.
The agency says caring for the
warehoused animals devours
most of its wild-horse budget,
leaving little for other approach-
es.
Horse advocates call the round-
ups cruel, contend t hat millions of
cattle do vastly more damage to
public lands than thousands of
horses, and insist mustangs must
never be killed. Ranchers and
some environmentalists view the
horses as feral pests that damage
ecosystems, compete for resourc-
es with cattle and wildlife and
should be culled or sold.
But at a time of deep political
polarization, something almost
unrecognizable is floating around
Capitol Hill: a compromise. Over
three years, major ranching and
hunting organizations, represent-
ed by Goicoechea and others, have
been negotiating with animal wel-
fare groups, including the Hu-
mane Society o f the United States.
These strange bedfellows recently
unveiled a wild-horse proposal
that they say meets both sides’
goals: It keeps mustangs alive,
and it gets a lot more off the land.
There are just a couple of catch-
es: It would cost $50 million a
year, swelling the BLM’s horse
budget by two-thirds. And most
wild-horse advocacy groups hate
it.
The compromise plan
The 10-year proposal calls for
scaling up the r oundups, or “gath-
ers,” that animal activists have
long despised — capturing up to
20,000 horses and burros each
year. Those horses would live in
private pastures or sanctuaries
that provide cheaper and “more
natural living situations” t han the
corrals the BLM now depends on.
Wild-horse adoptions, which last
year numbered about 3,100,
would have to increase, the plan
says. Its final pillar is aggressive
use of fertility control, such as
PZP, an injection delivered annu-
ally by dart.
“This plan doesn’t benefit the
horses at all, or taxpayers. It ben-
efits the livestock industry,” said
Grace Kuhn, spokeswoman for
the American Wild Horse Cam-
paign. “It’s more business as usual
that could end in the mass killing
of America’s wild horses.”
The alliance behind the plan,
which includes one prominent
wild-horse organization, dismiss-
es that as a misrepresentation of
its proposal — and of political
reality. Although the 1971 federal
law that protects wild horses and
burros allows the interior secre-
HORSES FROM A
Ranchers, animal groups
seek long-elusive peace
PHOTOS BY CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POSTA herd of wild horses in the Triple B Complex, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, near Ely, Nev., in July. The BLM periodically rounds up wild horses and now has nearly 50,000 in holding.
J.J. Goicoechea harvests hay in July in Newark Valley, near Eureka, Nev. He has represented
major ranching and hunting organizations in negotiations over wild horses on public lands.Laura Leigh, founder of Wild Horse Education, and other animal advocates document a Bureau
of Land Management horse roundup near Ely, Nev. She calls such roundups “senseless.”UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws