News Page Seventy Seven
Americans pay high price to give stored horses home on the range
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No matter how many horses Hughes buries, he doesn't have to wait long for another trailer full of lives ones to rumble down the road. There are always more. Capacity here is 2,000 horses, a number Hughes is always close to, and today there are 15 more that that. There are the legendary wild horse of the American West, for some, a living symbol of America's natural strength and beauty, for others, feral pest that has over populated dwindling public lands.
The horses of this aging herd, and many like them, represent a growing problem. They are old, 15 years on average, and unwanted, but they are sent to this retirement home for horses by the public that demands their protection. That comes at a hefty price. They've taken a long expensive journey across the country to arrive at their new home. Here, on a ranch outside Bartlesville, they live out their days on 18,000 acres of land full of grass, ponds and creeks.
This year the federal government is spending about $17,500 each day just to feed wild horses protected from slaughter and too old to adopt out. Some will live more than 30 years. There are too many horses, so many that even adoptable ones live with the aging horses. "These horses are truly a great story of institutional resistance," said former Bureau of Land Management Director Pat Shea, who struggled under the Clinton administration to control and manage the wild herd. "No one has the gumption to actually deal with them."
More than 20.000 wild horses and burros have accumulated in resent years in government corrals and sanctuaries. About 36,000 more roam public space managed by the Interior Departments BLM, competing with grazing cattle for food, putting stress on the ecosystem, reproducing at a rate that can double their population every four years and facing few natural predators.
Taxpayers are being asked to pick up the bill, which is increasing rapidly. In 2000 when the total wild horse and burro population was about 51,000, the program cost about $21 million. In its current budget request, with 36,000 horses on the range and 20,000 in holding pens and sanctuaries, the BLM is asking for $42 million. That level of funding, BLM officials said, needs to be permanent.
"It's just dealing with all those numbers of horses," said Jeff Rawson, group manager of the BLM's National Wild Horse and Burro Program. Federal efforts to manage the herds, as mandated by the 1971 Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act, historically have been unsuccessful. Over the years, managers and wild horse and burro advocates have proposed an array of solutions.
One plan, to round up excess horses and adopt them out for about $125 a horse (the cost to taxpayers was about $1,400 each) left to thousands being sent to slaughterhouses in the 1980's and early 1990's, where they were sold for a profit and processed for human consumption in Europe. Restrictions enacted in 1997 now require adopters to sign an affidavit stating that they don't plan to sell an adopted animal for slaughter to keep the hose for a year before they can receive a title. That has reduced the number reaching the slaughterhouse to about 600 a year, said the attorney representing the two remaining horse slaughterhouses in the United States.
Another plan, to use a birth control vaccine on wild mares, is working but has been given to only about 1,500 horses since 1992. The two year vaccine is still being studied, but the BLM would rather use a four year vaccine, which is being developed. The BLM has begun studying a fourth option: pilot program is Wyoming, where two ranches took about 30 wild horses each in exchange for a one time payment of $1,800 per horse. The program cold expand to more ranchers, but the BLM has no money for that. The Wyoming ranches won't get rich on the program. They were paid $1,800 a horse, but the animals, already 10 to 12 years old, could live 20 more years.
Other solutions that never took off including using computer chip ear tags to track wild horse and euthanizing excess animals. Adoptions, still are done, and a handful of prisons in the West have partnered with the BLM to have inmates train the animals. After Training, the horses have a much better change of being adopted by private individuals. But for now, wild horses and burro managers are shifting their focus to sanitary. Sanctuaries, or long term holding facilities, cost less than holding horses in corrals and converted feedlots, like the BLM did until around 1988. But there are so many horses that the BLM needs more sanctuaries.
In the 1950's, Velman Johnston of Nevada, dubbed "Wild Horse Annie'" started a letter writing campaign, predominantly among school children to save the animals. "Seldom has an issue touched such a responsive chord," The Associated Press reported in July 1959. The horse protection people have got members of Congress beaten about their heads and shoulders by 14 year old girls who feel these horses are their own," he said. "When I was BLM director, the first time something adverse happened to a horse I must have gotten 500 mails telling me I was a bad person." In 1971, when poachers had reduced the estimated wild horse and burro population to about 25,000 President Nixon outlawed the hinting and killing of the animals and designed them as natural resources.
The Law, while well intentioned, has proved impossible to enforce. The BLM has never had what it calls an "appropriate management level" of horses on the range, meaning the number of horses the land can support, as determined by the government. Now, the BLM says, its as close as it's even been to achieving that. It hopes to trim the herd to 36,000 wild horses across the country to 26,000 by 2006.
To do that means rounding up horses and sending even more into sanctuaries in the Midwest, where ranchers who won competitive contracts are paid between $1.22 and $1.30 per horse a day to keep horses in perpetuity. Today, seven ranchers, four in Oklahoma and three in Kansas, keep about 13,600 wild horses. That's almost as many horses as remain on the range in all Western states except Nevada and Wyoming.
The BLM plans to open as many as four more sanctuaries. But is this what eh act intended: to keep so many horses in a never ending welfare system? "We're dealing with an animal population," Rawson said. "It's not something you get to a point and walk away." The BLM wanted to get 10,500 horses off the range this year, but only 3,400 were gathered before the horse and burro program ran out of money for the roundups. The BLM still hopes to round up 6,000 horse this summer, Rawson said.
A few miles outside Bartlesville, John Hughes climbs into his pickup truck and makes the round s to check on his wild horses. He used to have cattle on these endless acres of land, but business was changing, and he needed more stable income. In 1988, he received a BLM contract to keep the horse's on his Oklahoma ranch. This year, Hughes will receive $912,500 from the government to house them. He fertilizes grass, feeds the horses alfalfa hay in the winter, makes sure his fences are intact and buries a horse when it dies.
He has another contract to keep 2,000 wild horses on a second ranch and still keeps cattle on leased ranches. "I love the cattle business, but it requires a large amount of capital. This is great combination for us. There's no question about it, "Hughes said. "this give us steady income. Taking wild horses also has ben good for Wyoming ranchers Ben and Pauline Middleton, who house 28 horse at their rural ranch.
It sounds like a good win win deal for everybody." Pualine Middleton said. "The horses are certainly happier when they're out of the corral. We felt we were adequately paid," Last year, 550 people asked to review the BLM's contracts for two sanctuaries before they went out to bid: 18 people summated bids. The horses here in Osage County, all geldings, are considered unacceptable because they are too old.
Hughes, his white hair peeking our from his cowboy hat, drives up close to a group of horses gathered near his ranch house. A brown and white horse, No. 0675, according to the brand on his left hop stops and glances at two fellow geldings, which in turn away, manes bouncing as they pound the earth. Here, they eat all they want, drink from the ponds and creeks, and never worry about starving.
"They have a little easier life here," Hughes said. He does his job and pays little attention to the politics of the wild horse program. "A rancher in Oklahoma doesn't know anything about the BLM," he said. Sanctuaries are always full or close to it. "They're beautiful on the range. They really are," said Larry Johnson, a member of the Wild Horse and Burro Program Advisory Board, a panel that advise the BLM on horse management. "You can't fault public for wanting to protect that resource. It's the right thing to do, but at the same time, the public has to be willing to pay for it."
Written by, Martha Mendoza and Angie Wagner for The Associate Press
Laura Rauch/The Associate Press Took the above Picture.
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