By DAVE PHILIPPS
New York Times
BEAVER COUNTY, Utah — When he was a boy on a 150,000-acre ranch here in the desert mountains, which are so remote that there is no power line and electricity comes from a turbine in a mountain spring, Mark Wintch would thrill at the sight of a rare band of wild horses kicking up dust as they disappeared over a rise.
“Now there’re so darned many,” Mr. Wintch, 38, said, shaking his head as he bounced his red pickup through sage-dotted public land that his family has ranched since 1935. “Look out there. You barely see a blade of grass.”
Management plans by the federal government call for no horses in this area. But five horses looked up in alarm at his truck, then wheeled off through the brush. “I counted 60 last night,” Mr. Wintch said. “If I put my cows out here, they’d starve.”
Wild horses may be a symbol of America’s unbound freedom in the Old West. But in the new West, they are a tightly controlled legal entity, protected by federal law and managed by a perplexing system on the brink of a crisis.
There are now twice as many wild horses in the West as federal land managers say the land can sustain. The program that manages them has broken down, and unchecked populations pose a threat to delicate public land, as well as the ranches that rely on it.
For decades, the Bureau of Land Management has relied on a strategy of rounding up excess horses with helicopters and storing them in a system of private ranches and feedlots. But now there are almost 50,000 horses in storage, and the system is out of space and money. In response, the agency has drastically cut roundups, leaving horses to multiply on the range.
The Bureau of Land Management says that Western rangelands can sustain about 26,000 wild horses. There are now 48,000. In five years, there could be more than 100,000, according to agency projections.
“It’s a train wreck,” said Robert Garrott, a professor of wildlife management and ecology at Montana State University. “I’m worried we are entering an intractable situation that will damage the land for decades.”
If left unchecked, horse populations could decimate grass and water on public lands, he said, potentially leading to starvation among horse herds and other native species, as well as lawsuits from ranchers and wildlife groups.
Mr. Wintch and a group of other local ranchers sued the federal government in April, demanding that it remove excess wild horses.
While some ranchers and politicians have pushed to slaughter the horses in storage to free up money and space to continue roundups, Professor Garrott said the idea had proved so controversial that the Bureau of Land Management and Congress had repeatedly refused.
“Horses are so beloved in our society that no one wants to make a hard decision,” Professor Garrott said. “So we take this disastrous policy and just keep kicking it down the road.”
Wild horses today are the descendants of stray American Indian ponies and cavalry mounts, as well as more recent ranch stock. Roaming a patchwork of parched rangeland roughly the size of Alabama, they have been protected by federal law since 1971 from capture or hunting. Since then, the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees most of the herds, has said that keeping the population around 26,000 would ensure the long-term health of the horses and the land.
Every year, the agency removes horses from the land and offers them for adoption, using programs with 4-H children and prison inmates to train the animals. But adoption numbers have never come close to equaling removal numbers.
So for about 25 years, the agency has been paying contractors to house mustangs in private feedlots and pastures spread across several states, which now costs the agency almost $50 million a year.
The hefty bill has sapped the management program’s ability to do much else. As a result, the agency cut roundups this year by almost 80 percent.
This summer, two longtime storage facilities abruptly ended their contracts with the Bureau of Land Management, forcing the agency to find a place for nearly 3,000 horses.
“It’s a triage situation,” said Steve Ellis, the agency’s deputy director for operations. “We can’t do all we need to.”
The agency usually rounds up about 9,000 animals a year. This year, it will round up just 2,500.
Mr. Ellis said he was exploring new strategies, such as sending some excess animals to Guatemalan farmers, but the agency does not have a broad, long-term solution.
“It’s going to take some patience,” Mr. Ellis said. “I know some people will say, ‘We’ve been patient for 20 years,’ but we have to look forward. This tough situation we are in is not going to be fixed overnight.”
But patience in parts of the West has worn as thin as the grass.
Ranchers in Wyoming won a lawsuit this summer that demanded the agency remove horses from public and private lands east of Rock Springs. Though the agency had little room in storage, it was forced to round up almost 900 horses there in September.
The Bureau of Land Management expects more lawsuits as horse populations grow, pushing storage costs even higher.
“For years, we all warned they were managing their way into a crisis, and now they have it,” said Ginger Kathrens, the executive director of the horse advocacy group the Cloud Foundation, as she watched helicopters sweep the sage at a roundup in Rock Springs. She said she feared the Bureau of Land Management and ranchers would use the situation to pressure lawmakers to slaughter horses in storage.
Horse advocacy groups say that the population problem is overblown, and that the agency has unfairly relegated horses to scraps of marginal land where they are vastly outnumbered by cattle, then blamed the horses for the damage done by all grazers. Many are pushing for expanded horse territories and better management on the range.
But those advocates also agree that the practice of removing and storing horses is unsustainable.
Bureau of Land Management officials said they were forced to create a huge storage system by laws and policies that require the removal of horses from the range, but that provide little funding for alternatives and prohibit horses from being euthanized or sold to be slaughtered.
For decades, horse advocacy groups and the National Academy of Sciences have recommended using fertility-control drugs instead of roundups. But the agency contends that the drugs, which must be given every two years by injection, are impractical to administer in large herds on open lands.
The government has been trying to develop more effective drugs, such as an injection that will last five years, but it is unclear when they might become available.
On his ranch, Mr. Wintch drove up to a juniper-dotted hillside where a few years before, state wildlife workers had fenced in eight-foot squares with wire mesh to study the effect of grazing. In the protection of the squares, tawny tufts of Indian rice grass nodded in the breeze. Outside the squares, hard-packed dirt held a few vestiges of grass cropped down to nubs.
“This is all horses,” he said. “I haven’t put out cattle here at all this year.”
Last fall, the Bureau of Land Management sent a letter to Mr. Wintch and a dozen other ranchers in the region, saying that wild horses were increasing and that with no money for roundups, the ranchers should voluntarily cut their herds by half.
So this spring, Mr. Wintch sold a third of his cattle and let the rest out in his hayfields, where, he said, they will eat about $150,000 in winter hay.
“We can’t last out here if this continues,” Mr. Wintch said.
The Bureau of Land Management replied to the lawsuit by Mr. Wintch and the group of other local ranchers last week, denying it has violated federal law by failing to control horse populations.
“We don’t want to sue, but this is killing us financially,” said Tammy Pearson, who ranches near Mr. Wintch.
This summer, she kept her cattle out of the Bureau of Land Management pasture she leases because, she said, the horses had eaten the grass.
“It’s not a horse issue,” she said, looking across the pasture, where about 60 wild horses grazed. “It’s a range health issue. This land is getting beat up pretty good. Sure, it’s easy to blame the ranchers, but if you took us all off the land, you still wouldn’t solve the problem. The horses would just continue to expand. And then what?”
She chuckled at a small gray colt gamboling after its mother, and then, like many ranchers, wondered aloud why the 50,000 horses in storage could not be slaughtered and the meat put to some use.
“The situation we have right now is kind of insane,” she said. “People just think horses should be free, and as long as they are free they’ll be fine. But it’s not true.”