ot.
Last fall, Josh Irving, the HSUS field technician assigned to Sand Wash, was able to dart 69 percent of targeted mares there, with help from Fox and Grams. That’s within the range The HSUS hoped to treat. It’s a slow process, not half as dramatic as a gather and removal, with results a year or more off, but Irving is convinced it’s the answer for Sand Wash. “You do have to put in the time and you have to be patient, but at day’s end, it’s cheaper and it works.”
Fox, Sand Wash’s wild horse and burro specialist, hopes he’s right. More than 400 horses live in the basin, an area the BLM estimates can support at most 362. With the herd increasing in size by 20 to 25 percent annually, it could triple within six years. Already, some parts of the area have little vegetation and others have lost their native grasses to cheatgrass, which has a lower percentage of digestible protein and a shorter growing season. “We’re looking at anything to slow down recruitment,” Fox says.
The BLM is investing $2.8 million into researching contraception and sterilization methods. What the agency would ideally like to find, Guilfoyle says, is a contraceptive that can be administered just once every five years—otherwise she can’t see contraception being used in the majority of the 179 areas BLM manages. Studies of a PZP vaccine that could be administered once every three to four years are under way, says John Turner of Ohio’s University of Toledo, who is doing the research for the BLM. The agency also plans to use private money to establish a prize challenge encouraging research into wild horse contraceptives, including easier methods of administering the drugs than darting or gathering.
The BLM, though, needn’t wait for further research to use PZP-22, the best contraception that exists, says Boyles Griffin. “We don’t have a perfect tool,” she says. “But we have a tool that works really well.”
Turner agrees. If the agency had begun using PZP and PZP-22 on a large scale 15 years ago, the current crises of too many horses in management and holding areas could have been avoided or at least delayed, he says. Instead, the BLM is in a tough situation: Horse numbers in management areas are rising fast and in many areas exceed legal limits. In those places the agency cannot gather horses, treat them with PZP-22 and put them back. According to the law, it must gather and remove them. So more removals will probably have to take place before the BLM shifts to contraception.
Holly Hazard, HSUS senior vice president for programs and innovations, says the switch from roundups to contraception represents a fundamental change in the culture of the BLM. “The agency is set up for large number, shorter-term, aggressive gathers—that’s the skill set they have in place. I’m hopeful within the next two to three years they will have a significant minority of their populations for which they are trying some new technology.”
When Boyles Griffin looks toward the future, she sees all the ways in which PZP-22, available now, could improve the lives of wild horses: With contraception, there will be fewer roundups in which horses in a herd are separated from each other, fewer gathers overall long-term, fewer horses in captivity and more opportunities for strategic removal of the youngest horses, who can be trained and stand a good chance of being adopted. With fewer roundups, there will be fewer chances for horses to be accidentally killed or injured, as happened most recently during September in Wyoming, when 10 horses died. Boyles Griffin says it’s possible that if next year’s results at Sand Wash are good and if the mares continue to receive the vaccine every other year, that herd will never need to be gathered again.
The last time the Sand Wash horses were rounded up was 2008, when 263 of them were removed from the range. Those who weren’t immediately adopted after the gather were taken to a crowded, dusty holding area in Canon City, Colorado, where 2,500 horses live on the grounds of a prison. With the help of inmates, horses are readied for adoption. They have their ho