By Karen E. Lange, HSUS
Gus Warr knew the wild horses under his charge were in trouble. It was the summer of 2002 in northwestern Utah, the fourth year of drought. Even the meager 6 to 8 inches of rain that usually fall in the parched Cedar Mountains hadn’t come. There was not enough water for the 900 horses Warr managed for the Bureau of Land Management. He watched as weak, thirsty animals stood by troughs, listlessly waiting for the trucks that delivered 12,000 gallons of water three to four times a week. Normally skittish, likely to bolt if a person approached within 50 yards, the Cedar Mountains horses did not even budge when the trucks pulled up. And Warr knew it was only going to get worse: The emergency water supply was starting to falter. Enough vehicles had passed over the dirt roads leading to the troughs that the fragile alkali soil was breaking down. Instead of delivering their cargo, four-wheel-drive trucks were sinking into patches of powdery quicksand. Warr, wild horse and burro specialist with the BLM, had little time left to save the herd.
“If a horse goes more than three or four days without water, they get very dehydrated; their kidneys start shutting down. … They’re just not going to survive.”
So Warr called for a roundup. Using helicopters, the BLM gathered 500 of the horses and took them to a holding facility, removing the animals permanently from the wild. The alternative was allowing potentially hundreds to die.
There is another solution: slowing population growth by vaccinating horses with a contraceptive known as PZP.
Wild horse populations double quickly—in as little as four years—and there are few places left out West where the animals are still free to live. Most of the range is leased to ranchers and used to graze their livestock. Ever since the 1971 passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the BLM has dealt with the unforgiving math of soaring horse numbers and limited space by rounding up animals in the 179 herd management areas it administers across 10 Western states. (Click here to read about an HSUS project that helps displaced burros.) Usually the gathers are not emergency measures, as happened at Cedar Mountains, but roundups the agency believes necessary to prevent such crises (though critics often say the land could support many more horses). The BLM policy, doggedly followed over the past four decades, has been to remove horses from areas where they or the land seem most in jeopardy—or where ranchers complain that horses compete with cattle—and place the animals up for adoption.
There is another solution: slowing population growth by vaccinating horses with a contraceptive known as PZP. But researchers and advocates who’ve argued in favor of using this method on a large scale haven’t gotten far.
And so year after year, BLM contractors have driven groups of horses into corrals, separating stallions from mares and mares from foals, breaking the strong bonds horses in a band form with each other. “You can see the longing of the stallions for the mares. They’ll never see each other again,” says Stephanie Boyles Griffin, HSUS senior director of innovative wildlife management and services. “It’s really painful to watch. You can see in their eyes, they’re in agony.”
A confluence of circumstances may soon change all that. Just as the BLM’s roundup strategy has reached a dead end, leaving the agency desperate for another approach, HSUS researchers have documented that a new version of the contraceptive, known as PZP-22, can keep mares from foaling for two or more years with each repeated application—twice as long as the original version (the name signifies the number of months it’s designed to be effective). A long-awaited shift from roundups to contraception could finally take place.
After a roundup, the horses left on the land keep reproducing—often at a faster pace than before, since competition for food and water is reduced. Soon the number of animals is once again over what the BLM considers an “appropriate management level,” leading to another roundup. During the 1980s 