s. (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 and 1990s, the agency managed to find places for most of the horses it removed, but then this never-ending cycle began to create a crisis. As the economy faltered in the first decade of the 2000s and drought caused the price of hay to rise, there wasn’t as much demand for horses. Between 2002 and 2012, the number of horses adopted each year fell by two thirds, from almost 6,000 to about 2,000, but the agency continued to gather between 5,000 and 10,000 horses a year. BLM holding facilities filled with horses no one wanted—animals who would never be returned to the wild and would cost $45,000 each to care for over a 30-year life span (versus $1,000 at most to gather, treat and release a mare with PZP-22, preventing two births over two years). By 2013 there were 47,000 horses in BLM holding areas—more than the estimated 40,000 animals still in the wild. The agency was spending about half its wild horse budget to care for them. And Congress was refusing to provide more money to set up new holding facilities.
Meanwhile, the outlook for the land and the horses left on the range was not good. In places with rainfall amounts as low as Cedars’, high numbers can put animals at risk during dry years—and with climate change, there are more and more of those. In other places, the land, much of it semi-desert, suffers. Horses eat the higher-nutrient native grasses and lower quality invasive species can take root in their place. To a visitor, it may look as though there’s enough vegetation on the land. But horses don’t eat juniper or sagebrush or greasewood.
Guy Palmer, a Washington State University professor, explains it in a video for the National Academy of Sciences. “If the horses just continue to grow ... in the end, two things are assured to happen—the rangeland loses its quality; it’s actually destroyed,” says Palmer, who chaired a National Academy of Sciences committee that urged the BLM to adopt PZP. “[And] eventually the horses themselves will become ill.”
The strategy of roundup and removal has brought the BLM to a 