By Lindy Browning | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
In a shocking and unexpected post on Twitter/X, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis posted that he wants the Trump administration to give at least half the funding that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) uses to manage Colorado wild horses to Colorado.
The post came from his personal page, not his official governor’s page.
Polis wrote, “…the BLM spends $187.8 million dollars a year on the Wild Horse Program, including $8.5 million on the ‘inhumane horse roundups’, and over $100 million caring for the 60,000 horses in holding facilities. Giv[ing] half that amount to the states with wild horses (like CO) with guardrails for horse treatment, we will efficiently manage the population through birth control, eliminating the need for costly roundups and holding, saving US taxpayers $75 million.”
While reasonable-minded people can agree from any political party that federal waste and abuse is wrong, the complexity of the Wild Horse Program is a highly emotionally-charged discussion with reasonable people on multiple sides of the issue having different opinions.
While no one wants to see the wild horses harmed in the management of the herds and lands, federal lands support multiple interests, some of those interests are conflicting.
Wild horse advocates range in opinions from leaving them all free, to more pragmatic views that understand that they must be managed for the species to survive.
According to the Sierra Club website, “Wild horses are reproducing at unsustainable rates. Between 2007 and 2021, their numbers more than tripled.
“In their search for forage, wild horses are tearing up high-desert vegetation, degrading riparian areas, and trampling fragile native plants. Free-roaming horses and burros are a major cause of the destruction of the top layer of desert soil. As climate change makes the west hotter and drier, the animals are struggling to find water too. In some places, horses have been known to die of starvation and dehydration,” reads the website.
“Wild-horse advocates, cattle ranchers, range ecologists and federal officials have struggled for decades to agree on a solution,” the website continues. “Roundups for slaughter are off the table as a matter of both humane treatment and U.S. law. Birth-control programs have shown promise, but they are difficult to carry out and are opposed by some horse advocates who express worries about horse health, genetic diversity and unintentional sterilization. Some horse advocates complain that the BLM’s annual roundups can be inhumane.”
Polis, among other state officials and wild horse advocates, has long been frustrated and at times outraged over the way that BLM manages the Wild Horse Program across Colorado, and the western states.
To that end, Polis and other state lawmakers created the Colorado Wild Horse Working Group last year because they were upset with the BLM’s annual low-flying helicopter roundups that corralled mustangs and shipped them to holding pens.
The 23-member task force created through Senate Bill 275 has $1.5 million in state funds and a mandate to recommend “humane, non-lethal alternatives” for wild horse population control.
The task force members, including a BLM representative, had been meeting for nine months, getting closer to offering solutions that are likely to include a state wild horse sanctuary and a paid team to shoot fertility darts at mares.
In spite of the work of the task force, BLM rejected the work of the group and a request from the group to delay scheduled roundups, and went ahead with the federal helicopter chase round ups in the Bookcliff Area Management Unit.
In that particular unit, “The federally-determined appropriate management level of the Little Book Cliffs herd is 90-150 horses, and the current population is 203, including 22 foals. That means there are only about 50 animals more than the upper end of the appropriate level. The BLM wanted to remove 100 of those horses, a number that halves the number of horses in the unit.
“This will be the largest roundup ever in Little Book Cliffs,” Polis wrote. “This is an escalation of roundups for this area, rather than my strongly-preferred approach of more measured population management, which prioritizes the well-being of these animals.”
During the latest federal roundup on the Little Bookcliffs Unit in September, three horses were killed by BLM. Two were euthanized because of previous injuries, but an older mare with a foal on her side was chased so aggressively that she broke her leg in a hole that she couldn’t avoid due to the chase, and left a young foal an orphan. The foal was caught later and is now in a foster facility.
In May 2022, the governor halted the roundup of wild horses when 144 wild horses that had been captured and sent to a holding facility in Canon City fell ill and died.
The Canon City disease outbreak among wild horses is believed to be the deadliest in recent BLM history. The identified contagion is Equine Influenza Virus (EIV), a virus that is routinely vaccinated against in the equine world and is included in the agency’s vaccine regimen for captured animals. All 144 of the deceased wild horses originally came from the West Douglas Herd Area, also in Colorado. It was determined that the horses were either unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated against EIV, despite being rounded up in July/August of 2021 and in the bureau’s care for nearly 10 months.
In response to Polis’ post, some people who commented on the post reminded Polis that since he is “the father of wolf reintroduction,” and the state is planning to transplant wolves into the same areas that the wild horse herds are located, the problem of BLM helicopter roundups may no longer be required, as the wolves are known to kill horses.
Others commented that they believed that Polis is just making an attempt to use the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency being headed up by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as a means to divert federal dollars to Colorado, and he isn’t really interested in saving money and being efficient.
Perhaps the state of Colorado, and the BLM should look to the wild horse herd management of the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group in Arizona or to the American Wild Horse Conservation program in Nevada for best practices, since they are considered the best wild horse management groups in the United States, according to experts across the board.
AWHC and SRWHMG are touted as the leading organizations that advocate for the humane protection of wild horses and burros on public lands. AWHC’s in-the-wild management program in Nevada’s Virginia Range is the world’s largest and most humane fertility control program for wild horses.