(Beth Clifton collage)
Friends of Animals blocked use of contraception while wild horse herd multiplied
GARDNERVILLE, Nevada––One of the largest planned gathers of wild horses in recent memory, scheduled for Pine Nut Mountains Herd Management Area of western Nevada in fall 2018, results directly from Friends of Animals’ May 2016 claimed success in causing the Bureau of Land Management to retreat from deploying contraceptives to stop herd growth.
The Bureau of Land Management reinstated the use of contraceptive horse herd population control as a component of a 10-year management plan introduced on November 28, 2017, but by then the estimated Pine Nut Mountains horse herd had increased to nearly four times the estimated optimal population for the range.
(Anthony Marr photo)
Range population four times optimum
The Bureau of Land Management now intends to remove 575 wild horses from the Pine Nut Mountains, leaving about 80, including 26 horses and not more than 8 colts near Fish Springs, human population 650, the largest community within the herd management area.
“There is one certainty,” ANIMALS 24-7 concluded on May 16, 2016, in reporting about Friends of Animals’ claimed victory. “Pressure will continue to build for the Bureau of Land Management to remove Pine Nut Mountains wild horses from the range, hard hit by drought and other probable effects of global warming.
Most dramatic were the Bald Mountain fire of 2012 and the Bison Fire of early July 2013, which burned 37 square miles on the east-facing slopes of Galena Peak and Mount Siegel.
The Bureau of Land Management planned gather made a prophet out of ANIMALS 24-7, but that it would be coming was never hard to predict.
(Beth Clifton photo)
15 years of almost unrestrained herd growth
The Pine Nut Mountains wild horse herd has grown with little restraint other than range conditions since 2003, when the Bureau of Land Management rounded up and removed 320 horses of the then-estimated 438 horses in the 98,600-acre wild horse herd management area.
The herd management area is about 25% of the total of 400,000 acres in the Pine Nut Mountains that are under BLM control.
Based on historical experience, the Bureau of Land Management believes the Pine Nut Mountains herd management area can sustain from 118 to 179 wild horses, who seasonally share the range with cattle and sheep.
After the 2003 gather reduced the Pine Nut Mountains wild horse herd to barely 100, the herd doubled to circa 215 by 2010, increased to about 332 by 2014, and is now around 775, according to the Bureau of Land Management.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Herd reduction pending since 2013
The Bureau of Land Management proposed to gather and remove wild horses from the Pine Nut Mountains Herd Management Area in 2013.
Objected Wild Horse Conspiracy author Craig C. Downer, “1,511 cow-calf pairs and 12,707 sheep graze its several allotments at various seasons. This is the equivalent of over 1,000 cow-calf pairs grazing all year long,” with “a preponderance of grazing early in the season when forage is highest in nutritional value.”
But the Bureau of Land Management has been mandated by law to lease grasslands for grazing ever since the ancestral agency was created by Congress in 1812. Though the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act added wild horse conservation and management to the BLM responsibilities, the BLM is required to balance the needs of horses with cattle and sheep grazing, and does not have the option to simply evict cattle and sheep to favor horses.
The 2013 planned gather was stopped when U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks “ruled that the BLM failed to conduct the necessary analysis required under the National Environmental Policy Act,” summarized Scott Sonner of Associated Press.
Science & Conservation Center staff including lab supervisor Elizabeth McShane (left), director Kimberly M. Frank (center) and senior scientist Kayla Grams (right). (Beth Clifton photo)
ZonaStat-H
Meanwhile, stretching for 40 miles southeast of Carson City toward the California border, the Pine Nut Mountains appeared to be the ideal place to test the contraceptive vaccine ZonaStat-H in wild horses, offering highly varied habitat, easy road access to keep the wild horse herd under observation, and one of the best-documented wild horse populations anywhere.
Based on porcine zona pellucida, extracted from the ovaries of slaughtered pigs, ZonaStat-H was developed by the late Jay Kirkpatrick at the Science & Conservation Center, on the premises of ZooMontana in Billings, Montana.
Called PZP for short, ZonaStat-H had been used successfully in zoos and with wild horses under National Park Service jurisdiction at Assateague Island, Maryland since 1994.
Kirkpatrick died at age 75 in December 2015, but the Science & Conservation Center continues to produce ZonaStat-H and other species-specific PZP variants for use in hoofed animal population control by zoos and wildlife management agencies around the world.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Contraceptive trial began in 2010
A Pine Nut Mountains trial of ZonaStat-H was begun in November 2010. Encouraged by the results from a preliminary test of ZonaStat-H on 24 mares, the Bureau of Land Management initiated what it called the Fish Springs Wild Horses PZP Pilot Project in December 2014.
Project partners included the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign, a coalition of more than 60 wild horse advocacy organizations, and Pine Nut Wild Horse Advocates, of Gardnerville, Nevada, a city of about 5,250 people just west of the Pine Nut Mountains Wild Horse Herd Management Area.
(Beth Clifton photo)
FoA & Protect Mustangs blocked PZP use
Friends of Animals and another group, Protect Mustangs, delayed the Pine Nut Mountains trial of ZonaStat-H with a lawsuit filed in January 2015, alleging that PZP harms horses and that using it would violate Judge Hicks’ 2013 order.
The Bureau of Land Management a year and a half later killed the ZonaStat-H trial rather than fight a second lawsuit threatened by the same organizations.
Friends of Animals then unsuccessfully appealed to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to cancel the registration of PZP for use in wild horses, consistent with a 25-year FoA history of opposition to animal contraceptives while promoting surgical sterilization of dogs and cats. The latter was the original purpose of Friends of Animals, incorporated in 1957.
(Beth Clifton photo)
“We have had the rug pulled out from under our feet”
After the Bureau of Land Management reinstated the use of ZonaStat-H in the Pine Nut Mountains in November 2017, volunteers did much of the work involved in contracepting mares.
“Our community was working together with our local BLM to manage our world famous wild horses,” protested the Pine Nut Wild Horse Advocates page on Facebook. “Suddenly, after years of tireless work, keeping wild horses out of neighborhoods, holding community meetings, darting the mares in the field with fertility control, and attending meetings with BLM and state representatives, we have had the rug pulled out from under our feet and the BLM informs us they will be coming to remove all but 26 of our horses.
“These horses are a big tourist attraction for our area, with people coming from all over the world to see them on their holiday visits,” the Pine Nut Wild Horse Advocates statement continued. “Advocates are willing to remove bachelor stallions incrementally and continue to provide fertility control. The bands will over time decrease due to natural attrition. Our program can work if BLM cooperates with locals and is consistent.”
Instead of blaming Friends of Animals, however, for two years of delay that allowed the horse herd to increase, Pine Nut Wild Horse Advocates blamed the Bureau of Land Management for allegedly “dragging their feet” in completing the environmental assessment required by Judge Hicks.
(Beth Clifton photo)
“Triple-digit heat”
After word of the fall 2018 planned gather circulated, “Hundreds of people from as far away as Elko and Sacramento [on July 12, 2018] braved near triple-digit heat in Gardnerville,” wrote Benjamin Spillman of the Reno Gazette Journal, “where impassioned speakers condemned Bureau of Land Management plans to use bait traps and helicopters to pluck” the 575 targeted horses from the mountainous desert terrain.
“BLM officials say they haven’t done a major removal in the area for eight years,” Spillman continued, “and that overpopulation threatens the health of the land, other wildlife, and habitat that could potentially support sage grouse,” a threatened species.
Greater sage grouse
“Not just horses out there”
“It is not just horses out there. Other wildlife that are in effect damaged because of this,” Bureau of Land Management spokesperson Jenny Lesieutre told the audience.
Political pressure to cut the Pine Nut Mountains wild horse herd increased with the passage of the 2014 Farm Bill, which apportioned $32 million over ten years to fund habitat protection measures meant to keep a sage grouse subspecies found only along the Nevada/California border off the U.S. endangered species list.
The Pine Nut Mountains are considered essential habitat for the sage grouse, whose total population throughout their entire range is believed to be about 5,000.
While the ground-nesting sage grouse have long co-existed with wild horses, cattle, and mule deer, grazing animals are seen as a potential threat to their cover, especially in combination with the effects of drought and wildfire.
(Beth Clifton photo)
“Double down on alternatives”
Opponents of the fall 2018 gather “want the Bureau of Land Management to double down on alternatives to removal,” Spillman wrote, “a list they said includes continuing the existing practice of recruiting volunteers who dart mares with birth control drugs, and doing more reseeding of damaged areas with native rangeland vegetation, and fencing off sensitive areas to keep horses out.”
Some opponents of the Pine Nut Mountains horse gather hoped for Congressional support, but Logan Ramsey, spokesperson for Representative Mark Amodei, told Spillman by email that “The congressman is not going to stand in the way of the BLM’s attempt to properly manage a situation that is unsustainable and that it is legally authorized to manage.”
(Beth Clifton photo)
45,000 wild horses already in holding pens
The 575 wild horses scheduled for removal from the Pine Nut Mountains herd management area would join approximately 45,000 wild horses and burros already in Bureau of Land Management holding facilities. Another 82,000 wild horses roam BLM herd management areas in ten western states, the agency estimates––about three times more than the estimated optimal population for range health.
Velma “Wild Horse Annie” Johnston.
(Wikipedia photo)
Maintaining the captive wild horse population and rounding up horses as believed necessary to maintain the carrying capacity of the herd management areas costs taxpayers about $50 million per year.
Wild horse activism began in the Pine Nut Mountains
The BLM wild horse management scheme was mandated by the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, lobbied to passage by Congress largely through the efforts of Velma “Wild Horse Annie” Johnston (1912-1977).
Johnston began her campaign in 1950, getting a significant boost from actors Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, who reinforced her efforts in their last film, The Misfits (1961).
The Misfits was filmed in the Pine Nut Mountains and featured the Pine Nut wild horse herd, then subjected to frequent roundups of horses to be sold for slaughter by dog food makers.
Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in “The Misfits.”
1969 deep snow rescue
But––then stalled in Congress––the draft Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act also won a timely publicity boost from the plight of 40 to 50 horses who in late February 1969 became stranded in deep snow along a 28-mile ridge in the Pine Nut Mountains.
The episode demonstrating the deceptively limited carrying capacity of the habitat. About 200 wild horses roamed the Pine Nut Mountains at the time, barely more than a quarter of the present population. But that was still too many for the late winter conditions.
“Winds have swept the ridge almost bare,” reported Associated Press. “A series of storms scared the horses to high ground, piling up shoulder-deep snow which eventually trapped them on the rocky ridge with only a few tufts of grass to eat.”
Beth & Merritt Clifton
Animals 24-7
Helicopter owner Ed Counts and pilot Byron Clark flew as much hay as they could to the stranded horses, buying time until a mounted posse could clear a trail along which to lead them out.
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Thank you for producing what is one of the very few accurate and thorough reports that describes what is really happening here on the Pine Nut Range. (By the way, I’m viewing this range out my window as I type.)
What you describe is what I’ve learned has become the Achilles’ heel of animal advocacy: individuals and groups driven by emotion, drama and occasionally self-aggrandizement, rather than by the less exciting process of seeking relevant facts and developing the most practical solutions.
Due to its proximity to populated areas and a credible corps of competent and licensed volunteers, the management of the Pine Nut Horses should be a working model for low impact, proactive and humane approaches with respect to maintaining a genetically and physically healthy horse herd in a sustainable environment. Instead, this herd area appears to have become the poster child of how so-called advocates can charge in and undermine years of negotiations and work done by the local, experienced groups and volunteers.
Unfortunately, a tentative deal that had been carefully crafted to reduce the numbers that BLM felt obligated to remove was once again undercut in the past few days. This interference occurred after volunteers already spent hundreds of hours in mitigation efforts, fulfilling their side of the deal. When BLM finds itself in the crossfire between opposing advocacy groups, the agency is naturally going to fall back to the published Environmental Assessment and the numbers that appear in that document, which may well end up being the case here.
Adding to to the complexity of this issue is habitat restoration for greater sage grouse. If this subspecies makes the Endangered Species list, it will be to Nevada’s ranges the equivalent of the Spotted Owl’s impact on Oregon. What should be happening is that individuals and groups who actually want to preserve this herd, rather than seek attention and create drama, should engage with the local volunteers who are actually out on this range and develop some understanding as to what the issues and potential solutions are. Successful engagement must include practical involvement in the environmental and ecological issues, including getting involved in sage grouse habitat restoration. By working with range biologists and understanding the issues, the volunteers can help achieve mandated solutions in ways that can also accommodate a robust horse herd.
Unfortunately, as Animals 24-7 has reported, the die may well be cast for the horses currently on this range. Therefore the only practical approach may be to strategically plan long-term in an effort to implement solutions so that five years from now there is not a need to remove and warehouse hundreds more horses.
Great comment, Mr. Lamm. That exact group did the same to my campaign for white-tailed deer in Ohio back in 2007 (please see my comment). If I can be of assistance to you and your group to further your campaign, please do not hesitate to call upon me.
Taxpayers are NOT mandated by any Congressional Act to bankroll public lands private livestock grazers. There is NO “balance” employed in a rigorous analysis when the political heft of the livestock industry is set against the interests of everyone else.
The RETIREMENT of grazing allotments to allow damaged habitat to regenerate is done ALL the time, when Western Watersheds Project gets the evidence in court.
The above comment from Susan Rudnicki was pared down from an 855-word comment, almost all of which was entirely beside the point. Indeed, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 envisioned that private ranchers grazing cattle and sheep on public lands would pay adequately and appropriately for land use, not be hugely subsidized by grazing fees kept artificially low in response to the conditions of the Dustbowl era. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 also envisioned that the Bureau of Land Management would prevent another Dustbowl by obliging ranchers to keep herd sizes within ecological limits, as the BLM largely has, having reduced the numbers of cattle and sheep on public lands by more than half since the mid-1950s, beginning long before the Western Watersheds Projects existed.
Of note, though, is that when BLM land once retired from grazing is deemed recovered and returned to the leasable land inventory, the BLM mandate is still to facilitate cattle and sheep grazing, not to accommodate growing numbers of wild horses, bison, elk, bighorn sheep, or any other non-endangered species favored by interest groups other than ranchers. In time, the growing constituencies favoring wild horses and wildlife may gain political ascendancy over cattle and sheep ranchers. At that point the BLM mandate may finally change.
Meanwhile, though, cattle and sheep ranchers still hold political clout enough that on July 11, 2018 U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned cattle ranchers and convicted arsonists Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steven Hammond for offenses amounting to out-and-out rejection of the authority of the BLM and other federal land use agencies. Under that circumstance, to anticipate that the influence of ranchers will be reduced in time to help any of the wild horses presently in BLM corrals or slated for removal from stressed habitat is basically daydreaming. Those horses need help now, not two, six, eight, ten or 20 years from now.
It’s unfortunate that you are quoting an exaggerated population number of 82,000 wild horses on public lands.
The myth that the Bureau of Land Management persistently overcounts the number of wild horses on public lands rests on two foundations. The first is that a July 1990 survey of the wild horse population on the Nellis Range of Nevada found 6,000 horses, while a January 1991 survey found only 4,300. The difference turned out to be not that the BLM had overcounted the horses, as many wild horse advocates alleged at the time, but rather that as many as 1,700 horses died from thirst and starvation in 1990-1991 after new security fencing around remote parts of Nellis Air Force Base cut off their access to water. The second foundation of the overcounting charge is that the late Michael Blake subsequently funded the first comprehensive aerial survey of the Nevada horse population, finding fewer than half as many horses as the BLM believed were there. However, Blake in the end accepted a wild horse population estimate that was 10,000 more than the low end of the high-and-low BLM projections. This is discussed in much greater detail in our obituary for Blake, How the late “Dances With Wolves” author Michael Blake earned the Animal Protection Institute “Humanitarian of the Year” award.
Currently, ANIMALS 24-7 has just completed a 3,000-mile journey through wild horse habitat in three U.S. states and three Canadian provinces, having made comparable drives in four of the past five decades, and found that wild horses are much more easily seen in all venues than ever before. Since greater visibility tends to result from increased numbers, it is reasonable to surmise that the wild horse population on the western range of both the U.S. and Canada may now be twice what it was as recently as 20 years ago.
I was always a strong advocate for PZP Then I talked with a woman who oversees a herd of wild horses in southern Colorado. (I should ask her permission to disclose her name.) She used it on a few horses and said that as a dose wore off, one mare became pregnant and had her colt in mid-winter when the baby died. She also said that the social structure of the herd becomes harmfully disturbed, and she would discontinue use.
Another woman who runs a wild burro rescue in California has also discontinued use because the females on PZP still come into season and are mated by the males over and over and over resulting in injuries from which at least one female died. The owner said she would never use PZP again. Pregnancy is actually a recovery period in normal herd life.
It is all complicated, and I see no acceptable solution in sight. (except the phasing out of ranching and going vegan)
Thank you for your excellent ANIMALS 24-7 !!
War stories about frustrations and failures are common during the introduction of any new technology, but encountering problems scarcely means that the technology itself should not be adopted and improved through practice. It is worth noting, for example, that some mares have always become pregnant and given birth at inappropriate times, and some mares have always been injured in mating, as noted by even the first writers who observed wild horse herds, decades before passage of the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act.
Also of note is that another contraceptive, Gonacon-H, is also licensed for equine use. We expect to be reporting more about promising results from trials of Gonacon-H in wild horses in coming months.
Editor’s note: 252 words have been pared from the following comment by Friends of Animals’ attorney Michael Harris for reason of redundancy. Our brief response follows.
BLM’s plan to round up and permanently remove 575 wild horses from the Pine Nut Mountains Herd Management Area has nothing to do with Friends of Animals opposition to the use of PZP on these wild horses.
The Fall 2018 roundup referenced in this article is being undertaken pursuant to BLM’s November 2017 Herd Management Area Plan and environmental assessment for the Pine Nut Mountains. This plan purports to authorize roundups, as needed, for a 10-year period. Unfortunately, in an attempt to avoid legal obligations to ensure public involvement in individual roundup decisions, BLM is now preparing these long-term plans for wild horse herds all over the West. These plans will authorize ongoing roundups, and also authorize the use of PZP or GonaCon.
With respect to the Pine Nut horses, in 2015 Friends of Animals successfully challenged BLM’s failure to engage in formal notice and comment rulemaking and its failure to comply with NEPA in a decision to roundup these horses. We have likewise thwarted attempts by BLM to circumvent the decision-making process with regard to wild horses in Colorado, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming.
Let’s not forget, BLM is now proposing to permanently sterilize 80% of the wild horse population. Let’s concentrate our blame on the agency proposing these atrocious plans.
Michael Harris
Director, Wildlife Law Program
Friends of Animals
Western Region Office
7500 E. Arapahoe Road, Suite 385
Centennial, CO 80108
720-949-7791
The claim that the forthcoming Bureau of Land Management removal of 575 wild horses from the Pine Nut Mountains Herd Management Area “has nothing to do with” FoA opposition to the use of PZP overlooks that if the contraceptive use that FoA blocked had gone ahead, many of these horses would never have been born. The range would be in correspondingly better condition.
Concerning the BLM proposal to “permanently sterilize 80% of the wild horse population,” it is well established, including by some research partially funded by Friends of Animals, decades ago, that 70% is the minimum number of animals who must not give birth in any given reproductive cycle to keep the population stable; 80% is the optimal target for sterilization projects, to be sure of reaching 70% when exact animal populations are unknown. Currently the U.S. wild horse population is approximately three times the number that the BLM deems optimal for the range, and more than twice the number that many wild horse advocates asserted should be the carrying capacity circa 20 years ago, before the effects of global warming had substantially reduced the carrying capacity of most BLM lands.
Can’t add 2 and 2, can’t connect the dots, can’t take responsibility, can’t understand the simplest scientific concept or ecological principle, can’t come up with any viable solution, and can’t see the laughability of their way, laughable, if not so tragic for the animals,.. So, what CAN they do? Destroy other people’s work. They do this very well.
Thank you, Merritt and Beth, for the excellent and might I add, objective, article. Your denouncing the group whose name ranks high in AR literature, but only on the list of misnomers, is exactly the objective thing to do.
Not needed, but I could add substance to it with my own subjective observation, that they make it their business to derail the campaigns of other AR groups who advocate application of Immuno-Contraception (IC) to save animals from culling and their habitat, including my own in Ohio on urban white-tailed deer back in 2007.
These irrational and unscientific ideologues will never take responsibility for the trail of real devastation they leave in their wake. They will never own up to the lives of all the animals being culled, rather than being humanely contracepted, then left alone. If not clear enough, I am talking about the blood of the thousands of culled animals being on their hands, period.
Not to mention the hypocrisy regarding the original purpose of that group as pointed out in the article.
There are two non-misnomer versions of their name: one is [Foes of Animals] and other is [Friends of Foes of Animals], your choice.
My organizations and I will support all groups and all efforts that use IC in saving wild horses from culling, and will take on the Foes of Animals should they raise their logic-challenged head again. Here is my opening salvo for what they have already done:
One word of advice to the prospective-donors and donors to the group in question: DON’T.
Anthony Marr
Why is reserve design being ignored, and the “quick drug fix” which is no fix at all being adopted by so many people who seem not to honor the true and core intent of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act? To me these people lack the real vision of what this very benign and ecologically centered Act was all about and in so doing fail to honor the general public’s will on this paramount quality of life issue.
“Reserve design,” according to Wikipedia, “is the process of planning and creating a nature reserve in a way that effectively accomplishes the goals of the reserve.”
The reserve design goals prescribed by Congress in the Wild Free-Roaming Horses & Burros Act of 1971 are “to protect and manage wild free-roaming horses and burros as components of the public lands…in a manner that is designed to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance,” including “to protect the natural ecological balance of all wildlife species which inhabit such lands, particularly endangered wildlife species.” The Wild Free-Roaming Horses & Burros Act of 1971 requires the Interior Secretary, operating through the Bureau of Land Management, to “determine appropriate management levels of wild free-roaming horses and burros on these areas of the public lands; and determine whether appropriate management levels should be achieved by the removal or destruction of excess animals, or other options (such as sterilization, or natural controls on population levels).”