Western wild horse, burro population at unsustainable levels

Graphic by E&E News; click on the image to enlarge it.

The grasslands of the American West can support almost 27,000 wild horses and burros, but the population has risen to an unsustainable level of more than 88,000. "The issue has quietly become the biggest public lands management crisis facing [the Bureau of Land Management] today, some experts say," Scott Streater reports for Energy & Environment News.

The herds have stripped many areas of native vegetation like black sage, rabbitbrush, grass, and winterfat shrubs, allowing invasive species like cheatgrass (which has little nutritional value) to spread and starving out other wildlife like mule deer, antelope, and greater sage grouse. Since there isn't much water in the more arid regions, the plants are slow to grow back, and the horses must travel farther and farther afield to find drinking water and forage, Streater reports.

"The winterfat is very sensitive to overgrazing. And if we lose it, then more than likely the site will not come back," Ruth Thompson, manager of BLM's Wild Horse and Burro Program in Nevada, told Streater. "They'll never replant that key forage species."

Nevada is at the epicenter of the issue, with more than 47,000 wild horses and burros roaming 14 million acres of BLM-managed herd areas. That's more than half of the wild population on federally managed lands in the West, Streater reports.

"There is no consistently effective birth control vaccine and no easy way to round up and remove excess horses from the range," Streater reports. "Already 50,000 or so wild horses and burros have been rounded up and are being cared for in off-range corrals until they can be adopted — at great, unsustainable expense to the federal government." Last year BLM removed more than 11,000 horses from federal rangelands, but Streater notes that as many as 18,000 foals were born on the range last year.

"BLM's National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board recommended last year that BLM use removals to get the number of wild horses and burros down to 26,600 in three to five years," Streater reports. "But four years ago, BLM estimated it could cost $2 billion to remove all excess horses on the range within a five-year period. That's far and away more than BLM's $1.3 billion fiscal 2019 budget."

If the problem is not fixed, not only will the rangelands be permanently damaged, but many of the horses and burros—along with other wildlife—will probably die of starvation.