A contractor’s helicopter drives wild horses toward the trap site during the roundup on the Salt Wells Creek Herd Management Area in Wyoming. Photo courtesy of Lynn Walleen.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will hold its annual, legally required public hearing regarding the use of motorized vehicles in the management of wild horses and burros from 3-5 p.m. MT on May 23.
The meeting will be held using Zoom. It will be live-streamed at blm.gov/live.
To provide comment during the meeting, members of the public by May 22 at https://buff.ly/4a3t0hy. Written comments are due by 5 p.m. MT on May 23 to BLM_HQ_MotorizedVehicleHearing@blm.gov. See our website for direct links.
The BLM uses helicopters to drive and trap wild horses, trucks to move them to off-range holding facilities and adoption / sale events, as well as helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft to conduct population surveys.
The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 (FLPMA) amended the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burro Act to allow the use of helicopters and other motor vehicles for herd management. FLPMA requires that the agency conduct the annual hearing.
In its ongoing effort to reach population targets for herds that the BLM itself sets, the agency relies on a failed program of removing wild horses and burros from the range.
The BLM continues to stall the use of proven, safe and humane fertility control. Fertility control could slow herd growth, without stopping it, and, if properly and robustly implemented, replace capture-and-removal as the agency’s primary management tool.
Between now and September, the BLM plans to remove 11,112 wild horses and burros from the range while treating just 219 with fertility control.
When helicopters are used to capture wild horses and burros: the animals are extremely stressed, fearful and often driven for miles over uneven ground, standard operating procedures often go unfollowed, and mares and foals can easily become separated. Conducting them during the summer makes horses more susceptible to heat stress and dust exposure.
We urge a slower approach of scaling up fertility control as lesser removals are accomplished methodically with bait-and water-trapping techniques, in which horses or burros are lured into temporary enclosures made with livestock panels.