Photo taken at the Salt Wells Herd Management Area in Wyoming by Meg Frederick.
LOMPOC, CA—Return to Freedom Wild Horse Conservation on Monday applauded a new $30 million investment to increase wild horse fertility control efforts while emphasizing that it will keep pressing for greater action to keep herds on public lands.
“We will continue urging Congress to hold the Bureau of Land Management’s feet to the fire on the robust implementation of fertility control,” said Neda DeMayo, president of Return to Freedom (RTF), a national nonprofit wild horse and burro advocacy organization. “We must do so if we want to keep wild horses and burros on the range, where they belong.”
RTF has long supported fertility control as a humane and practical tool to slow (not stop) herd growth and phase out the agency’s antiquated and often deadly practice of trying to control populations by capturing and removing wild horses and burros from the range in controversial helicopter roundups.
A government press release last week announced that “the American people have asked for more fertility control in wild horse and burro management, and the Department of the Interior is prepared to deliver.”
To that end, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has received a $30 million investment from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to expand and accelerate fertility control efforts, according to the release.
While this is a positive step, the BLM must show meaningful results.
Congress first called for the use of, and provided additional funds for, a wild horse management strategy including the use of “proven, safe and humane” fertility control beginning in Fiscal Year 2020.
In the time since, the BLM’s own figures show that the agency has captured and removed from public lands 74,011 wild horses and burros.
By comparison, the BLM has totaled just 7,818 fertility control treatments, which could include the same individuals boosted multiple times — the data are unclear.
As a result, more than 58,000 wild horses and burros are now living not wild and free but warehoused in off-range government corrals and other holding facilities at a cost to taxpayers of more than $100 million annually.
“Population modeling by ecologists shows that management of wild horses and burros by capture and removal will not work,” DeMayo said. “Only by scaling up fertility control immediately to slow reproduction down, not destroying our herds with sterilization, can removals and long-term holding be phased out.”
Also of concern: The BLM recently put the sterilization of wild horses back onto the table. RTF opposes sterilization — especially surgeries on wild mares, which are dangerous, unproven, costly, and unnecessary.
BLM’s attempts to sterilize wild horses have been halted by litigation and public opposition. Most recently, in 2021, the agency abandoned a plan to sterilize captured mares after RTF and others filed lawsuits in federal court.