Wild horses following the Judas horse, a horse trained to lead horses into the trap, run close to unmarked fencing on the Sand Wash Basin Herd Management Area on Friday. All photos by Meg Frederick.
Click here to read RTF’s full statement on the Sand Wash Basin roundup.
The Bureau of Land Management captured 16 wild horses on Friday, the third day of a planned 783-horse “emergency” helicopter roundup on Colorado’s Sand Wash Basin Herd Management Area. No deaths were reported on Friday.
The contractor’s helicopter returned twice to the trap site, driving a group of 15 wild horses the first time. An hour later, on a second pass, the pilot returned trailing behind just one exhausted horse.
Photos on Friday showed the first group running close to unmarked fencing (see photo above). The fencing should have been flagged to make it easier for horses to see.
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A total of 81 wild horses have been captured since the roundup began. No deaths have been reported.
The BLM’s justification for the roundup is the number of “excess” wild horses on the Herd Management Area. The roundup was prioritized then as an emergency because of a lack of forage, especially at lower evaluations, with winter coming, according to BLM.
Prior to the roundup, BLM estimated the number of wild horses on Sand Wash pat about 896 wild horses. The BLM-set “Appropriate Management Level” for the 157,730-acre Herd Management Area is 163-363, or as low as one horse for every 968 acres.
By comparison, BLM allows up to 19,758 Animal Unit Months of private cattle and sheep grazing on four allotments overlapping the Herd Management Area, or the equivalent of 1,647 cow-calf pairs annually. (One AUM equals monthly forage for one cow-calf pair, one horse or five sheep.) While wild horses are free-roaming all year long, seasons of use for livestock vary by allotment, with cattle use ranging from as low as two to as many as three months and sheep use ranging from as low as six to as many as eight months.
Actual livestock use on three of the allotments averaged 14-52% of maximum livestock use from 2008-20, according to planning documents. On the fourth allotment, there has been no livestock use since before 2000 due to wild horse use and limited acreage and lack of AUMs for cattle, according to planning documents.
No cattle were grazed on the Herd Management Area in 2020-21, according to BLM, while 2,161 AUMs were allocated for sheep in 2020. Use varied by allotment with sheep allowed to graze as early as September and as late as May, according to planning documents.
In 2021, the trailing of sheep through the Herd Management Area has been the only livestock use. An active grazing period was not used, Leonard said, and an exact number of days has not yet been calculated.
Captured horses are to be transported to the BLM facility in Canon City for adoption or sale.
Plans call for 25 mares of the mares rounded up to be treated with fertility control and for them to be released with a similar number of studs. RTF strongly supports the use of safe, proven and humane fertility control to slow reproduction and halt future roundups.
Last year, 300 mares on the Herd Management Area were treated with fertility control, in cooperation with advocates. Advocates will also provide input into which captured horses are released, BLM said.
The roundup is part of a plan to remove 6,000 additional wild horses from the range because of drought conditions by the end of September.
Return to Freedom believes that we are in this tragic position because of the BLM’s failure to implement solutions that have been available for over 20 years For nearly 50 years, these horses have had to suffer this management program and the Americans who love them suffer with them.
This is even more tragic because other solutions exist now. The agency has resisted creating an infrastructure and a culture that could have made a sustainable and effective fertility control program possible. It has rounded up horses year after year while waiting for longer-acting vaccines instead of using the safe, proven and humane fertility control that’s available right now. These sensitive habitats are vulnerable to drought and, knowing this, a national land management agency tasked with the preservation and protection of our wild horses should have been prepared long ago and in a much better position today.
See BLM’s planning documents here.
See BLM’s tentative roundup schedule here.
