A contractor’s helicopter pursues wild horses at the Cedar Mountain Herd Management Area in Utah. RTF file photo.
UPDATE: The Bureau of Land Management this week completed a helicopter roundup on Wyoming’s Red Desert during which 1,035 wild horses were captured.
One horse died of a seizure, according to the BLM’s gather report, while 16 others were put down for reasons that included limb deformities and club foot. Eight were euthanized for blindness.
The roundup is part of a longer-term plan to remove 1,800 wild horses from the Red Desert Complex of HMAs.
It’s all part of the agency’s decades-old, inhumane effort to manage wild horse numbers almost solely by capture and removal.
Before the roundup, the 752,694-acre complex had a BLM-estimated population of 2,278 wild horses. The agency has set a complex-wide population target of 480-720.
Starting Monday, the BLM plans to capture and remove 500 wild horses from the Cedar Mountain HMA and 140 from the Swasey Mountains HMA in Utah.
Cedar Mountain has a BLM-set population target of 190-390 wild horses and an estimated population of 660. The agency says it plans to conduct a post-roundup survey and return horses to the 211,592-acre HMA if the number drops below 190.
The 120,113-acre Swasey Mountains has a population target of 60-100 horses. The population was last estimated at 206 before foaling season.
Following the Red Desert roundup, the BLM plans to treat just 52 mares with fertility control, then return them to the range with the same number of stallions.
A small number of Cedar Mountain mares have been treated with fertility control in past years. A “limited number” may be treated and released following this roundup. It does not appear that the BLM will use fertility control at Swasey Mountains.
It shouldn’t be this way.
Return to Freedom has long supported the use of proven, safe and humane fertility control as a key tool for stabilizing population growth on the way to replacing roundups as the agency’s primary management method.
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