RTF archive photo from Devil’s Garden.
The U.S. Forest Service on Tuesday was set to begin a helicopter roundup of 350 wild horses on the Devil’s Garden Plateau Wild Horse Territory in Northern California. No capture numbers have yet been posted.
The 258,000-acre territory located just north of Alturas in Northern California, mainly on Modoc National Forest, is a clear example of federal agencies stubbornly trying and failing to manage wild horse numbers solely by capture and removal:
In 2016, USFS estimated that there were 2,246 adult wild horses there based on an aerial survey. Since then, the agency has removed horses every year, just over 3,500 in all, in an attempt to reach its own target of 206-402.
There were “more than 700” wild horses living in and around the territory as of last year, the USFS said. Thirty-seven have been captured this year in an ongoing bait-and-trap roundup.
(By comparison, USFS permits up to 26,880 Animal Unit Months of seasonal grazing by privately owned livestock at Devil’s Garden, the annual equivalent of 2,240 cow-calf pairs.)
Proven, safe and humane fertility can slow wild horse herd growth without stopping it. Used properly and robustly, that would reduce the size and frequency of too-often deadly roundups and could eliminate removals as the agency’s primary management tool.
In 2017, USFS treated 52 Devil’s Garden mares with fertility control, then released them.
Since then? Not one.
The Devil’s Garden wild horses were California’s last large remaining herd. If USFS was close to accurate in its population estimate and succeeds in removing 350 horses, the herd will soon be smaller than three overseen in the state by the BLM.
Management of Devil’s Garden wild horses has been a recurring source of controversy:
- In 2018, USFS announced unprecedented plans to sell captured older wild horses without restrictions against slaughter. We and others sued. As the case progressed, USFS was able to adopt or sell the horses with protections in place — including a dozen that came to our sanctuary.
- In 2017, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of RTF and our co-plaintiffs, ordering the USFS to restore 23,000 acres of Devil’s Garden to wild horse use. The agency had said that the land was added in the 1980s as the result of an administrative error.