The BLM Blamed Wild Horses. Its Own Records Pointed to Cattle.

Photo of the Pancake Herd Management Area in Nevada (WWP/Erik Molvar)

In northern Nevada, helicopters are flying over the Callaghan Herd Management Area and driving wild horses across miles of open desert in the Bureau of Land Management’s largest roundup operation of the year. Nearly 2,000 horses are slated for removal. Several have already died. Most will spend the rest of their lives in government holding facilities, where taxpayers will pay to feed and care for them for years to come, while others will face the threat of landing in kill pens awaiting slaughter in foreign slaughter plants.

The agency says these roundups are necessary because wild horses are degrading the range. If that were the whole story, there would be little left to discuss. But recently obtained government records suggest it isn’t.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, we obtained the monitoring records the BLM relied upon in evaluating land health within the Callaghan Complex. We expected to see evidence supporting the agency’s public explanation for removing nearly 2,000 wild horses.

Instead, we found something else.

Again and again, the agency’s own field staff documented cattle hoof action, cattle-caused streambank erosion, livestock impacts to vegetation, and opportunities to improve conditions through better grazing management. In many of those same assessments, they recorded no evidence of wild horse use at all.

One assessment noted recent cattle use, heavy utilization of vegetation, and cattle hoof action throughout the stream reach, while observing no horse sign and concluding that conditions could improve through grazing management. Another attributed bank erosion to cattle, documented cattle inside an enclosure, and again found no evidence of horses. Still another concluded that better grazing management, or simply resting the allotment, would improve conditions. Those recommendations apply to livestock, not wild horses.

We didn’t write those observations. The BLM did.

To be clear, none of this proves that wild horses never affect the landscape. Nor does it suggest that western rangelands don’t face real ecological challenges. Drought, wildfire, invasive annual grasses, recreation, wildlife, livestock grazing, and wild horses all influence public lands to varying degrees.

But these records raise an obvious question: if the agency’s own monitoring data repeatedly identified livestock grazing as the source of many of the conditions it documented, why did wild horses become the face of the problem? Because somewhere between the field notes and the public narrative, the cattle largely disappeared.

That matters because the consequences are not academic. AWHC has serious concerns that the horses running from helicopters today are paying with their freedom, and some have already paid with their lives. Once removed, most will spend decades in government holding facilities, supported by taxpayers at a cost that now consumes the majority of the Wild Horse and Burro Program’s budget. Meanwhile, the underlying issues identified in the agency’s own records remain largely unchanged.

This isn’t simply about the Callaghan Complex. Across the West, helicopter roundups have become the default response to wild horse management. The cycle is familiar: Declare a range in crisis, remove horses, place them into long-term holding, and repeat. It is an extraordinarily expensive system, and one that rarely asks whether the management response actually matches the problem identified on the ground.

Congress has charged the Bureau of Land Management with managing public lands using sound science and multiple-use principles. The American public has every right to expect that when the agency cites deteriorating range conditions to justify removing federally protected wild horses, its public explanation reflects what its own specialists observed in the field.

From WWP’s perspective, it is disingenuous to round up wild horses from areas where cattle are doing the lion’s share of the damage to public lands. It is impossible to solve the serious ecological problems on western public lands – desertification, degraded riparian (or streamside) habitats, devastated trout streams and loss of ESA-listed trout and salmon populations, contaminated waters, widespread invasions of flammable cheatgrass – without correcting the root cause of the degradation, which is cattle and sheep overgrazing, rather than wild horses.

When domestic livestock are allocated 50 to 65 percent of all of the edible vegetation that will grow in a calendar year, it is impossible for any other grazer, whether wild horses or mule deer or jackrabbits, to have a meaningful role in land-health failures. Distracting the public with wild horse populations, currently numbering 61,523 West-wide, when there are millions of cattle grazing across western lands and wildlife habitats and having a comparable, if not more severe, impact animal-for-animal, is disingenuous in the extreme. Federal agencies should be ashamed of themselves for attempting this sleight-of-hand. The Callaghan roundup cannot be undone. The horses already lost are gone, and many of those removed will spend the rest of their lives in captivity.

But one question remains: if the Bureau of Land Management’s own field data pointed to cattle as a primary cause of rangeland harm, why were the helicopters sent after the horses?

---

Patricia Miller is Executive Director of American Wild Horse Conservation, one of the largest wild horse advocacy organizations in the world. Erik Molvar is a wildlife biologist and Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, a West-wide conservation group that works to restore healthy ecosystems on public lands.