Is Freedom Free? Calico Wild Horse Roundup Concludes

Early on in the controversial round up of wild horses in the Calico range north of Reno, NV, a black stallion earned the nickname Freedom when he jumped a fence and escaped. It's unclear if the Bureau of Land Management caught him, but if he made it so far, he's all set. The Bureau of Land Management says they're stopping the roundup at 1,922 mustangs instead of the 2,500 they set out to catch. In the process 30 have died.

It's not because they've had a change of heart. They fought a lawsuit to stop the roundup. They've fought activists who want to document the gather. It's just that the horses have moved off the range--as if they'd caught onto what's going on.

Craig Downer and Elyse Gardner reported on Freedom's escape on January 2 in Action for Wild Horses: "the captured band stallion, "Freedom," valiantly fought for and regained his liberty although he had to leave his family of 8 adult mares and 2 colts. Jumping a 6-foot fence and immediately thereafter breaking through a barbed wire fence and injuring himself, this was an awe-inspiring, do-or-die effort demonstrating the loathing of captivity to a wild horse and his need for freedom."

When I talked with some horse activists at a Madeleine Pickens event last month, they said they'd heard Freedom had been captured but everyone was appealing to set him free again. I haven't found anyone who knows for sure. I would like to think he made it and somehow communicated to the other horses that something bad was going on.

Where to See Wild Horses Around the World
More Stories About Wild Horses

Are Undescended Horse Testicles Getting in the Way of a Sanctuary?

A big difference in the two leading plans for 33,000 wild horses now held by the federal government is whether mares and geldings may mix. The issue may come down to undescended horse testicles. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's plan wouldn't let geldings mix with mares, who would also be on birth control. Madeleine Pickens' plan would let the geldings run free and form normal social groups.

There are plenty of other things that divide the plans--location, price, management--but whether the wild horses get to live in their natural herds is a big sticking point for horse advocates. Suzanne Roy, program director for In Defense of Animals, calls it the "the Sala-Zoo plan." "Most people can drive half an hour or 10 minutes to see horses," she says. "These horses are wild in name only." What makes these horses special is the wild, natural lives they lead, she says.

I asked Madeleine Pickens whether geldings at her proposed Mustang Monument would be able to mix. "They'd be able to roam freely and form bachelor bands," she said.

BLM spokesman Tom Gorey told me this week that they would have to keep the sexes segregated because you "can't take a chance that the gelding might not have worked. There is always a possibility."

Say what? I was always amazed when dog people would ask if my obviously neutered male dog Jolly was neutered. The testicles are either intact or removed. Either way, it's highly visible.

But Gorey referred me to Dr. Albert J. Kane of APHIS, a vet that works with BLM. Perhaps understandably, Dr. Kane wasn't too comfortable answering my questions about whether geldings could somehow be fertile. He referred me back to the BLM, but he did say that when you're dealing with thousands of horses, one virile gelding could slip through.

The BLM isn't totally crazy here. Horse herds are generally matriarchal, so there's only one or two males in a herd of 10-20 horses. One stallion could impregnate all the females in their herd. (Or could if the mares weren't on birth control. Or if undescended testicles didn't confer at least some infertility.)

So, is this whole wild horse population management thing coming down not being able to keep track of which horses are gelded or to undescended testicles? Because the ACVS says that's pretty easy to detect (hormone levels) and treat (surgery). British horse magazine Horse and Hound says about 15% of 2 or 3 year olds are "cryptorchids"--that is they have an undescended testicle. And they've got more crazy terms for us: a "true rig" is a horse carrying a hidden testicle and a "false rig" is one that just acts like that with "over-the-top stallion-like behaviour."

Oddly, this whole issue might become something taxpayers care about. Or might insist that the BLM stop caring about. The BLM now spends $29 million to keep 33,000 horses and wants to catch another 10,000 to 12,000 this year in Nevada. Salazar plans on asking Congress for $97 million to build two of seven horse preserves. Pickens will supply the land and management, she just needs about the same amount of money per year per horse as the feds are paying ranchers to keep them in pens now.

Where to go to see wild horses

Read what's going on with Madeleine Pickens' Plan

Maybe A Starter Sanctuary of 10,000 Wild Horses for Pickens

Maybe instead of creating a sanctuary for all 33,000 wild horses currently in federal holding pens, as Madeleine Pickens proposed in 2008, she'll just take 10,000. The smaller version may help "establish credibility," she told a group of reporters and supporters at a Manhattan breakfast Wednesday.

She senses resistance is weakening at the Bureau of Land Management, which controls the horses and spends $29 million a year keeping them in holding areas.

So far, however, the BLM just keeps collecting more wild horses, something animal advocates hoped would stop after President Obama took office. In Defense of Animals announced Tuesday that BLM is already starting to round up 12,000 horses this year in Nevada. That means we'll end 2010 with roughly 63%--or nearly two-thirds of our wild horses (including expected foals)--kept in holding facilities, mostly in Oklahoma and Kansas. Even if BLM lets Pickens take care of 10,000 horses, we'd still be worse off (as judged by the size of our wild horse menagerie) than when Obama took office.

The Obama Administration has come up with a rival option known as Salazar's Plan, named after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who is thought to be too cozy with cattlemen. It would cost $96 million to create for two of seven preserves he would put in the east and Midwest. Pickens says those would accommodate just 7,000 horses. Somehow I think taxpayers would prefer Pickens' option, in which she supplies the land and manages the horses and the feds just pay her $500 a year per horse, about what we pay to keep them in long-term holding.

We've heard very few details about the federal plan and Salazar's op-ed in the LA Times didn't clear much up. I thought it was churlish for a cabinet member to drop the line "to allow wild horse herds to grow beyond the limit of the range -- as some wild horse advocates and celebrities are arguing..." Nobody wants to overcrowd the horses, of course. They just don't want the agency giving the only land horses can legally graze on to cattle ranchers. Wildhorsepreservation calculates the horse's area has been cut by 36%.

But the horse advocates in the room thought it was great Salazar was at least talking about horses and the need to use contraceptives to control the herd. It's certainly a lot better than the 2005 plan to sell them to slaughter. But we've got a long way to go to bring these plans together.

Where to go to see wild horses

The Last Wild Horses in the Bahamas

The Bahamas are down to only six wild horses. Genetic tests show they're Spanish Barbs who improbably survived for generations in pine forest and scrub.

Then logging companies came--clearing forests, bringing hunting dogs and flushing the horses into view, according to Equiworld.net. "The road put in by the logging company opened the area up to local hunters. When a child died due to her own misbehavior with a horse, locals tried to slaughter all the horses.  Three were rescued and placed on the [Bahamas Star Farms] and as their numbers grew they were released back into the regenerating forest," say Milanne Rehor who founded  Wild Horses of Abaco. 

Rehor desrcribes herself as a once "horse crazy child," set out to find them after reading of them in a sailing guide. She eventually found that they were real, but about to disappear. 
In 1982 there were 35 Abaco horses. In 2005, the Bahaman government claims it shut down Bahamas Star Farms because of a citrus canker; Rehor says the area was clear cut. Now a mysterious illness is killing off the horses. "It has been invaded by Brazilian pepper and Lantana Sage, the latter deadly to animals. The horses know to not eat it, but it became so thick in one forage area that two ingested it by accident and died," Rehor says. "The area has been closed off and there have been no more loses."

Here's the group's emergency plan.

If this rare population is going to survive, they need help.

If you go to the Bahamas, Wild Horses of Abaco will be happy to take you out to see the survivors for a donation of $35 per person.

See how you can help out the Wild Horses of Abaco

Wild horse herds are all over the world. Here's an animaltourism.com map of where you can find them

2,700 Wild Horses Fight Eviction in Federal Court

Today a federal judge in Washington will hear wild horse advocates argue that 2,700 wild horses in Nevada shouldn't be rounded up and held indefinitely in holding pens. Seems like an obvious choice, but under the antiquated U.S. wild horse protections, it's not.

Wild horses in America are like a beleagured employee who has somehow gotten stuck with a totally inappropriate manager who doesn't understand their charm or why he can't just get rid of them. Horses somehow fall under the The Bureau of Land Management, despite its mission to provide land for energy producers, cattle ranchers and miners. Since 2000 the BLM has gone on a spree of rounding up wild horses, creating what has become a vast, money-sucking collection of 11,000 in corrals and 22,000 in Midwestern pastures--the same number that run wild. In 2008 the BLM started openly talking about mass euthanasia for mustangs. (To save them, Madeleine Pickens proposed a private sanctuary.)

The BLM announced its final decision Monday to remove 2,700 horses near Reno in what it calls the Calico Complex Round-up, which includes five herd management areas: Black Rock Range East and West, Calico Mountains, Granite Range, and Warm Springs Canyon. The BLM decided the right amount of horses for the area is 600-900 and it counts about 3,000 out there.

If they don't round up the horses, some might die, the BLM threatens. Well, yeah, they're wild animals. That's what they do. It's not as if this is a magical species that would continue to multiply until there were 42 million horses in Nevada, trampling the state into dust. Populations go through cycles; predators like coyotes and coywolves step up--unless you mess with the cycle. The anti-horse, pro-cattle contingent the BLM supports seems to have taken matters into its own hands, shooting six mustangs, whose carcasses were found this month.

Horse advocates don't trust their target number, their count, their management of public lands (they've been steadily eroding the horses' range) or their intentions. Wild horse ecologist Craig Downer and In Defense of Animals are suing to stop the round-up and stop the BLM's perpetual short-changing of horses in the way it manages land. A bill that passed the house this spring would fix some of these very problems with the BLM's management of wild horses (though still leave them to the BLM). Pickens and other horse lovers are trying to get it passed in the Senate right now.


See In Defense of Animals' action center for wild horses
Help Madeleine Pickens pass horse management reform in the Senate
See Wild Horses out in the wild

Madeleine Pickens Would Effectively Double the US Wild Horse Population

It could get a whole lot easier to see our country's wild horses soon. Sometime in the next couple years Madeleine Pickens plans to open up a million-acre horse sanctuary that will effectively double the country's wild horse population.

Madeleine Pickens and her animal-animal loving, billionaire husband T. Boone have come up with plan to save wild horses. I got to talk with her recently for a story on her wild horse sanctuary I did for PeoplePets.

What many people don't realize is that we have about 33,000 wild horses in the wild, plus another 30,000 in pens. The Bureau of Land Management has been managing these horses since they got federal protection in 1971--and shrinking the land they graze on all the while.

They calculate how many wild horses can survive based on the land left, so when they cut the grazing area, they cut the number of horses. The BLM recently said it wanted to cut the herd to 27,000.

Meanwhile, it's been rounding up horses every year for auction. They try to auction them off to horse lovers who agree to all kinds of restrictions. Well, the main restriction is they can't sell them to somebody who's going to use the horse for meat. At least not right away.

The BLM wanted to either euthanize or sell the other horses "without restriction." That means they would go to auction and almost certainly be bought by buyers who would send them to slaughter. Horse slaughter is effectively banned in the U.S., but the buyers just truck the horses to Canada or Mexico.

So, if the Pickens' horse plan goes through, we'll end up with about 60,000 horses instead of 30,000. Our country will effectively double its wild horse population. (I don't think we can count the 30,000 in holding pens now as wild anymore.) Sure, the ones on Pickens' proposed retirement home will be sterilized. But they'll still be enjoying life.

And we'll still be able to go see them. In fact, Pickens is a huge animal lover, so she says she'll allow dogs. That's a big contrast to the east coast's Chincoteague, which almost superstitiously doesn't allow them on the island.

Plus, Pickens is already thinking about taking in more wild horses as they get moved off the range. And discarded race horses. And--down the road--even other animals.

This could become the best animal tourist destination in the country. I can't wait to visit.