It’s a practice no one much likes—not the bureau that devised it, not the ranchers whose cattle and sheep share the land with the horses, not the wild horse advocates sticking up for the rights of the herds. So how did it happen? And what, if anything, can we do about it? How did we get to a place where we spend $2 billion to gather and store animals that everyone agrees should be wild and free? I decided that afternoon, as I watched the truck full of mustangs pull away, that I would try to find the answers. I would scour the corners of Wild Horse Country to see if I could figure out how we got where we are, and where we should go.
Like the bald eagle, the wild horse was in pretty dire straits by the middle of the twentieth century. They had been hunted, killed, poisoned, rounded up, and sold for slaughter until there were only about seventeen thousand left. Then, in 1971, amid a raft of environmental protection laws, Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, declaring that wild horses “are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” and “shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death.”
President Richard Nixon, who was never a big backer of environmental preservation but was a shrewd politician who knew good press when he saw it, paraphrased Henry David Thoreau at its signing, saying, “We need the tonic of wildness.” He said wild horses “are a living link with the days of the conquistadors, through the heroic times of the Western Indians and the pioneers, to our own day when the tonic of wildness seems all too scarce.”
The act protected the last remnants of the West’s wild horses, putting them under the watchful guard of the government. (As the law’s name suggests, burros are protected too, and though in many ways burros are even tougher and more independent than horses, they don’t have the same prominence in the American imagination. Suffice to say, however, the issues affecting the two species are largely the same.) But the law unintentionally made wild horses into legal misfits. They are stuck in a world between wild animals and livestock. They are considered “wild” but not “wildlife.” They are “fast disappearing” but don’t count as an endangered species. They are American but not “native.” And not all wild-born horses are protected under the law; only those that are born in designated areas of US Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management land count. These quirks can make for some confusing outcomes. For example, imagine a foal whose ancestors descended from escaped Spanish stock that has run loose in the West for four hundred years. Its parents are legally classified as wild horses. But if the mother wanders into a state park, national park, or Indian reservation to have her foal, the foal is not a wild horse. It is a feral stray and can be rounded up and sold to the slaughterhouse. Conversely, if another horse that is descended from captive domestic horses since the time of Homer gets free of the stable and has a foal on BLM land, that foal is legally a wild horse. In other words, the rights of a wild horse are a lot like the rights of citizenship. A lot of it depends only on where you were born.
That means not all horses that are wild are legally considered wild horses. Tens of thousands live on Indian reservations, state lands, and federal lands, including national parks and wildlife refuges, where protections don’t apply. They can be trucked off to slaughterhouses, and often are. (In the Grand Canyon, rangers shot thousands of burros and eventually got rid of them entirely by relocating the few that remained.) To keep things simple, when I talk about wild horses, I’m referring only to the statutory wild horses. When referring to all wild-born, free-roaming horses and their descendants, I’ll use the blanket term mustang.
The word mustang itself needs some explanation. In modern times among horse people, it has come to mean a horse of relatively pure Spanish blood—the horses that escaped from Spanish conquistadors centuries ago and still have the traits of Spanish Barb horses brought over by the first explorers. That definition is often used to devalue other wild horses. People—usually ranchers and government officials—will say that there are no true mustangs left, and that today’s modern horses are just a degenerate muddle of domestic strays. Part of that is true. But it’s also misleading. Almost all wild horses are a mix of different genetics, and some have little Spanish blood. But the Spanish, from whom the word mustang came, never used it to refer to their finest horses. Originally, mustang comes from the Spanish word mesteña—meaning stray livestock belonging to local herders, the mesta. Just like the wild horses of today, these stray mesteña were an outcast mix of high and low stock, some domestic and some that had been living free for generations. Sometime in the nineteenth century in Texas, the word mesteña jumped the fence to English, becoming mustang. And mustang became the preferred way to refer to the tough little wild-born, free-roaming horses, which often had Spanish blood, that populated the West.
The 1971 law was supposed to allow wild horses to roam the places where they existed at the time that the law was signed. The BLM was supposed to manage herds at levels that would maintain what the law calls a “thriving natural ecological balance and multiple-use relationship” with existing wildlife and cattle. Neither has happened.
Starting in 1971, the agency documented where horses were found and drew lines around the territory like so much pink plastic tape, designating 303 Herd Management Areas. Since then, it has administratively eliminated about a hundred areas, changing their designation from Herd Management Areas to Herd Areas. A Herd Management Area is where the primary use is supposed to be management of the horses. Herd Areas are where the BLM has decided horses are not supposed to be. The horses in those latter areas are slated for eventual elimination. Altogether, the areas that have been taken away from wild horses make up nearly thirteen million acres—a region about the size of West Virginia. Sometimes the agency said it was because of lack of forage or water. Sometimes the agency said it was because the horses would interfere with oil and natural-gas drilling. Sometimes, it appears, the agency did it just because locals asked them to.
Since taking control, the agency has struggled with the wild horse population. It set a goal for a total population in the West of about twenty-seven thousand horses, a number it felt could be sustainably managed on the land. The BLM has been rounding up horses continuously since 1977 but has never once met the goal. Over the years, under the guidance of a dozen different directors during both Republican and Democratic administrations, it has slipped farther and farther away. By the end of the Obama administration, there were seventy-seven thousand horses on the range—the largest population since the law was passed. The BLM says wild horses must be removed to avoid long-term damage to the land. Horse advocates have pushed back, saying the horse is a scapegoat for damage by cattle and sheep. The current system has led to both overpopulation and roundups, ensuring that no one wins.
The way we try to control wild horse populations only underlines their misfit status. With wildlife, federal and state governments either largely ignore populations, letting nature take its course, or set target populations and let hunters keep the numbers in check. Wild horses are the only species that the government captures in large numbers alive and then holds in storage. This is a stark departure from how we treat other Old World domestic animals that have gotten loose in America. Take feral hogs. The United States kills tens of thousands a year. Texas even has special helicopters specifically for gunning down hogs. It calls them “pork choppers.” Sure, feral hogs aren’t companion animals like horses. But consider our pets. We euthanize millions of dogs and cats each year. We even have programs to electro-shock feral goldfish. Wild horses are different. We don’t hunt them. We don’t euthanize them. We don’t eat them. More than perhaps any animal, we think wild horses deserve respect. The mustang is the closest thing in America to a folk hero of the animal kingdom.
This is not, by the way, a universal human instinct, or even one shared by modern, Western societies. It is uniquely American. In Canada, wild horses can be sold to slaughter. You can order horse steaks and burgers in some very nice restaurants in Montreal. In Western Europe, you can
find frozen horse meatballs at the supermarket. The United States is even unique among nations that have large wild horse populations. Australia has a staggering half a million wild horses, which Australians call brumbies. (They also have about a million feral camels!) Law allows brumbies to be rounded up and exported as horsemeat, but Australian government scientists say the most efficient and humane “pest control” is to shoot them from helicopters.
The United States alone has chosen not to kill wild horses, even if that means warehousing the unwanted at a staggering expense. That has led to the bizarre situation in which we now find ourselves. When the BLM started rounding up horses in the 1970s, the plan was to find a home for every animal that came off the land. It never happened. While tens of thousands of people have adopted and trained mustangs, there have never been enough homes for all those that have been removed from the range. Several times, the BLM and lawmakers have proposed selling unadopted horses to slaughter buyers. That idea has provoked such outrage from the public that it has always been abandoned. Instead, the agency started storing surplus horses like the ones I saw in the Sand Springs Valley in a labyrinth of feedlots and pastures across thirteen states. It calls this labyrinth “the holding system.” Every year the agency adds thousands of animals to the system. Our unique relationship with wild horses has led us to this stunning contradiction: The United States now has nearly as many wild horses in captivity as it has in the wild.
Anywhere you go in the West, you will see homages to the wild horse. Cars arriving at Denver International Airport are greeted by a thirty-two-foot stallion rearing in defiance. Statues of wild horses galloping in bands run along I-15 through Las Vegas. The mustang is the mascot of hundreds of schools across the West, including the Colorado elementary school I attended. Every Friday we would wear school shirts emblazoned with a running, snow-white stallion.
For us as kids, the mustang was a symbol of power and freedom. It is a stunning reversal that the wild horse can now be seen as a welfare case entangled in a federal bureaucracy. The animal that carried the explorers, lugged tools for prospectors, pulled the plows, powered the great cattle drives, and empowered the tribes of the plains now is a burden on the taxpayer, a ward of the state. This slow crumbling of a cultural icon is not the horses’ fault, but ours. There is a fundamental conflict in how we approach wild horses that has gotten us into this mess. As one wild horse advocate said to me while we sat on rocks overlooking a roundup in Nevada’s Stone Cabin Valley, “People don’t have a wild horse problem. Wild horses have a people problem.”
The night after the Sand Springs roundup, I camped out in the empty valley. The BLM staff had rolled up their pink plastic tape and gone home, so I was free to wander the plain below, where thousands of hoof prints from the roundup still dented the dirt. It was cold and I built a small fire with silver wood ripped from old sagebrush. I sat watching the stars over the flames and thinking about the horses out in the dark heading down the highway in dim trailers toward the holding system. I wondered how many horses were still roaming free in the valley under the stars, and what the future held for them. It seemed to me that they could not go on like this very much longer. Eventually Americans would get tired of spending so much on gathering and storing horses. Their image of wild horses would cease to be wild and free. Public opinion would turn against the mustang. And then what?
Maybe the public would demand that we start killing horses. Maybe Congress would loosen the protections of the law. Maybe mustangs, which were saved from the brink of extinction in 1971, would again face destruction. Wild horses have always been a bellwether for the West. If we could find ways to live in balance with them that are good for the long-term health of the land, the local people, and our stories of who we are, then it will go a long way toward preserving what we love about both the horses and the place.
That night as the campfire died, I felt like the long history of the wild horse was at a turning point, where people either had to find a way to live with mustangs, and the wildness they require, or forever lose one of the last untamed parts of the West. What was the proper place for the mustang in the West, if any? And how could we find it? I intended to travel Wild Horse Country until I found out.
WILD HORSE COUNTRY
CHAPTER 1
THE DAWN HORSE
In a corner of northwestern Wyoming the long chain of the Rocky Mountains splits into two separate stands of peaks that corral a broad stretch of desert country called the Bighorn Basin. Almost no one lives there. The basin is roughly the size of West Virginia, but its sherbet-colored badlands have less than one percent of West Virginia’s population. The land in most places looks like it always did: chalky, dry mesas fenced in by distant blue peaks. There are only two real breaks in the hills, cut by the deep, green Bighorn River, which flows in through a slot canyon in the south and out through another canyon in the north.
The Bighorn Basin exists in what people in the West call a “rain shadow”—a patch of perpetual drought cast by the mountains. It is created by prevailing winds pushing weather from west to east. Moist air cools as it rises over the twelve-thousand-foot peaks of the Absaroka Range before reaching the basin. The cold wrings out most of the moisture, which falls on the thick mountain forests as rain or snow. The air passing over the mountains and down into the basin warms and expands. Expanding air acts almost like a sponge that, once squeezed, absorbs more water. And so it almost never rains. The basin receives only about six inches of rainfall a year—less than in the cactus-studded deserts of Arizona.
Where water flows out of the mountains in swift, emerald rivers, farmers have created a lush corridor of green. Waving fields of malt barley stretch out in neat irrigated rows above the muddy banks. Swallows cut through the moist air, snatching fat mayflies on the wing. Grebes and mergansers paddle the lazy currents. After a long, dry drive through the sage flats of Wyoming, the feel of water in the air along the river is so thick and abrupt that you can taste it. But walk away from the river, through the fields and across the two-lane highway that traces the Bighorn’s banks through the basin, and your feet are soon kicking up chalky gray dust. The river and its irrigated fields on either side make only a thin line through the basin. Then bare shale terraces rise up and away from the fields, their red, gray, and green bands slumping together like slowly melting ice cream. The roads and farmhouses cease. On a map, the shale sometimes runs twenty miles without interruption in crumples and jags so erratic that it seems as if the contour lines were plugged into an electric socket.
The rain shadow has left the hills bare except for sparse polka dots of greasewood and black sage. There is no shade. It is boiling in the summer and arctic in the winter. There are creeks that were marked on the map long ago by cartographers with either a naive sense of hope or a cruel sense of humor, but there is almost never water. It is classic badlands: desiccated, defiant, devoid.
Naturally, it is Wild Horse Country.
I drove into the basin on a hot July afternoon to spend a few days out on the shale benches far from the paved road, looking for wild horses. I turned off the highway at the farming town of Worland (one of the biggest towns in the basin, population 5,487) and sped west, kicking up a plume of fine dust on a narrow dirt track.
As I drove, I scanned the empty horizon. I wasn’t looking for mustangs—not live ones, at least. I was looking for the camp of Dr. Ken Rose, a longtime summer resident of the basin and professor of anatomy at Johns Hopkins University, who happened to be one of the leading experts on the first horses ever to walk the earth.
The Bighorn Basin may not be a very hospitable place for farming, or ranching, or really anything else, but it holds one of the greatest troves of early mammal fossils in the world. Scientists from around the globe, Rose included, have been making pilgrimages to the site for more than a century to search for old bones. I was making my own pilgrimage to the basin because it is one of the best places to study where the wild horse began. I wanted to see it because I had he
ard over and over from government employees, ranchers, big-game managers, and others who want to limit wild horse numbers, that wild horses aren’t really wild—they are just escaped livestock that are now infesting the native ecosystem like so much kudzu. As a nonnative invader, the argument goes, mustangs represent an imbalance to the native ecosystem. They are a usurper, a contagion, and because of this, they must be rounded up to protect the natural balance.
The assertion that horses are not native made perfect sense to me at first. Europeans brought horses to the Americas. That is clear. There are a few fringe wild horse advocates who will argue that horses were actually here before Columbus arrived, but there is not good evidence. No explorers who made first contact with native tribes ever documented horses. If Europeans brought them, the argument goes, then they are an invasive species. If they are an invasive species, we must control them.
But as I kept turning the idea over in my mind, the main points started to dull by knocking into competing arguments. The first was that the wild horse is not invasive. I had some vague memory from a high school textbook of an illustration of prehistoric horses roaming North American among woolly mammoths and giant sloths millions of years before humans arrived. Second, I began to wonder what “native” really meant. Of course the definition seems obvious: A plant or animal is native when it exists in its natural range or ecosystem, as opposed to a species introduced by man. But it actually isn’t so simple. That natural range of a species is often thought of as static. In North America, we generally define it as wherever it was found by the first European observers. Any subsequent changes often are portrayed as unnatural. But animals and ecosystems have migrated thousands of miles over the millennia, gaining new ground and losing old. Oceans have risen and fallen. Whole continents have been covered in ice. Landmasses have drifted from the equator to the poles, burying jungles in ice. Mountains have become seas and seas, mountains. Isolated continents have slammed into each other, unleashing their own invasive species like a geologic D-day landing. The writer John McPhee summed up the constant change on Earth with one observation: “The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”
Wild Horse Country Page 3