Are roundups so cruel and traumatic that we should end them, as many advocacy groups have argued? They clearly are not a threat to the survival of the wild herds. We’ve been using helicopters for decades, and there are more horses now on the land than at any point since the law protected them. Are the roundups traumatic and cruel for individual horses? No formal, independent scientific study of the effects of roundups has ever been done. But clearly, the practice frightens animals and severs long-held social bonds.
What is more worrisome than the impact on individual horses is the impact on the agency that oversees them. Roundups have become a crutch that has kept the BLM from finding a better way of doing things. But they’ve done more than that. They have encouraged waste that has bred resentment and begun to undermine what wild horses mean. In many places in Nevada, they are no longer symbols of individual freedom. They are symbols of federal mismanagement and waste.
After we watched the last of the horses drive away in a semi and I said good-bye to Laura Leigh, I drove back to Tonopah. I planned to sleep out in the desert, but I wanted to get a hot meal first, so I stopped at one of the few sit-down restaurants in town—a little, sun-bleached Mexican place. At the bar sat three men in big black cowboy hats, the felt brims covered in gray dust—the contractors from the roundups. They wore boots with spurs and weathered jeans covered in the same dust. And in front of each man was a tall, frosty-pink strawberry daiquiri in a fancy glass with a long green straw. A man with long silver hair and a droopy mustache passed by the backs of their stools, his belly preceding him. “You boys trying to round up all of Tonopah?” he said with a chuckle.
“No, rounding up wild horses for the BLM,” said one of the contractors.
“Wild horses? Good. Get every one of those sons of bitches,” the man growled.
After the first Stone Cabin Valley roundup in 1975, the BLM had the legal clearance to take the roundup policy to all of Wild Horse Country. The agency started by trying to chase mustangs the old-fashioned way, on horseback. That quickly proved to be impractical. “We spent hours on horseback, not only just walking along but when the chase was at close quarters, galloping through brush and over loose, jagged rocks the size of footballs,” an author named Alden Robertson wrote, describing one of these early attempts. “That sort of riding was very hard on the horses, and if one got too tired or lamed up, its rider walked. Often a cowboy had to switch to his spare horse partway through the day. And sometimes he wore that one out as well.” The group Robertson shadowed spent three days riding dawn to dusk and caught only ten horses.
The BLM quickly realized that if it wanted to round up horses efficiently, it needed to go back to its old ways. It began lobbying for a change to the law that would allow them to use aircraft. It got the approval in 1976, when Congress added a small amendment to the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, or FLPMA. The law, which nearly everyone calls “flipma,” is basically the Magna Carta of the BLM—a wide-ranging law that gave the agency a new mission to manage lands sustainably for multiple uses, including mining, grazing, recreation, and wildlife.
The introduction of helicopters started a pattern that has continued until the present. Every year, the agency spends millions sending contractors with helicopters and corrals on a tour of the West, gathering up thousands of horses that are almost all shipped to the holding system. Often the same pilots who had captured horses for dog food before FLPMA were the pilots hired after the law to round up horses for the BLM.
The BLM has received steady criticism from horse advocates for continuing the pattern, but in many ways it had no choice. Public-land law requires the bureau to manage for multiple uses, which means keeping wild horse populations under control to maintain what it calls, “a thriving ecological balance and multiple use relationship.” When herds got too big, ranchers sued, saying the excess horses were eating grass that under multiple-use doctrine had been allocated to cattle. The BLM’s only ready solution was roundups.
The agency began removing thousands of horses every year: about two thousand in 1978, four thousand in 1979, and six thousand in 1980. But managers soon realized that this wasn’t enough. The wild horse population in 1978 was at about sixty-two thousand. Just to break even, the agency would have to remove more than eighty-five hundred horses a year. To get to AML, they would have to remove far more, so BLM director Robert Burford decided in 1981 to double the roundups.
His staff came up with a plan. It was going to slowly chip its way down to twenty-seven thousand horses on the range. If the BLM could cut the wild herds to twenty-seven thousand, the remaining herds would only produce about forty-five hundred extra horses each year—a number the bureau thought it could realistically adopt out. Helicopters gathered 12,500 horses in 1981 and almost as many in 1982. But the huge removals had a quick and obvious consequence: Suddenly there were thousands of horses in BLM captivity. The bureau had never been able to find adopters for more than a few thousand horses a year. It suddenly had ten thousand horses on its hands and began paying to keep them in private feedlots. The bill in 1982 climbed to $4 million—more than the entire budget of the program.
Fiscally conservative Republicans who dominated the West were not pleased. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who had worked for the Department of the Interior before entering politics, proposed an amendment to give the BLM authority to sell horses in storage to slaughter buyers. But he quickly withdrew his amendment after Idaho Senator James McClure, a longtime ally of ranchers and an advocate of roundups, sent him a letter warning that it was politically impossible: “Those who would protect the wild horses are zealous to a fault in their protection.” McClure told Stevens that letting the BLM sell to slaughter buyers “is going to inflame their passions.”3
The Reagan administration then made its own move to head off costs. Secretary of the Interior James Watt approved a directive stating that adoptions must pay for themselves. To meet the goal, the BLM announced it would raise the adoption fee for mustangs from $25 to $200 and instituted a policy that horses that were not adopted in forty-five days would be destroyed. The 1971 Wild Horse Annie Law had not addressed overpopulation, but a 1978 amendment, requested by the BLM, gave the secretary the authority to euthanize “excess” horses humanely. Up to that point, no one had ever done it, but the agency began to draw up plans.
An internal memo estimated the BLM would have to kill about six thousand horses, probably by lethal injection, though some would be shot and their carcasses burned on the range. In July 1981, someone in the bureau leaked the memo to a reporter at the Philadelphia Bulletin, immediately sparking what a BLM spokesman at the time called “an emotional firestorm.”
Velma Johnston had died of cancer in 1977, but Joan Blue, president of the American Horse Protection Association, took over as the main voice for wild horses.
“The ranchers have always wanted to get rid of all those wild horses, and now they’ve got the right administration,” she said. “We’re appalled by this and we’re going to fight it.”4
Director Burford tried to reason with horse advocates, saying the BLM was in a bind and lacked the cash to keep rounding up horses, which he said was necessary to protect the range. “If horses and burros are allowed to destroy the range, they destroy it for all,” he told them in a meeting. “The wild horse and burro herds suffer, livestock suffers, as do bighorn sheep, antelope and the many other forms of wildlife that inhabit the public rangelands.”
The bureau and the advocates met several times but were not able to find a compromise. So, just as the killing got started, Blue and two other horse-advocacy groups filed suit in federal court, saying the roundups violated the 1971 law. In all, only about fifty animals were killed before the BLM director, in January 1982, placed a three-month moratorium on euthanizing horses. It was seen as a temporary stay until a judge could rule on the case. It has never been lifted.
When the BLM backed down from euthanizing horses, it was still left with a growing problem of how to mana
ge horse herds—a problem that became worse the longer the agency waited. By 1984, the number of horses on the range had grown to about sixty thousand again, and the BLM was facing lawsuits from ranchers. Once again, the agency pitched a familiar plan: Round up until the wild herds are down to twenty-seven thousand so the program could sustain itself. This time, though, the bureau added another piece: To achieve its goal, it would need more money. Way more.
In 1985, Congress agreed to more than triple the program’s funding, raising the budget from $5 million to $17 million, with the understanding that the agency would round up twenty-seven thousand horses in twelve months. The bureau staged what was likely the largest roundup effort since the heyday of the Chappel Brothers canning plant. The helicopters launched all over the West. More than a thousand horses were removed from Stone Cabin Valley alone. In the end, the agency was only able to gather about eighteen thousand wild horses in 1985. It gathered ten thousand more in 1986 and eleven thousand in 1987. If the BLM had kept on that track, it eventually might have reached AML. But nearly every horse removed was a horse the agency had to house and feed. The agency tried adoptions, but many of the horses were what one BLM wild horse specialist once described to me as “too old, ugly, or ornery” for anyone to want. Instead, the agency was saddled with animals. By the end of 1985, it was spending $26,000 per day to feed and house them—more than $9 million annually. (Remember, in 1971 the BLM had said the whole program would cost about $3 million.)
What to do with all these extra horses? The obvious answer from a rancher’s perspective was to treat them like any other livestock and sell them to the slaughterhouse. A horse could bring $150 to $250 at auction. It didn’t make sense to house them, many ranchers argued, when you could recoup the taxpayers’ roundup costs at the market. Idaho Senator McClure, who four years earlier had warned not to introduce a slaughter bill that would “inflame the passions” of the wild horse groups, now introduced his own slaughter bill, which would allow any wild horse to go to slaughter buyers if it was not adopted in forty-five days. It didn’t go over well. Most of Congress had no reason to vote on a politically poisonous bill to kill wild horses. The bill died in committee.
That left the BLM on its own. Director Burford’s moratorium against killing was still in place. So the agency tried something slightly left of euthanasia to achieve its goals—something that hinted at the corrupting influence of the roundup program that in later years would grow worse. They would give horses to slaughter buyers. They just wouldn’t advertise that they were doing it. The agency created what it called the “fee waiver” adoption program. Anyone who agreed to adopt a hundred or more horses at a time could have them for free. Horse advocates said it was a fig leaf to hide the BLM’s real intent. After all, who buys a hundred untrained horses unless they plan to sell them to a slaughterhouse? Animal welfare groups immediately took the bureau to court, but while the case was pending, the program kicked into high gear.
Later government reports showed the agency gave away twenty thousand wild horses between 1985 and 1988, counting them as “adoptions” when in fact they were sending truckloads to “kill buyers”—the middlemen who deal in unwanted horses and deliver them to the slaughterhouses. During those years, fee-waiver horses accounted for two-thirds of all adoptions.
It was about as ugly a system as you could design. The mustangers of yore were still making money from sending wild horses to the dog-food factory, but they no longer had to go out and catch them. Under the new system, the bureau was doing all of the work—kill buyers just had to haul away the horses. At the time, a thousand-pound horse could fetch $250, so during the program BLM gave away about $5 million worth of horses.
Regulations designed to protect horses from cruelty only added to their suffering. Fee-waiver buyers had to keep horses for a year before gaining the titles that would legally allow them to sell the horses to slaughter. It was a safeguard the agency had created to take away any incentive to the slaughter buyers bent on a quick profit, because buyers would have to feed and house horses for twelve months. But an investigation released by the Government Accountability Office found that this requirement often led to horses being kept under near-starvation conditions during the waiting period by kill buyers who wanted to maximize profit.5
In a number of cases, the BLM, desperate to get rid of the surplus horses that were dragging the program down, was aware of problems with the bulk adoptions but did nothing. At one location in Nebraska, a BLM inspection discovered six hundred horses living in a small lot without enough food or water. Thirty had died in the two months after they arrived at the lot. A veterinarian hired by the BLM said the remaining horses were facing death, too, if they were not given food, but the bureau did nothing. “Less than 1 month later, 40 more horses were reported dead,” noted a later review by the Government Accountability Office. “But BLM took no action.” In all, 150 horses died before the BLM arrived to reclaim them.6
In Oklahoma and South Dakota, investigators found the agency had given nearly 1,100 horses to groups that had then sent 687 to slaughter. Investigators warned the BLM about what the buyers had done, but the BLM issued titles for the remaining 394. They were quickly slaughtered. One buyer of 140 horses, who was contacted by suspicious Department of the Interior officials, wrote a letter to assure them that he did “not intend to use or exploit said horses for commercial purposes.” Seven days after he gained title, he trucked his herd to slaughter. The BLM got a call from the local slaughterhouse, where the man’s horses were waiting to go down the chute. The factory owner was concerned about so many wild horses in his stockyard and wanted to make sure killing them was legal. The BLM told the slaughterhouse owner to go ahead and kill them. No charges were ever brought against the buyer.
Technically, horses were not supposed to go to fee-waiver adopters if the BLM thought they might end up in slaughter, but the agency was so desperate to get rid of horses that it was willing to look the other way. In the end, the investigators said, the program was a “prescription for commercial exploitation of wild horses.”7
In October 1988, after three years of legal battles, a federal judge sided with wild horse advocates, saying the fee-waiver program “renders the adoption process a farce” by failing to screen out kill buyers. The court barred the BLM from transferring title to anyone who planned to slaughter horses, and the agency officially ended the fee-waiver program a few weeks later.
The legal ordeal and public airing of its slaughter record that forced the BLM to cancel the fee-waiver program was not only an embarrassment, it also cut off the agency’s only effective way of getting rid of excess horses and left the BLM stuck back where it started. The BLM was still required by public lands laws to control horse numbers on the range, and since it still relied on helicopter gathers, it still needed to do something with the horses it gathered.
Knowing that the fee-waiver program would likely lose in court, Interior Secretary Donald Hodel in 1987 had put together a citizen advisory board made up overwhelmingly of ranchers. In a report issued that year, they recommended euthanasia, stating, “Some 13 million dogs and cats are destroyed annually by humane organizations in this country. It is reasonable for the federal government to implement the legal provision for humane destruction when faced with a surplus of wild horses and burros.”8
Robert Burford, still the director of the BLM after six years, considered lifting his five-year-old moratorium and instituting a policy that would allow unadopted horses to be euthanized. “When we’re cutting programs for the poor in this country, should we be feeding excess wild horses?” he asked, when questioned about the program that year. “Someone needs to bite the bullet.”9
There were about seven thousand horses in government holding pens in Nebraska, Nevada, and Texas in 1987. Caring for them cost $7 million annually. Burford was considering a plan to kill nearly all of them. He never got a chance. In the fall of 1988, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives inserted a rider into its annu
al appropriations bill barring the BLM from spending any money to destroy healthy horses. Even if the BLM wanted to euthanize horses, and could somehow convince the public that it was a good idea, it no longer was allowed to spend the money to do it.
Pressure on the BLM mounted. It was still being squeezed by ranchers demanding that it remove horses, but now it had fewer ways to relieve pressure by getting rid of them. Instead of taking a step back and asking whether it was time to fundamentally change the roundup approach, though, the agency kept the helicopters flying and kept selling the horses to slaughter buyers. It just became less open about it.
After the fee-waiver program ended, people could only adopt four horses at a time. The limit was an attempt to keep would-be commercial kill buyers from acquiring enough mustangs to make a profit. But kill buyers soon found a loophole—one the BLM seemed to hold wide open. Regulations allowed an adopter to sign a power of attorney to have a proxy buyer adopt a horse for them. It was intended as a way to allow people who lived far from an adoption site or were unfamiliar with the process to be able to have a mustang. Kill buyers began obtaining dozens and dozens of these forms, asking friends, relatives, and sometimes complete strangers to sign them. Then they had hundreds of horses shipped to one proxy buyer. Once the horses were adopted, the kill buyer would often—though not always—hold them for the required year to obtain titles, take ownership of the whole herd, and ship them to slaughter.
Not only did the BLM allow this to go on, but many of the people who participated in the scheme were BLM employees. James Galloway was one of the regular buyers. For more than a decade, he had worked for the BLM, helping with roundups and arranging what the BLM said were adoptions for more than nine thousand horses and burros. In 1992, a tipster told BLM law enforcement that Galloway was fattening up a herd of horses to send to slaughter on a friend’s ranch near Del Rio, Texas. These law enforcement agents were not part of the Wild Horse and Burro Program, and were not aware that this kind of scheme was tacitly allowed.
Wild Horse Country Page 20