Wild Horse Country

by David Philipps

  After years of asking the government to remove horses, Joe Fallini finally sued. In 1984, a judge ruled the BLM was violating the law by not keeping the wild horses contained to the area where they were originally found when the law was passed, and ordered the BLM to limit the herd to around 140 horses. The agency is now required to round up horses in the valley every few years. Since then, Fallini has sued thirty times over smaller points—his right to build hefty steel barriers to keep horses out of his springs, for example—and has won every time but once. But he doesn’t see these as victories. All told, he said, he has spent about $1 million on legal costs and another $1 million fixing damage done to his ranch by horses.

  When we had been discussing Fallini’s family history, and how his grandson, named after his grandfather, was now learning to herd cattle, he had nearly glowed. But as we talked about his long battle with the BLM, he started to sound defeated, even despondent, and seemed to be struggling with whether his family should keep up the fight, or just light out for new territory. “Jesus, you put your whole life into trying to make something work,” he said, shaking his head, “and they just keep trying to put you out of business. I’m so damned bitter. This whole stupid law never should have happened.”

  The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was a striking reversal of the status quo. For more than a century in the West, ranchers and farmers had worked to get rid of the wild, and the feds had backed them. By 1970, they had made monumental progress. They had eradicated wolves, killed off most of the grizzlies, driven back mountain lions, and were making good progress on coyotes. The federal government had formally organized grazing rights to keep out speculators and nomad sheepherders. The Homestead Act had ended; the public land that was left would stay public land forever. Ranchers had drilled wells and installed gas engines to bring water up into the desert. Public land ranching had finally beaten back most of the uncertainties of wildness that it had battled for generations. Then the wild horse law came along as part of a wave of laws, including the Endangered Species Act (1973) and the Wilderness Act (1964), which sought to bring an end to the Great Barbecue and save some of the wild scraps of the nation that were left. Those laws, though widely popular, often contradicted the traditions relied on by many western ranchers.

  Wild horses were a threat to the bottom line, but, just as important, they were also a troubling sign for ranchers of changing times. They were a sign that the federal government would no longer always be on their side. For ranchers, the horses eventually became a symbol of galling mismanagement that was clear evidence, for anybody who cared to look, of the federal government’s inability to manage the land properly.

  Because the wild horse has become a symbol of broken trust and mismanagement, the legend of the wild horse as companion to the cowboy has started to disappear in Wild Horse Country. Hatred of wild horses is not hard to find. Mention mustangs in almost any small-town bar or café and prepare for an earful. “They’re just trash horses, not even wild,” one man told me in a café in the remote Nevada town of Ely. “People think they saved the mustangs. Well, if you want ’em so bad, come out and take ’em.”

  After the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act passed in 1971, the anger festered until some locals started shooting horses. In 1988, in central Nevada’s Lander County, an estimated five hundred were shot by a high-powered rifle, their bones left to be scattered by scavengers. Was it frustrated ranchers? Local beer-drinking yahoos? Or just a statement about local disdain of federal intrusion? The culprit was never found. In 1989, in Nevada’s Antelope Valley, near the Utah border, another hundred were found dead. Though federal agents combed the area and banged on doors to question locals, no one said they saw anything and no one was ever charged. Since then, a steady stream of horses have turned up dead, often in lonely, empty valleys far from witnesses. Sometimes just one or two, sometimes a few dozen.

  Often horses are shot far from any witnesses and drop into the sage, only to have their bones found months later, if at all. But even in cases where suspects are identified, local US attorneys have rarely filed charges. When they have, juries in the Great Basin have again and again voted for acquittal. Dawn Lappin, who took over Velma Johnston’s organization, told a Nevada newspaper in 1988, after hundreds of horses had turned up dead, that the BLM only takes about a fourth of all cases to court, and juries rarely vote to convict. “There is such anti-Bureau, anti-government feelings,” she said. “I think they felt the government had set them up.”3

  Successful prosecutions under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act have been few. The penalties often amount to small fines and probation. And the BLM has misrepresented how successful its enforcement is. In the 1990s, when the bureau was facing broad criticism for allowing horses to be sold to slaughter, it told Congress it successfully prosecuted 125 people between 1985 and 1996. In fact, the Associated Press later found, the real number was just three. Since then, there have been only a handful of successful cases.4

  Shooting leaves bodies, which could eventually lead to prosecution. Some locals instead preferred to make horses disappear by sending them secretly to slaughterhouses, which got rid of the evidence while providing the rancher with cash. In 1977, the BLM caught a longtime Nevada mustanger named Max Allred using a traditional water trap to catch mustangs. Allred had been working as a ranch hand in the area for decades, putting out domestic horses in his spare time and selling the offspring, as well as whatever else he happened to catch. When caught, he claimed the horses he was gathering were not wild, but domestic. A jury acquitted him. He later wrote a letter to the local paper, lambasting the BLM for mismanagement. “Why don’t the BLM give up their horse control, admit that their whole program is comparable to some wino’s dream and let the people of Nevada handle their own overpopulation of wild horses as they did before this thing reached its present Idiotic proportions?” he said. “When there is an overpopulation of cattle you don’t let people adopt them, you don’t shoot them, you sell them. . . . The people of Nevada have been paying for the grass these animals eat, sometimes at the expense of their own cows, sheep and horses. So they should be permitted to gather and sell some of the horses instead of having the ranges littered with dead horses.”5

  In 1981, a BLM ranger came across another water trap holding four mustangs near Fire Lake in Nevada. Fresh tire tracks suggested several loads of horses had already been taken from the trap. The ranger staked out the trap and caught a rancher and his son returning with an empty trailer. The rancher said he was just trying to catch his own stray domestic horses. He was never charged.

  In 1990, a rancher named George Parman, who lived not too far north of the Fallinis’ ranch, was caught with 117 wild horses. He also said they were domestic horses. A jury found him not guilty. In 1997, when contacted by the Associated Press, Parman was not afraid to call himself a mustanger. “I’m proud of the fact that my family, whenever we needed money, we made our money off the mustangs,” he said.6

  In a 2010 letter Parman posted on the Web, he longed for the good old days:

  What we need to do, is to let the ranchers and the mustangers take care of the problem, just as they did in the old days, back when, along in the Fall a handful of cowboys would take their saddle horses—throw a bunch of grub and their bedrolls in the back of a pickup—and off they’d go to do a little mustanging. It was a perfect system. . . . It cost the taxpayer nothing. The best of the horses were put on the market for people to use and enjoy. The remainders of the older and less desirable animals were euthanized via a facility that made good use of the end product. Rangelands were not overstocked. Springs were kept open and maintained by the ranchers. The cattle had plenty to eat. The horses had plenty to eat. Wildlife did well. Everything was better.7

  Frustration over the current situation on the range is easy to understand. Ranchers like the Fallinis see the way the BLM manages horses as an egregious double standard. Using range science to calculate sustainable grazing, the agency se
ts the number of cattle each rancher can graze on public land. Ranchers caught running more cattle can be fined, or, in extreme cases, lose their permits. The BLM also sets the number of horses that are sustainable in a region. The agency has almost never met its own numbers, but there is no penalty for the agency like there is on ranchers. In fact, the penalty for BLM mismanagement is often visited on the rancher. When horse herds grow to double or triple the management levels, and grass is depleted, the agency often orders ranchers to reduce their cattle count to limit damage to the range.

  A few years ago, I talked to a rancher named Mark Winch in the Wah Wah Valley, on the Utah/Nevada line. There was a drought, and little grass had grown. Horses in the valley were way over the agency’s goal, but it had no money to remove them, so it ordered him to reduce his cattle herd by half. “I don’t understand it,” he said to me as we looked at a muddy spring that he said had been trampled by too many horses. “If we have to play by their rules, why don’t they?”

  Not only is the BLM not penalized when horses exceed management goals, it often comes out ahead. When the population mushrooms, the bureau is given a larger and larger budget to tackle the problem. Though the budget hikes have never led to progress, no one in the agency leadership has ever been fired or even formally admonished for failing to meet goals. Instead, the agency has only gotten more money. Practices that would put a ranch out of business have actually allowed the agency to add staff.

  If there is a sentiment nearly all ranchers share, it’s that wild horse numbers need to be managed at the level set by the BLM. They often preface their statements by saying they like horses, and want them around. But, they say, if the BLM can’t manage herds because it is spending all its money on the holding system, then it should sell the horses to slaughter.

  “I would not want to see all horses eliminated,” the president of the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association told the New York Times in 1989, echoing a sentiment ranchers have shared many times since. “But how many do we need for scenic and historical purposes? Do we want to sacrifice food and fiber for wild horses?”8

  Ranchers chafe against money misspent on wild horses, and look back longingly on the days when they could harvest the herds. And certainly, the BLM’s practices of paying to round up horses and store them, only to quietly sell them to slaughter buyers at great expense, makes no fiscal sense. But the wild horse budget pales in comparison to federal subsidies spent on public land ranchers.

  While ranchers often think of themselves as rugged individuals and independent businessmen, and scoff at the inefficiency of the wild horse program, they too benefit from government subsidies. They pay just $2.11 per month to graze a cow on BLM land—less than a third of the average cost for grazing on private land in the West. The BLM raised about $15 million in grazing fees in 2015. But it spent more than $36 million to run its grazing program. Almost any way you look at it, this is a losing proposition for the American public.

  At the hearing in Rock Springs in 1983, when Joe Fallini testified before senators, one of the senators harangued the director of the BLM for losing millions on the wild horse adoption program, to which the director replied, “We run a money-losing program with western ranching too.”

  The federal government provides other subsidies, including about $9 million a year in predator control. Then there are farm and drought subsidies. The Fallinis have received nearly $50,000 in farm subsidies over the years.

  How much do we as a nation really need ranchers like the Fallinis? Very few jobs are tied to these vast, arid ranches. Though cattle cover much of Nevada, the whole industry employs fewer people than a single large casino in Las Vegas. Repeated studies have determined that even though the federal lands in the West where cattle are run cover the same number of square miles as all the states along the East Coast, those ranchers only make up three percent of all cattle growers. And because it can take fifty acres to sustain one cow in the arid West, versus just a few acres in the East, they produce less than one percent of all beef. If all public-land ranching west of the Rockies were ended, many studies have suggested, the industry would hardly notice. As George Wuerthner, the author and ecologist, concluded in an essay on the subject, western public-land ranching “is insignificant to all but the individual rancher.”9

  Horse advocates say ranchers should not complain about the glut of wild horses since there are vastly more cattle in Wild Horse Country. In 2016, when the wild horse population was at its highest since the law passed, the West had about seventy-seven thousand wild horses. At the same time, there were about seven hundred thousand cattle on BLM land. If there is a shortage of grass, muddy springs, invasive weeds, and deteriorating range in the West, horses can hardly take all the blame, or even most of it.

  Both environmentalists and horse advocates have called for an end to government support of public-land ranching. Better, they say, to turn federal land in places like Nevada over to wildlife. Let elk, antelope, and mountain lions be free of competition with cattle. Let jackrabbits, coyotes, rice grass, desert marigolds, shovel-nosed snakes, collared lizards, desert tortoises, and sage grouse reclaim the land.

  The arguments seem compelling from afar, but they are less convincing if you have spent a day with a family like the Fallinis. Walking down the long gravel drive of the Fallinis’ ranch after talking with them for several hours, I listened to the crunch of stones under my feet and then looked up at the wild crest of the Hot Creek Mountains, with their distant snow. The shadows showed uncounted, unvisited canyons that flowed down. My eyes scanned the smoke-colored hills below as a warm wind whisked up from the south, bringing the sweet scent of sage from the nearby atomic testing grounds. I thought about all the fall evenings Fallini had spent out there, bringing in cattle. To one side of me stood an old shack, where generations of branding irons hammered out by hand were hanging from weathered wooden pegs.

  My journey there had started with a flight to Las Vegas. In the city, there are statues and murals of wild horses everywhere, but the city is mostly about tearing down the past. I drove north through old mining towns, thrown up by eastern capitalists and abandoned as soon as the pay dirt ran out. I drove past the nuclear testing grounds, where the United States tested ever-bigger bombs to try to ensure its safety. Standing on that gravel road, I felt for the first time in a while that I was in a place that made sense.

  When I started out exploring Wild Horse Country, I thought that, after learning enough about ranchers and mustangs, it would become obvious which had the proper claim to western lands. As I walked back to my car, I realized what an impoverished place the West would be without the two. What we need most is balanced land use—leaving space for horses and other wildlife, and for ranchers.

  It’s not that we need horses or ranchers materially. We don’t need public-land ranchers for the beef any more than we need mustangs for saddle horses. But we need them both because, in order for America to work, in order for the story we tell ourselves about our country to be real, we need space for both free-ranging animals and free-ranging people. Both are part of our story. Get rid of one and you are likely to lose the other. Man never catches the White Stallion, but he is always there in the picture, chasing him.

  CHAPTER 8

  ALL THE MISSING HORSES

  “You ever wonder where these horses end up?” Laura Leigh said as she looked through her viewfinder to reframe her shot.

  We were crouched in the pink-tape public viewing area on the winter morning I visited the Stone Cabin Valley. A helicopter had just come over a hill, driving a band of about eight horses into the steel corral of the trap. As it headed off again, a handful of cowboys waved whips to drive the mustangs into a trailer. The doors clanged shut and the trailer rumbled off down the rutted dirt road toward the highway.

  “I can tell you where they end up,” I said. “Long-term holding.”

  “Yeah, but after that?”

  As far as I knew, there was no “after that” in long-term holding. It was a
life sentence. “Heaven?” I said.

  She chuckled. “I’m sure that’s true,” she said, “but before that?” She got up and rearranged one of the tripods holding the camcorders she had fixed on the corral.

  “You have me out here watching the roundups,” she said. “No one ever watches the holding system. You could get rid of a lot of horses there and no one would know.”

  She lifted a long Canon lens to her eye and scanned across the sage, waiting for the return of the chopper. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them end up going to slaughter.”

  I held my tongue. Wild horse advocates are constantly theorizing about how wild horses are going to slaughter in the way some gun owners constantly fret that the government is coming to get them. By the time I had been touring Wild Horse Country for a few months, I had heard all sorts of theories but had seen nothing that resembled credible evidence.

  I had no doubt the BLM had looked the other way as tens of thousands of horses were slaughtered in the 1980s and 1990s, but because the agency had been caught each time, flogged in the press, investigated by the Department of Justice, and firebombed by environmental radicals, I figured they had learned their lesson. Plus, after each scandal, safeguards had been added to make it nearly impossible to sell horses to slaughter without being caught. By the time Leigh and I met in Stone Cabin Valley, the BLM was so emphatic that no wild horses ever went to slaughter that at the top of a list of “myths about Wild Horses” it published on its website was a bold proclamation: “Myth: It is the BLM’s policy to sell or send wild horses to slaughter.”

  I figured the agency’s slaughtering days were in the past. So when advocates started in on slaughter conspiracy theories, I tried just to nod politely and hope that the subject changed. Maybe it was because we were sitting alone amid hundreds of miles of desert with no horses in view yet, or because I had learned to respect Leigh, but this time I didn’t just brush her off.