Wild Horse Country

by David Philipps

  “That’s how I got started in this,” she said with an exasperated chuckle. “If you had told me I’d be carrying a gun around . . .” She shook her head without finishing her thought.

  We padded quietly up the bends of the dry arroyo. The walls, which were well above our heads, hid us as we wove deep into the salt brush. Holmes stopped at a spot where the banks were six feet high, and she set down her pack. She slipped her gun from her shoulder.

  About sixty wild horses live in Disappointment Valley—more than the BLM says it can sustain. It’s a small number, but they have significant impact in a valley with limited forage. Like most horse advocates, Holmes had come to regard BLM roundups as costly and needlessly traumatic to horses. But, unlike many others, she long ago sided with the BLM on one point: The populations needed to be controlled.

  “At first I was against population control,” she told me, “but it is better for the land, better for the horses. I realized it was the only way.”

  She edged up the dirt bank and looked over the rim. Three mares stood swishing their tails in the sage. She spotted a flea-bitten gray she had named Corona—her target for that morning.

  “I have never missed,” she whispered with a wry smile. “They call me Annie Oakley.”

  She stepped up over the rim, steadied herself on one knee, leveled her gun, and fired. The mare jumped. A spring-loaded dart about the size of a small syringe barreled from the gun and hit her in the rump. It stuck for a few seconds as the mare galloped away, then fell into the sage.

  “Got her,” Holmes said. She beamed as she stood up. She went to collect the dropped dart, then pulled out her phone, which contains records of every horse in the valley, and recorded the date in Corona’s file. Corona was good for another year. Instead of bullets, Holmes’s gun fired darts filled with a substance called PZP, which makes mares infertile for about a year. It’s basically a birth-control pill for horses.

  In the conundrum of how to manage wild horses—where managers must limit herd growth but cannot, politically, send them to slaughter, PZP has emerged as a promising alternative. The substance can slow or stop the growth of herds, it is cheap, and it is relatively simple to administer. It appears to have no harmful effect on the health or behavior of the horses, and it doesn’t linger chemically in the environment. Most important, unlike helicopter roundups, it doesn’t result in tens of thousands of horses living for decades in government storage, or quietly being shipped off to slaughter. One would think something that promises to ease the pressure on roundups would have the BLM chomping at the bit. Not so.

  The bureau knows all about PZP. It has studied it, deemed it effective, and for twenty years has said that it is excited about the potential of PZP. It has repeatedly announced plans to roll it out. But it never really has. Funding has been halting and inconsistent. Effective pilot projects have not been expanded. Its use has been so limited that on a broad scale it has made little difference.

  In an ironic twist, the more horses that the BLM puts in the holding system, the less money it has for alternatives like PZP that could keep horses out of the system. The agency that now needs PZP more than ever, uses far less PZP than it did in the past. It can no longer afford it. But that does not mean PZP has been a failure. In the absence of BLM leadership, citizens like TJ Holmes have stepped forward. She is part of a grassroots movement trying to end the need for roundups through smart, efficient use of the drug. Volunteers are now darting in Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Arizona, California, and New Mexico. Their work has eliminated or drastically reduced the need for roundups in almost a dozen herds. Their efforts are coordinated not by BLM agents, university biologists, or environmental groups, but by motivated citizens.

  Holmes first came to Disappointment Valley in 2002 when she was working as a copy editor for a newspaper in the town of Durango, about two hours away. An editor, knowing that she had grown up around horses, mentioned there was a roundup going on. She was intrigued by the idea that wild horses still roamed the West, so she drove out to the basin to see for herself.

  The local BLM manager had warned her not to expect too much of the Disappointment Valley herd. The wild horses in Colorado, he said, were not the regal Spanish steeds of old, but a bunch of malnourished mongrel misfits that weren’t much to look at. “I was expecting pig-eyed, hammerheaded inbreds,” she told me. But when she arrived at the roundup, the horses she saw running before the helicopter were stunning.

  She went back to Durango, but the horses stuck in her mind. The idea of them captivated her. While she was back at work, or riding her bike, or lying awake on a stormy winter night, they were out there, unsheltered, making their own way, with no one’s permission. Wildness. It was beautiful just knowing it was there.

  “They don’t need us, they don’t want us, they are just there,” she told me when we met. Her voice cracked, and for a moment she was on the verge of tears. “There is just something about that that is really amazing.”

  Holmes started going back to Disappointment Valley. A few times a year grew to a few times a month. Usually, she was the only one there. She trekked the hills and gullies, following the herds. She got to see how they lived when helicopters weren’t chasing them—how the family bands interacted and how individual horses expressed distinct quirks.

  In 2007 the BLM scheduled another roundup. By that time Holmes was editor of a nearby weekly newspaper called the Dolores Star. Holmes, notepad in hand, went to cover the roundup, and watched the horses running terrified into the trap, from which they were later trucked away.

  “Why do you have to use helicopters?” she remembers asking the BLM employees.

  “No other way, really,” came the reply.

  After the roundup, she grew even closer to the herd. She took her lunch and ate with them. She stretched out in the sun and slept with them. At first they were skittish, but eventually some let her approach within a dozen meters.

  Soon she had a name for each horse. She carried a long-lens camera and started snapping hundreds of photos. She began jokingly referring to herself as a “wild horse paparazzi.” You realize, after meeting her, that this is not far off base. She posts her pictures online in a blog she created called “Spring Creek Basin Mustangs,” along with gossipy bits of horse news. “Comanche has taken to hanging with Hollywood, and David has added Kestrel, Juniper, and Madison to his family, which previously included just Shadow. No pix yet,” she said in a typical post. She often refers to the constant horse drama she covers on her blog as “As the Basin Turns.”

  In 2011, a few years after she started the blog, the BLM brought in a helicopter for another roundup. The day of the roundup, the normally abandoned valley suddenly was transformed. About twenty protesters showed up from Telluride—a wealthy ski resort town two hours away. They waved signs and chanted slogans, saying the BLM was in the pocket of ranchers. They filed a lawsuit saying the roundup violated the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act and a number of other federal laws. They brought along a documentary filmmaker in a leather vest to record the injustice. A small plane buzzed the area, at one point getting so close to the helicopter that the roundup was suspended for the day.

  In the end, the roundup went forward, despite the protests. During a four-day operation, which netted fifty horses, Holmes watched the helicopter sweep indiscriminately through the valley, breaking up family bands. One stallion trying to escape broke his neck and was shot.

  “It was brutal, horrible,” said Holmes, remembering the scene. “And all those horse people had come out here and screamed and sued and it had done no good.”

  She became determined to avoid another roundup. She connected with two wild horse activists at the Pryor Mountains in Montana and in the nearby town of Grand Junction, where a few volunteers cared for a small herd in a desert rimrock area called the Little Book Cliffs Wild Horse Area.

  In the Book Cliffs, volunteers had worked with the BLM to get rid of helicopter roundups. Instead, they
used dart guns loaded with PZP to slow reproduction. The Book Cliffs herd only produced a handful of extra horses every few years, so instead of an expensive helicopter, they used a water trap to gather extras. This allowed the BLM to take only the horses it wanted— young, adoptable ones. No horses were going into the holding system from Little Book Cliffs. “It just made so much sense,” Holmes said. “I didn’t want to be just another advocate screaming that I hated what the BLM was doing. I wanted to change something.”

  She decided she would teach herself to shoot a dart gun and learn how this thing called PZP works. The decision led her in 2011 to the back lot of the zoo in Billings, Montana, where the reigning expert on PZP, Dr. Jay Kirkpatrick, offered classes on using the vaccine.

  That is where I eventually went to learn about PZP, too.

  A few weeks later, I was waiting outside Kirkpatrick’s office in Billings when he pulled up, driving an ancient blue Subaru hatchback with a faded Cornell sticker on the back. In his early seventies, he was wearing a khaki uniform like a man on safari. He opened the door and pushed back the front seat to let out an equally ancient sheepdog that followed him into the building.

  Kirkpatrick had short, gray hair parted neatly to the side, wire-framed glasses, and a number of one-liners well polished by having told the story of PZP to dozens of classes over the years. After shaking my hand, he put on his best fake sinister smile and told me, “I want you to become an emissary of PZP. Let the indoctrination begin.”

  Kirkpatrick is the accidental Johnny Appleseed of PZP. He is not a horse person, but he was motivated by his belief in wildness. In his decades of work with the substance, he has trained hundreds of people with a three-day course that explains the biology, politics, and practical application of PZP. It includes plenty of dart-gun practice.

  On the morning I arrived, Kirkpatrick led me down a small hall in his lab to a room where his latest class was waiting. In a room filled with various models of dart guns sat three other students: a regional BLM wild horse manager Holmes had persuaded to take the class; a wildlife director at the Humane Society of the United States, which was using PZP on horses and urban deer; and a twenty-year-old woman with a baseball cap pulled down low over her eyes and camouflage fleece zipped up to her chin. Her mother, like TJ Holmes, had started darting a local herd. This one was in the McCullough Peaks, in the Bighorn Basin, near Cody, Wyoming.

  “I really like to hunt,” the woman said. “Since I like to shoot things, my mom said I should try doing it for good instead of just killing them.”

  “What do you like to hunt?” Kirkpatrick asked. The girl shrugged as she weighed how to word what could be a very long answer, then she smiled and said, “Food.”

  Next it was the BLM manager’s turn. He had just moved from the Midwest to take over range management in the region that includes Disappointment Valley. The first person to show him around the wild horse herd was TJ Holmes. “So of course she told me all about PZP,” he said, “and it makes sense. Right now, with these roundups we are just filling buckets and no one has turned off the spigot.”

  The woman from the Humane Society of the United States said her group saw PZP as extremely promising and planned to expand its efforts with the vaccine.

  When it was Kirkpatrick’s turn, he settled in for a long yarn that told the whole history of PZP. “I’ve been doing this for more than forty years,” he said. “There is a lot to catch up on. It started in 1971, the same year the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was passed. I was a wet-behind-the-ears reproductive biologist, just a few years out of Cornell, and I had a job at Montana State University. One summer afternoon two BLM cowboys with sweaty hat bands and shit on their boots walked in.”

  One of the men was the manager of the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range, which roamed a windswept ridge not too far from Billings. The Pryor Mountain Range was created by a separate decree in 1968, before the 1971 law. The herd was starting to grow, and managers doubted they could find adopters for all the horses they wanted to remove. The manager asked Kirkpatrick whether there was any way to stop horses from reproducing.

  For the reproductive biologist, it was an odd question. People had studied animal reproduction for centuries, but nearly all of their focus had been on how to increase reproduction, not how to put on the brakes. Kirkpatrick thought for a minute. He had grown up during the introduction of the birth control pill, so obviously he knew there was no physiological reason something couldn’t be done. That no one had done it yet did not mean no one could. Not realizing that his answer would dominate his life for the rest of his career, he casually told the cowboys, “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Kirkpatrick and his good friend from grad school, John Turner, started working on the problem. First, they realized they had to learn something about how wild horse herds reproduce. The closest wild horse area was in the Pryor Mountains, about forty miles southwest of Billings, on an eighty-eight-hundred-foot windswept collision of mesas and ridges. Lewis and Clark had passed by the mountains in 1804, on their exploration of the West, and named the area after Nathaniel Pryor, a sergeant in the expedition who had gone south toward the mountains trying to recover horses stolen by the local Horse Nations. Wild horses have been living up in the Pryor Mountains—isolated from other herds—for as long as anyone could remember.

  To Kirkpatrick and Turner, it seemed like the perfect place to understand the horse’s reproductive dynamics. With his wife and Turner, he began spending summers in a one-room cabin in the Pryors, studying behavior and reproduction rates. During the winters, they tried to come up with a practical strategy for birth control.

  Their first attempt at controlling reproduction was to try vasectomies for dominant stallions—something Velma Johnston had suggested as an option in 1976, shortly before her death.1 Their theory was that the snipped stallions would retain their harems of females but not reproduce. While the procedure worked, doing the surgeries in the field was too costly and controversial to be practical. Vasectomies were also less than ideal because they were not reversible. If a natural disaster wiped out too many horses, there was no way to reverse the fertility control.

  Next they tried to make stallions infertile with high levels of testosterone. Horses tranquilized by dart from a helicopter were then given a huge dose of slow-release testosterone in a hip. It also worked. But the steroid was expensive and the use of the helicopter pushed the price beyond what the BLM could afford. The team also soon realized that focusing on one dominant stallion had little effect, because there is a lot of hanky-panky among the herds, and mares became pregnant anyway. “It was a pharmacological success and a practical failure,” Kirkpatrick said.

  After that, they turned to trying to control mares, testing different hormone treatments that worked much like human birth control pills. Still they ran into problems. Natural hormones, like the ones millions of women take daily, broke down quickly after being injected, providing only a few weeks’ worth of contraception. Synthetics lingered in the food chain too long, meaning the effects could get passed on to other animals. One hormone they tried actually made the birth rate go up. “We tried so many things, but none of them really were acceptable,” Kirkpatrick said.

  In 1985, after years of work, Kirkpatrick and Turner were still trying to perfect hormone treatments when another researcher discovered a different approach—one that used a horse’s own immune system as a contraceptive. Irwin Liu, an immunologist at the University of California at Davis, was working with a slaughterhouse byproduct called porcine zona pellucida, or PZP. Zona pellucida is a naturally occurring sticky protein that coats all mammal eggs and allows sperm to bind to the egg. It has a unique molecular structure that acts like locks that only sperm can fit. Porcine zona pellucida comes specifically from pigs’ eggs. Dr. Liu found that the zona pellucida from pigs is different enough from a female horse’s zona pellucida that, when injected into the horse’s bloodstream, the horse immune system flags it as an outside pathogen. The immune system then
begins producing antibodies to fight the foreign zona pellucida. The antibodies are designed to bind to the pathogen and neutralize it. But pig and horse zona pellucida are similar enough that the antibodies designed to bind to pig protein also bind to horse protein. The antibodies essentially jam the locks on the horse’s eggs so no sperm can enter. No sperm, no foals.

  To get a reaction, it takes only a small amount of PZP—a few drops that can easily be loaded into a small dart. The antibodies stay in the horse’s system for about a year, after which the effects wear off, so PZP is reversible in case there is a sudden drop in population, but it lasts long enough that it can be applied with an annual dart.

  To determine whether PZP could really work in a wild herd, Kirkpatrick and Turner needed an isolated test population. They found it in an unlikely spot, far from the wild horses of the West. Along the coast of Maryland and Virginia is a long, narrow strip of sand called Assateague Island. For as long as anyone can remember, wild horses have roamed the island’s marshes. Locals say the horses—which records show have lived on the island since before the Revolutionary War—were marooned when a Spanish warship bound for Cuba was dashed on the beach by a storm. The National Park Service, which runs the thirty-seven-mile-long island as a national seashore, says the horses more likely are strays from early settlers. But, like most mustangs, they are both. Tests have found Spanish and domestic genes in the herd. Either way, they have lived wild for a very long time.

  The Assateague horses became famous in 1947, when Marguerite Henry—the author who later wrote Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West, about Wild Horse Annie—published a book called Misty of Chinco­teague, about a wild foal that grows up wild on the island and is captured by a pair of kids who befriend her, then eventually let her go because they see her yearning to be free. It’s a simple story that sold more than two million copies and was made into a movie in 1961. No doubt it influenced many young people who later pushed for the 1971 law.