Wild Horse Country

by David Philipps

  State wildlife agencies, often subsidized by the federal Wildlife Services program, also still kill hundreds of lions. Then there are the hunters regulated by the states. In 2014, in the eleven western states that make up Wild Horse Country, they killed almost 2,800 mountain lions. So, in the West, in 2014, we wiped out at least 3,105 lions.

  That number in itself is alarming, but this is the craziest part: The places where the federal government is spending hundreds of millions to round up and store wild horses are often the same places where the federal government is spending piles of tax dollars to kill the lions that would likely eat them. I’m not talking about “the same places” in general, regional terms. I’m talking about the exact same places. Lay out the maps and the two overlap to a surprising degree: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and New Mexico all fit the pattern. Only California, where voters outlawed mountain lion hunting, is different.

  Not only are government agencies removing lions from wild horse areas, private hunters are also overwhelmingly hunting them there. In many states, the highest number of lion kills come from hunting zones that overlap overpopulated wild horse Herd Management Areas.

  Here is what the Nevada Division of Wildlife spent to kill lions in recent years: $70,000 to bait and trap lions in Washoe County, an area that is home to half a dozen wild horse areas; $30,000 to kill lions in the Gabbs Valley and Black Mountain—both wild horse areas. And $50,000 to pay trappers to kill lions as needed in other parts of the state. In 2017, the state proposed to ramp up its lion hunting, spending more than $200,000 on trapping, hunting, and shooting mountain lions from helicopters.

  The federal Wildlife Services program had a $121 million budget in 2016, about $30 million of which goes to predator control. It doesn’t break out the details of what is spent on killing mountain lions, but it helps fund lion kills across the West.

  The economic tangle of killing predators while storing horses is mind-boggling. The Bureau of Land Management warehouses thousands of horses each year. Each of those horses costs on average $50,000 to capture, house, and feed over its lifetime. At the same time, we are spending millions to kill mountain lions in the West. It is fairly safe to say that every dollar spent taking out mountain lions in Wild Horse Country drives up the cost of storing wild horses.

  Consider this: If just a fraction of the roughly three thousand mountain lions killed by the government and hunters every year—say, a hundred—were active horse hunters, and each of them killed five foals a summer that would otherwise end up in the storage system, the savings over a lifetime of those horses would be more than $23 million. That is a third of the wild horse program’s annual budget. Obviously, the BLM would not see all the savings immediately, but if you repeat that reduction with just a hundred mountain lions every year, pretty soon you are talking about real money.

  How many herd management areas could integrate mountain lions into their management plans? It’s a great question that has never been asked. The BLM wild horse program has about 160 employees, but not a single biologist who specializes in predators. The BLM has never done a formal survey of what Herd Management Areas might include the necessary criteria for lion predation. It hasn’t even asked what those criteria are. BLM wild horse specialists with whom I’ve talked have repeatedly told me that there are probably almost no places in the West where setting up Montgomery Pass–style wild horse predation is practical. I don’t doubt their sincerity, but I think the real answer is that they don’t know.

  What the work of John Turner and other researchers suggests is that we don’t need mountain lions everywhere in the West to make a big difference. A few hundred lions in a third of the wild horse area could fundamentally change the program and save the public hundreds of millions of dollars. We would likely still need some roundups. We would likely still need PZP. In the short term, we would definitely need both. But we could set a long-term goal of maximizing the predator management wherever possible.

  How would we do it? That’s far from clear. Managers can start by building on the knowledge that lions hunt foals near water sources in the summer months and likely need to switch to other prey in the winter. The BLM can make a list of areas that fit the criteria. Perhaps the bureau can come up with plans to get herds to move seasonally into the high ground where lions hunt.

  Managing horses to migrate would have benefits beyond population control. It might offer a seasonal break to deer and bighorn sheep populations. It would improve the landscape. Studies have shown that a healthy predator population keeps plant-eaters on the move. Horses that might otherwise hang close to their favorite springs would be forced to get a quick drink and then leave. This protects riparian areas, which in Wild Horse Country harbor a stunning array of birds, bugs, snakes, and amphibians. This ripple effect of reintroducing predators is most famously seen in Yellowstone National Park. When the park brought back wolves in 1994, it didn’t just cut the deer and elk populations, it led to more grass, which led to more small rodents, which led to better-aerated soil, which led to more abundant flowers and a suddenly robust community of butterflies.

  The BLM is in the range management business and often spends a lot of time thinking about quality and variety of grass. But how much time does it spend wondering how that grass is tied to the lion’s claws?

  Letting mountain lions do what they do is not just about reducing horses or saving money. It is about truly restoring the “thriving ecological balance” that has been the mandate of the BLM for thirty years. It is about learning to let the wild be wild in all its complexity. Right now, wild horses are embattled as a symbol. Whatever they once were, they have become an enfeebled emblem of controversy, cultural divides, mismanagement, and waste. Good management—wild management—could bring them back. If the horse is once again independent, pursued, tough, and free, its original symbolism will be revived. The legend of the White Stallion could be resurrected. It is not too late for the idea that an animal can represent our ideals as a nation, but it will take a broad effort similar to the one that passed the 1971 Wild Free-Ranging Horses and Burros Act.

  Restoring the White Stallion through predator management is not an impossible endeavor, but it is far from simple. The BLM does not manage the mountain lions on its land—that is the job of state wildlife divisions. But states often partner with the US Fish and Wildlife Service on projects, and perhaps could be swayed by federal funding incentives, so there is potential for cooperation.

  Both BLM and USFWS are part of the Department of the Interior, so the right Secretary of the Interior could encourage them to work together on mountain lions. But it would take a sustained effort—so far, no one is even mentioning it.

  From there, it gets trickier. Wildlife Services, which funds mountain lion killing, is part of a separate agency—the Department of Agriculture. Each department has different bosses, different budgets, and different missions. Getting them to work together would take serious leadership. It would likely take a strong president and a willing Congress. Both of them would need sustained public pressure to act.

  Then there is political will. Mountain lions have their defenders, for sure, but they also have plenty of foes. Almost everyone in the livestock business is dead set against them, and understandably so. If you think of a rancher’s cattle as his bank account, every missing calf is a robbery. Why would any rancher open himself up to such theft? But data show the losses are fairly small. In Nevada, according to a study by Wildlife Services, lions kill an average of 257 cows and sheep a year. This may seem like a lot, but it is just a fraction of what is killed by coyotes, and far less even than what is killed by ravens. A program set up to compensate deserving ranchers might cost far less than rounding up and storing horses.

  Perhaps a bigger hurdle could be hunters. Deer and bighorn sheep populations in many western states are not growing. The sportsman lobby has a huge influence over state wildlife agencies that decide predator control strategies. Their license fees fund most of the manag
ement, and they generally favor any policy that will lead to more game. That means keeping predator numbers low. It is hard to see how the agencies would favor more mountain lions if it would mean fewer deer and sheep. I could more easily see ranchers signing off on the idea. At least for them, mountain lions that might impact their livestock business would be taking out horses that certainly do. For sportsmen, it’s harder to find the upside.

  But maybe there is one: Maybe, as in Yellowstone, encouraging predators in Wild Horse Country could have positive, unexpected effects well beyond horses. Wild horses are hardly the only tough wildlife issue in the West. Deer and sheep have been dwindling, even with the predator control programs that have been in place for decades. The sage grouse is also close to endangered. Part of the problem is that the land is out of balance. The land has always had predators, and it can’t function properly without them.

  To begin exploring predator management, the BLM would need to start with a survey of suitable test sites, then create pilot management programs. It took generations to get rid of most of the predators in the West, so I don’t expect welcoming them back would be easy. But, as Lao-tzu said, and the Academy of Sciences seconded: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

  What will it take? First, money—which the bureau does not have. To fund such an ambitious program, there seem to be two options: Sell the horses in the holding system to slaughter or get Congress to increase the budget. Neither of those are very palatable choices, but neither is the status quo. Second, the BLM must do everything possible to avoid falling into the budgetary trap of storing horses again. That means as it builds a predator program, it has to drastically increase adoptions, drastically increase PZP use, or start euthanizing horses. It might have to do all three.

  This leads to a final problem with making the change: The structure of the BLM. The bureaucracy is built in a way that favors a corrosive status quo over bold fixes. The directors of both the Wild Horse and Burro Program and the BLM are always senior civil servants nearing retirement. They have repeatedly shown a tendency to avoid making waves, preferring the low risk of a deteriorating situation to the high risk of a solution that may be controversial or a failure. Many want to maximize their highest three-year average salary and get out. Making a long-term predator plan happen will take a greater commitment and a more courageous leader than the program has so far produced.

  The day after we toured Montgomery Pass, Turner and I hiked up a mountain near his camp to get away from the heat. The summit was a bare block of stone ringed by emerald shrubs. From the top, we could see one range of mountains after another, like rows in an auditorium, eventually disappearing into the distant desert haze. Wild Horse Country was on all sides, as far as the eye could see. Herds were out there, foraging in the searing heat, just as they had been since who knows when. In Stone Cabin, Slate Range, High Rock, and Rocky Hills. In Sand Springs, Sand Valley, Sand Canyon. In Black Mountain, Bald Mountain, Dead Mountain. I couldn’t see the herds out there, but I knew they were thriving. The eulogies for the mustang in the 1950s had been premature, but their future was far from certain.

  As we sat looking out at the distance, I knew that the legend of the mustang—a story we have told and retold about ourselves—wasn’t doing so well. We had come a long way from the days of pulp novels, or even Wild Horse Annie. The wild horse was a welfare horse, a contentious creature, a symbol of bureaucracy. But everything needed to revive the legend was still out there in the desert. The question was, What would we do with it?

  On that summit, we talked about PZP. Turner had been working on it for thirty years. It worked, but trying to get the BLM to use it had discouraged him. The bureau had chosen instead to pursue a quixotic test that year—spaying mares in the field—and it had been abandoned after lawsuits. There was no real talk of increasing PZP use. “I don’t know if it will ever happen,” he said. “I thought we could show people it worked and that would be enough, but every year there seems to be new resistance.”

  As we spoke, the BLM’s wild horse management program was grinding to a halt under the strain of storing horses. The program’s citizen advisory board was calling for a total killing of almost fifty thousand horses. The wild horse advocates were suing to stop the PZP program that could offer a solution. The program’s leaders were offering little leadership.

  As a nation, would we keep storing the horses or kill them? Store them and we’d have to live with the cost. Kill, and we’d have to live with ourselves. Sometimes during my journeys I was in favor of killing the horses. Sometimes I worried that it would just make a bad problem worse. In the end, I knew only one thing: Whatever we decided to do, neither would protect the legend or the wildness unless we found a way to stop relying on roundups. We had to move toward a sustainable future. We needed to reforge the relationship between mountain lions and horses.

  A few days after I made the trek home from that summit, I found a yellowed 1906 newspaper clipping with an amazing version of the legend of the White Stallion that seemed to fit perfectly with what Wild Horse Country needed. It seemed to tie the past and present together, and to show the promise of the steep and uncertain path toward welcoming back the wildness in the West that we had spent generations battling. It gave me hope. The piece, published by the writers of McClure’s Magazine, was an account called “King of the Drove.”5

  It was the story of a valley out in Wild Horse Country during the early days. As long as anyone there could remember, the hills had been run by “a drove of wild horses numbering thirty.” The drove was led by a white stallion “whose beauty and fleetness had been the talk of prospectors, trappers and Indians for two years.”

  The stallion harassed domestic horses and cattle herds, and the stockmen of the area might have shot a lesser animal, but they admired his speed and beauty and wanted to make him theirs. All the ranchers in the valley came together with a plan to catch him. At sunrise one day, they stationed sixty men on horseback along the valley and forty men on foot with rifles to frighten the stallion away from thickets where he might hide.

  “How could a lone horse hope to escape the net to be drawn around him?” the story read.

  The horsemen planned to chase the White Stallion in relays the length of the long valley until he was exhausted, then rope him. “As if the plans of men had been whispered in his ear and as if he bade defiance to them and was anxious for the struggle,” the stallion appeared at the end of the valley at sunrise to challenge them, and the chase began.

  The men chased him fifty miles, but he did not seem to tire. At one point, he grabbed a rider and dragged him in his teeth. The riders pushed after him into the night, but still he ran onward.

  “Next morning, as the east was purpling, the horse came out of the dark ravine in which he had rested in safety and kicked up his heels as a challenge,” the story went. “Without a nibble at the sweet grass or touching his nose to the waters of the many brooks, he galloped a distance of 120 miles. No pursuing rider came within pistol shot of him. At night he again disappeared, and the opening of the third day saw him as fresh as ever.”

  For the legend of the White Stallion to work, the horse can never be caught. He must never be caught. If he can, he is almost not worth having. He must remain free and independent. Roundups and PZP won’t do. Even death is better. He is, in a very real way, the embodiment of that founding American ideal: Liberty.

  “Man always kills the thing he loves,” Aldo Leopold said, speaking of the West, “and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”6

  We’ve made a mess of our attempt to preserve the mustang, but the wild horse is not dead yet, and doesn’t need to be.

  Eventually the White Stallion began to tire. The men were closing in on him. It looked hopeless. The narrator then took an unusual path in telling the legend
of the White Stallion, by giving the perspective of the fleeing horse: “His enemies were too many for him. His drove had been killed off, and he was all alone to contend with the machinations of man. He might evade them for a few days and remain in the valley where he was born and where he knew every foot of the ground, but in the end he must be captured.”

  But then the Stallion realized there was another way. There was a pass that led through a narrow gap in the mountains. His herd had always avoided it because of the only thing he knew could catch him: a lion. But now he had to take a chance. A hundred men were right behind him. They had regrouped with their ropes and rifles.

  The Stallion accelerated with “a burst of speed that elicited cheers of admiration from the men. They compared it to the flight of a cannon ball. He had ten miles to go to reach the pass, and a bird could hardly have made the distance sooner.”

  Soon he was at the foot of the mountains. He galloped up and up into the pass, higher and higher. The sides were steep and thick with trees. He could hear the men behind him. The close forest made him uneasy. “He heard the water dripping from the rocky sides. He heard the whine of coyotes and the growl of a wolf that had sneaked into the pass as day broke. He caught the odor of pine and cedar and tried to feel confidence in himself.”

  He did not like this terrain. He feared what was ahead, but what choice did he have?

  What choice, at this point, do any of us have? After pursuing a way to preserve and manage this American legend, the money has been exhausted and the patience is running out, too. We are out of options. Even though we fear what is ahead, we must take the path toward lions.

  The White Stallion stepped forward. He could see the land opening on the other side of the pass. He moved to run. Just then, a mountain lion landed on him from above.