AWHC Urges Resource Advisory Council To Protect the Carter Reservoir Horses, Not Doom Them

AWHC recently attended a virtual Resource Advisory Council meeting and I had the opportunity to give public comments urging the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to protect the beautiful Carter Reservoir horses. Listen and read them below

Listen to the comments here:

Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Amelia Perrin, and I’m here today on behalf of American Wild Horse Conservation and the more than 800,000 supporters who believe wild horses deserve a future on our public lands.

The Carter Reservoir wild horses are one of the most unique herds in the West. They carry traits that link them to America’s earliest horses with primitive stripes, leg markings, and Spanish colonial bloodlines. They are living history, and they belong on these lands.

But under the Bureau of Land Management’s current plan, their Appropriate Management Level is set at just 25 to 35 horses. Let’s be clear: that is not management, it is a slow-motion extinction plan. No herd can remain genetically viable at such low numbers. To reduce them to this level is to erase them from our landscape.

Rounding them up to this level is costly, cruel, and nonsensical. It adds to the government’s massive holding crisis, one that the agencies themselves have created. Warehousing wild horses wastes tens of millions of dollars each year while tearing families from the range. And as we know, the BLM cannot adopt its way out of the crisis they have created. 

Instead, it has to stop adding more horses to holding. Using proven fertility control at scale is cost-effective for taxpayers, more humane for the horses, and a solution that works across the board. It protects the herds, saves money, and aligns with what the American public overwhelmingly supports.

California and Nevada should be protecting these horses as part of their heritage, not managing them out of existence. I urge this committee to reject population targets that doom this herd, and instead fully support and expand efforts to implement science-based, humane management that allows the Carter Reservoir horses not just to survive, but to thrive for generations to come.