BLM Should Stick to Science on Wild Horses

Almost 20,000 free-ranging horses and burros live on federal public lands in Nevada, or more than half of the animals the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. Costs of the program have skyrocketed over the last decade, but neither the public nor BLM seems pleased with the results.

As the BLM tries to control population growth on the range by rounding up and removing horses, it is creating a new population of horses and burros that has to be cared for in holding facilities. In 2012, the BLM had more than 47,000 horses and burros in these holding facilities, which is more than it reported living on the range. Continuing this will be expensive — it already consumes more than half the program’s budget.

There are many proposed solutions to this problem, but there is no one choice that will completely satisfy everyone. The best that BLM can do, therefore, when the choices are difficult, issues complex and the public opinion differs widely is to root its decisions in science. This means collecting and disseminating clear, accurate and transparent data and basing decisions on the data.

That’s the bottom line of a two-year study by the National Academy of Sciences that was just released last month. The report strongly recommended that the BLM improve and standardize the way it estimates population size.

Accurate counts are the basis for all management strategies, and the committee concluded that most herds were not counted in a systematic, organized or reproducible way. This has substantial consequences for management because the study also found that horse populations are growing at 15 percent to 20 percent a year.

After reviewing several management plans, the committee could not tell whether BLM field offices consistently used the modeling program to make management decisions or to justify decisions that were already made.

In addition, there are alternative approaches that would account for a more complete set of management options. For example, a more complex model could account for the effects of using both male and female fertility control. The committee identified non-permanent forms of birth control that could be used in mares with fewer effects on behavior than other options.

More scientific monitoring of rangeland condition and of the effects of all users on the rangeland is needed. This monitoring can inform decisions about population levels of horses and burros under different climatic conditions in the arid West.

Finally, increasing the transparency of data used to make decisions would increase acceptance of BLM’s decision-making process.

The steps laid out by the report will be expensive for BLM in the near term. They also will require more intensive management — for example, consistent and widespread use of fertility-control treatment of horses, more collection of genetic information and more rangeland monitoring.

However, in the long run, this approach could reduce the population growth of free-ranging horse and burro herds, and eventually balance the number of animals rounded up and removed from the range with demand from the adoption market.

Guy H. Palmer heads the National Academy of Sciences committee on the BLM’s wild horse program.

Originally Posted By Reno Gazette-Journal