Cruel New Tradition at Snaffle Bit Futurity?

The Reno Snaffle Bit Futurity, a popular event in Western horse circles, introduced a new and controversial division this year: a category featuring “spayed” fillies, sponsored by Protect the Harvest, a corporate lobbying group that advocates for horse slaughter and promotes mass sterilization of wild horse herds.

Billed as the First Annual Wild Spayed Filly Futurity, this special division created by Protect the Harvest featured 12 three-year-old wild fillies, whom the group purchased from the Burns Oregon Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro program as two-year-olds in 2017. The young fillies underwent surgery to remove their ovaries and were then sold to trainers who were invited back to the Reno competition.

After the Wild Spayed Filly Futurity, which featured three classes competing for a $25,000 purse, the horses were sold again along with 11 new two-year-old spayed fillies for the upcoming 2019 Futurity.

In total, 23 young female mustangs have been subjected to invasive and painful surgeries to promote Protect the Harvest’s political agenda: reducing America’s federally-protected wild horse and burro herds through mass roundup, slaughter, and sterilization. Why? Because wild horses compete with livestock special interests that receive steep tax subsidies to graze cattle and sheep on public lands.

According to Protect the Harvest, the purpose of the futurity is to demonstrate that removing the ovaries of wild mares is a solution for reducing the population of these federally-protected animals. However, this perspective is not shared by the National Academy of Sciences, which called the surgery “inadvisable for field application” due to the risk of infection and bleeding, nor by veterinarians who have labeled the procedure “barbaric.”

That Protect the Harvest collaborated with the Burns BLM to purchase the fillies for this brutal spectacle isn’t surprising. For years, the BLM has proposed conducting sterilization experiments on wild mares and continues to do so despite two major research institutions – Oregon State University and Colorado State University – withdrawing from the controversial project.

The sterilization method promoted by Protect the Harvest is called ovariectomy via colpotomy. It involves a veterinarian manually (and blindly) inserting their hand into the mare's abdominal cavity through an incision in the vaginal wall, then using a rod-like tool with a chain on the end to sever the ovaries and remove them. The procedure is highly painful, as cringe-worthy video demonstrates all too clearly. It is rarely performed on domestic horses, but when it is, the surgery is conducted under sterile conditions with adequate anesthesia, pain medication, antibiotics, close observation, and stall confinement to reduce the risk of hemorrhage and evisceration – the fatal protrusion of bowel through the surgical incision.

Such care cannot be provided to wild, untamed horses undergoing the procedure in the unsterile environment of a government feedlot or on the range. Additionally, most wild mares are pregnant, and removing their ovaries will cause many to abort their unborn foals.

This doesn’t seem to matter to Protect the Harvest or the BLM, but it matters to Americans, 80 percent of whom want wild horses protected and humanely managed. Humane management is available in the form of the scientifically recommended PZP fertility control vaccine, which has a 30-year track record of success in wild horse herds. But Protect the Harvest, ignoring three decades of scientific research and the conclusions of the National Academy of Science, claims that humane birth control doesn’t work.

That’s just more fake news from an industry front group pushing a special interest agenda to destroy the cherished and iconic wild horses and burros of the American West. The public should not be fooled by the “Spayed” Wild Filly Futurity, and next year’s Reno Snaffle Bit Futurity should eliminate the cruel spectacle altogether.

Deb Walker is the Nevada field representative for the American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Campaign). She lives in Gardnerville.