Environmental Report Exposes BLM's Misplaced Blame on Wild Horses for Range Damage

Washington, DC (September 18, 2014) - The Public Employees Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has released an analysis exposing the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for unfairly blaming wild horses for range damage primarily caused by livestock. The report highlights the agency's skewed interpretation of a 2013 study on sage grouse habitat decline, a species considered for the Endangered Species Act.

The PEER report found that the BLM considered all wild horses and burros as factors in sage grouse habitat destruction, while livestock were only counted if grazing allotments failed the agency’s Land Health Standards for wildlife. PEER noted that livestock are cited as a cause of failure to achieve land health standards 30 times more often than wild horses and burros. If the same standards were applied to livestock as to wild horses, the livestock's area of influence on sage grouse habitat would be 14 times larger than reported by the BLM, and six times larger than that of wild horses.

“The BLM knows that the listing of the sage grouse as endangered will spell the end for livestock grazing on our public lands. So the agency and its rancher allies are laying blame for the bird’s demise on everything except the obvious contributing factor - the massive livestock grazing that is occurring across the fragile western sagebrush ecosystem,” said Suzanne Roy, director of the American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign).

“The notion that 40,000 wild horses and burros confined to less than 27 million acres of BLM land are a greater threat to sage grouse than millions of cattle and sheep that graze on 155 million acres of BLM land is absurd," Roy continued. "We are grateful to PEER for, once again, exposing the BLM’s bias, fraudulent science and preferential treatment of livestock at the expense of wildlife, including wild horses and burros.”

According to American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign), the BLM manages 245 million acres of land in the U.S., 155 million of which are grazed by livestock. Wild horses and burros are restricted to 26.9 million acres of BLM land, which they share with livestock. In a recent email, BLM senior wild horse and burro specialist Zachary Reichold revealed that 77 percent of forage on the small amount of BLM land designated for wild horse and burro habitat is allocated to livestock, while federally-protected wild horses and burros receive less than one-quarter of forage allocations.

The BLM bases “Appropriate” Management Levels for wild horses and burros on this inequitable forage allocation. The agency aims to reduce the wild horse and burro population to below 27,000, close to the number that remained in 1971 when Congress passed the Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act to protect these iconic animals because they were "fast disappearing" from the West.

The American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign) is a coalition of more than 60 horse advocacy, public interest, and conservation organizations dedicated to preserving the American wild horse in viable, free-roaming herds for generations to come, as part of our national heritage. AWHC was founded by Return to Freedom, based in Lompoc, CA.