Nebraska Rancher Offers Sanctuary for Wild Horses
The Wild Horse and Burro Center at Elm Creek has maintained a steady population of 430 to 500 horses over the past decade. However, the number of horses relocated to Nebraska has more than doubled recently, thanks to an Atkinson rancher's decision to offer a long-term holding pasture for 800 mustangs.
“I was born and raised with a horse between my knees,” said Stan Dobrovolny, “so nobody likes to see horses starve to death like that.”
Dobrovolny's involvement with wild horses began last winter. This development comes as the National Academy of Sciences recommends sterilization to the Bureau of Land Management as a strategy to address what many see as a failed management policy.
Recent estimates suggest the wild horse population is as high as 50,000 and growing, with annual management costs at $75 million and rising.
Tom Gorey of the BLM office in Washington declined to comment on a June report requested by the agency from the academy. “We want to let the report speak for itself,” Gorey said. “We don’t want to characterize it.”
Joe Stratton, the facility manager at Elm Creek for 15 years, also refrained from detailed comments on the National Academy's findings. However, he acknowledged that efforts to find adopters for horses brought to the facility, located about 160 miles west of Lincoln, have been declining.
“The last couple of years, we’ve been averaging about 50 animals adopted a year from our facility,” he said. “So it’s gone down significantly.” He attributed this trend to “high hay prices, drought, the economy, you name it.”
The weakening response has ended periodic efforts to transport adoption candidates to events in more populous areas. “We haven’t really done adoptions off-site much, because the productivity of that has not been there.”
Meanwhile, the breeding and birth cycle increases the horse population by 20 percent annually, adding about 7,600 foals each year. “If you don’t catch that many a year, you’re losing ground,” Stratton said.
The National Academy's report criticized capture and removal strategies, stating they create a self-perpetuating problem by allowing more horses to survive in areas that would otherwise be overgrazed.
Past suggestions to send captured horses to slaughter plants met with significant opposition from those advocating for more humane solutions. Sterilization is not a new idea, but it is newly recommended by the academy.
Dobrovolny expressed a desire to read the report himself rather than rely on media portrayals. He perceives “a lack of understanding” from the public and false solutions from “far left environmental nut cases.”
He sees merit in the slaughter idea, despite it being a crime since the Nixon administration and the closure of a slaughter plant in North Platte. “The best control would be to open the kill plants and let the people who like horse meat eat horse meat,” he said. “Obviously, that’s my opinion.”
France has been a popular export destination for horse meat.
In the absence of more effective controls on horse numbers, Dobrovolny is engaged in custom grazing for mustangs relocated to his ranch. “No,” he said, “I’m not doing it for free. Actually, if you’re in the ranching business, everything you do has to have some profit to it or you can’t afford to do it.”
Originally Posted By Lincoln Journal Star