Owyhee Roundup: A Harrowing Winter Event for Wild Horses
Photo credit: Stephanie Martin, Wild Horses The Film
On November 26, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) began the largest roundup of the winter season—the removal of 847 wild horses from the Owyhee Complex in northern Nevada, a 3,000-square-mile area. Originally, the agency planned to remove up to 1,600 horses, but due to the lack of holding space, that number was reduced to 847. Since 2009, livestock use of the public lands grazing allotment in the Owyhee Complex has increased dramatically. Yet, BLM proposes to reduce the harm to the range caused by overgrazing from sheep and cattle by gathering wild horses, while making no effort to reduce the negative impact of livestock grazing. Additional information about this BLM roundup is available here.
Weekly Reports from the Field
Tragic Outcomes of the Owyhee Roundup
The Owyhee roundup has been brutal, with stampeding horses crashing through barbed wire, wranglers hotshotting (electro-shocking) horses to get them to load onto trailers, and at least five deaths:
- 2-year-old sorrel mare euthanized due to blindness in the right eye and a pre-existing physical defect of the front left leg, which had also caused club footedness.
- Palomino mare, 2 years old, found dead in temporary holding after apparently having died overnight. Initial findings showed an enlarged heart and signs of pneumonia.
- Bay mare, 2 years old, euthanized due to a chronic incurable injury to the right rear hock joint.
- 20+ year-old stud with a pre-existing broken hind leg. Body condition 2.5. [Elder stallion with injury stampeded for miles and trapped before his life ended in terror and tragedy.]
- 5-year-old stud with a poorly healed broken front right leg. Body condition 3.
Pictures Worth a Thousand Words
This photograph, taken on December 6, 2012, by Laura Leigh of Wild Horse Education, shows a tiny foal who apparently collapsed after being stampeded by helicopter for miles. Unable to run farther, he was picked up—limp—and brought in by wranglers on horseback.
These photographs below, captured by Stephanie Martin, director of the film Wild Horses, and graciously shared with American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Campaign), tell the tragic and brutal story of the BLM’s Owyhee roundup on days 3-5.