White House Urged to Stop Experimental Vaccine on Nevada Wild Horses
Washington, DC (September 24, 2015) - The American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign) has filed a complaint with the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The complaint aims to stop a precedent-setting plan to use an experimental fertility control vaccine on wild horses in the Antelope Herd Management Area (HMA) in eastern Nevada.
The vaccine, known as GonaCon, has never been previously used by the agency. The only available data on GonaCon in wild horses is from a study of just 15 free-roaming mares who received the vaccine and were tracked for one year after the vaccination.
AWHC is calling on the CEQ to direct the BLM to halt the pilot program until the agency completes adequate environmental analysis as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and prohibit its use in the absence of a formal scientific study to accurately collect and analyze data on the physiological and behavioral effects of the vaccine on horses.
“The current Proposed Action involves experimenting on America’s wild horses without any scientific oversight, review, or, for that matter, any scientific method for determining the impacts of the experiments on the horses themselves,” wrote AWHC attorney Katherine Meyer of Meyer, Glitzenstein and Eubanks. “Further, the use of GonaCon in this unscientific, unregimented proposal will place in jeopardy the individual horses’ long-term well-being and their natural, social behaviors, which are attributes that make wild horses celebrated American icons, treasured by Americans and others around the world.”
The BLM Ely District Office is proposing a 10-year fertility control “pilot program" for wild horses living in the Water Canyon area of the Antelope HMA. The agency intends to use helicopters to remove all of the estimated 60 wild horses in the area, and to return only 15 stallions and 15 mares to the range. All mares released would be inoculated with GonaCon.
In 2014, the BLM's Northeast Great Basin Resource Advisory Council, a citizen advisory board for the Ely District, recommended initiating a humane pilot fertility control program using the PZP birth control vaccine which has been safely and effectively used in wild horses for more than 20 years.
“The BLM is pretending that science is guiding its wild horse and burro management strategies and yet the agency is galloping ahead with the first-time use of an experimental drug in the total absence of science and in contradiction of the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences,” said Suzanne Roy, AWHC director.
The current “pilot” program fails to incorporate a properly-designed, rigorous scientific study conducted in conjunction with a reputable academic institution as needed in order to determine the short- and long-term effects of GonaCon on wild horses.
The American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign) mission to preserve and protect wild horses and burros in viable free-roaming herds on public lands for generations to come is endorsed by a coalition of more than 60 horse advocacy, public interest, and conservation organizations.