Richard Beal’s Blog

A federal roundup of wild horses in Nevada was scheduled to resume Thursday and to continue through this weekend despite nearly two dozen animal deaths since it began.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) says three of the deaths were due to injury and 18 due to severe dehydration following a drought.

Horse activist Laura Leigh, whose lawsuit put a temporary halt to the roundup July 14, blames the deaths on the BLM, which she says allowed the horses to become dehydrated and held the roundup during the hottest season of the year.

“This is foaling season, it could have been done earlier, it could be done last fall,” Leigh says. “This is not following the mandate to manage and protect our horses. It’s just wrong.”

She and other activists also complain that the BLM has blocked them from observing the roundups to control the flow of images and public opinion.

The BLM will escort up to 20 members of the media and the public to observe roundup operation today and Saturday for the first time since the roundup began July 10.

The BLM says the roundup of wild horses is a necessity because the mustang population is growing so fast that horses are running out of food and harming the native land and wildlife. Agency estimates show 38,000 mustangs and burros roam 10 Western states; half are in Nevada.

Leigh and other activists say the agency is moving the animals to clear the way for livestock grazing and energy interests.

Elliot Katz, founder of In Defense of Animals, which joined Leigh’s lawsuit, says wild horses are a low priority nationally because they don’t produce a profit.

“They’re just in the way of corporations who have cattle interests or want to do mining,” Katz says. “There’s been a gradual continuing effort to get rid of them.”

BLM counters that it is required by law to balance the needs of multiple interests on public lands, including wild horses, wildlife, mining and livestock. Wild horses, which have few predators and double their population every four years, can damage habitat shared by endangered and threatened species such as the pygmy rabbit and the lahontan cutthroat trout, says Heather Emmons, a spokeswoman for the BLM in Nevada.

“If we let them eat everything and we started having mass die-offs of protected species, can you imagine the outcry?” Emmons says.

This latest wild horse controversy started after a BLM contractor using a helicopter moved 250 horses on July 10, when the Tuscarora gather began. By the next day, seven horses had died from dehydration, according to the agency.

“These horses were without water for several days,” Emmons says.

U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks stopped the roundup July 14 but lifted his order two days later after BLM attorneys said an emergency existed on the range and that hundreds of horses could die of water starvation if the roundup did not resume.

BLM plans to remove 1,137 to 1,197 horses in three phases and to leave 337 to 561 in the 482,000-acre area, which it says is 30% drier than normal this year.

Horse activists say the drought was predicted last March and the emergency could have been averted.

“If there’s a water issue it’s created by fencing,” says Deniz Bolbol, wild horse campaign director for In Defense of Animals.

Bolbol says she flew over the Owyhee area, where the roundup began, and saw cattle lying in water at nearby Black Creek Reservoir, which is on BLM land.

Emmons says ranchers pay the state to provide water to livestock. Many, including the rancher who leases Black Creek, leave their gates open for wild horses, but some horses get used to a certain watering hole and don’t move, she says.

The last roundup in Nevada, the Calico gather, removed 1,922 horses from December to February and resulted in 104 deaths.

“Litigation dragged out the gather, so it happened three weeks late,” Emmons says. By then, “they didn’t have any food in their stomach and when we introduced them to food…they reacted to it.”

Bolbol says that after she and others reported what they saw in Calico, Don Glenn, chief of BLM’s wild horse and burros program, reneged on a commitment made in December to allow public access to roundups.

“All our gathers are open to the public,” Glenn said at the time. “We will accommodate them as best we can.”

Bolbol points to another YouTube clip, dated June 14, where BLM manager Lili Thomas describes dealing with the public’s reaction to “videos without explanation” disseminated on social networking sites from the Calico roundup.

“It’s caused us to have a really hard time in terms of trying to explain what’s happening,” Thomas says. “Working with wild horses is not a pretty sight. It’s very complicated.”

Bolbol says BLM has since instituted “a virtual blackout.”

Glenn says he never meant that roundups would be open to “a bunch of people running around willy nilly wherever they want to be.”

Public access can be granted “within reason,” he says, but the landowner who owns the corral where the first phase of the current roundup occurred refused to allow public access.

“He can tell us and private individuals we can’t come in if he wants to,” Glenn says.

The next big roundup, called the Twin Peaks gather, is scheduled for August in California. BLM plans to remove 1,855 horses and 210 burros from the wild and leave 445 horses on the range.