Talk on another Site Moved Here
Here's what happens in Nevada on BLM ground. USFS grounds have horses, but their policy and practices are a tad different than BLM, so let's just deal with BLM for now.
As you're about to find out, the BLM is like every other bureaucracy in that they love their acronyms.
The BLM lands in Nevada have "Horse Management Areas" -- these are areas that outline specific areas used by various known horse herds, or are areas where herds tend to roam for most of the year before moving into another HMA.
Every HMA has what is known as a "AML" -- appropriate management level, or what you could think of as a target horse population, based on the carrying capacity of the area, wildlife and cattle uses of the same area. NB that HMA's don't coincide exactly with grazing allotments; matter of fact, a single HMA typically has several grazing areas within it.
OK, so let's assume we have a HMA with a AML of 200 horses. The BLM typically waits until the horse population is from 100 to 600% over the AML (say, 400 to 1200 horses) and people are screaming at the idiots in the BLM to do something, then the BLM puts out a proposed gather plan and a EIS (environmental impact statement), the horse-besotted women then file a lawsuit challenging the horse gather plan, the BLM responds, the IBLA or federal court responds and the horse gather happens.
The shortcut is if someone flicks their Bic, or we get a lightening strike, starts a rangeland fire that burns over a HMA or a substantial part of it, then the BLM gets to do an "Emergency Gather" and shortcut some of the nonsense, because the poor widdle horses might start while trying to eat dry ashes.
Previously, the BLM tried to gather only the horses they thought had a reasonable chance of being adopted. Mind you, I'm not a horse rider, I don't even like horses all that much (with the exception of draft horses), but mustangs older than about three years old can't be taught nothin'. You might as well adopt 'em and shoot them as soon as you unload them and save yourself the trouble, expense and injury you'll sustain by trying to train them to ride. Young mustangs can be trained up.
Well, the horse-besotted women sued the BLM, claiming the BLM was discriminating against older horses, blah, blah, blah. So now the BLM is forced to pull in a cross-section of horses, including old broken nags that no one will want to adopt unless they're sending the horse straight to the kill plant. Now that this is no longer an option (thanks again to the horse-besotted women), mustang holding centers in places like Palamino (north of Reno, NV), and Susanville (further north of Reno on US-395, in California) and so on have large numbers of horses older than three years build up. The BLM can't kill these horses, they can't turn them back out, so here is what all you taxpayers are doing:
You're paying a contractor (who bids for the contract) to pasture these stupid horses. Part of pasturing involves making sure these horses have veternary care. These horses need to have fences that aren't barbed wire, is at least six feet high, only has a density of a few horses per acre, etc, etc. In short, for mustangs, they've gone to the promised land and then some. On your taxpayer money, I might add.
I'm told by contractors who have won the bid as well as BLM employees that the winning bids tend to be around $3 per head per day.
There are, last I looked, at least 14,000 mustangs in the pasturing system, and the number is growing by leaps and bounds every year. This pasturing started around 2001.
Here's an interesting factoid for all y'all in states where you aren't blessed with "wild horses" -- the reproductive rate of horses, when you look at a whole herd out on the range, with no care, is at least a 17% increase per year, sometimes in the low 20's when the feed is really good. This means that in five to six years, the number of horses in any given HMA typically doubles.
This means that you taxpayers are coughing up plenty of money every year to bring in a contractor to NV, UT, CA, ID, WY and round these stupid horses up, ship them to the processing areas like Palamino and Susanville, then run an adoption program on them, and then pay for some bureaucrat to check up on the adoptors and make sure that Black Velvet hasn't been turned into Alpo. On the range, the expected lifespan for a mustang is, oh, 10 to 12 years.
In captivity, on fat pasture, with vet care -- what's a horse lifespan? 25 years plus? Talk about taking a bad problem and making it worse. Feh.
This, people, is your tax dollars at work. All because some estrogen-crazed females let their emotions take control of their judgement on these animals. The lack of judgement isn't limited to the good horses -- it encompasses a huge lapse of judgement in what benefits the horses as well, like herd genetics. When you look at some of these horses, I swear, the most humane thing anyone could do for the horse in question as well as the soundness of the herd genetics is to step out onto the range with a M1 Garand or a M1A and start shooting. Some of these horses have genetics that make them look like freaks from Mars -- huge heads, short necks, stubby legs, etc. We call these miscreants "hammerheads" and when you've never seen one, you don't understand why. The first time you see one, you understand why the name fits perfectly. They don't need to be rounded up. They simply need to be shot on sight.
Before she passed away in '98, my dear mother was one woman who believed all thise idiotic propaganda surrounding the mustangs -- how the ranchers were starving these hooved rats out of existance, how endangered they are, blah, blah, blah. These "wild horse annie" groups know their audience(s) -- horse-loving women from back east and urban areas that really don't know jack about horses, even tho they own horses.
I put a stop to this when I offered to send Mom as many mustangs as she wanted -- I'd pay all expenses to make them appear in Orange County, NY, where she had her horses. She was speechless -- "How could you do that?" "Well, Ma, I just go up to Palamino, pick out as many as will fit in a horse trailer or, better yet, on a cattle trailer I hire to take 'em out to you, and pay the BLM about $125 per head, then pay the hauler and they'll show up at your place. How many ya want? 10, 20? A cattle trucker tells me he could haul 30 coast-to-coast, and do it for $4,000. For less than $6,000, I can inject a load of mustangs into ya as soon as you give the word. When ya want them?"
There was silence on the other end of the phone. Never heard another word about mustangs after that.
Here's the Nevada BLM's page of sorry idiocy on horses:
http://dcnr.nv.gov/nrp01/bio10.htm
