Oregon: too many horses.

Both feral and domesticated.

Oregon's horse population outpaces ability to care for them [link]
Richard Cockle | Aug 23, 2008

Joan Steelhammer planned to care for 35 unwanted and neglected horses this summer at her nonprofit central Oregon sanctuary. It didn't work out that way. Steelhammer's Equine Outreach on 20 acres near Bend Municipal Airport, is feeding 1 ton of high-priced hay daily to about 100 abandoned horses. She's worried about the approach of colder weather, when more financially strapped owners might decide they can't afford to feed their horses hay costing more than $200 per ton. "I'm scared to death about this winter," says the 54-year-old real estate broker. "I wake up at 3 a.m. scared."

Oregon and the nation are in the throes of a population explosion of horses, both wild and domestic. The surge in horse numbers—estimated at 9.2 million animals by the American Horse Council in Washington, D.C.—is aggravated by a sluggish national economy, soaring hay and fuel prices, and the 2007 closure of the nation's last domestic horse slaughter facilities.

$190,000 a year

Steelhammer and her husband, Gary Everett, rely on donations to help cover their $190,000-a-year costs to feed and care for unwanted horses in the shelter they have operated about five years. They offer domestic horses for adoption after rescuing and rehabilitating them.

Oregon has 3,750 wild horses on its open ranges, well above the 2,855 level that range managers prefer, said Gary McFadden, a federal Bureau of Land Management wild horse specialist in Burns. About 175 wild horses are penned at the bureau's corrals near Burns, down substantially from a more typical 440 wild horses there in January 2007. The BLM's budget crunch put the brakes on roundups that normally gathered 500 to 600 wild horses a year to protect Oregon's open ranges, said McFadden. This year's roundups have corralled only 234 horses. Wild horse adoptions have declined, in part, because of the cheap availability of thousands of unwanted domestic horses. Without an increase in its budget, BLM soon will be faced with implementing one or more unpopular options to control wild horses, said Tom Gorey, BLM spokesman in Washington, D.C.

So the BLM may propose in October:

• Humanely killing wild horses that nobody wants to adopt.
• Selling unwanted horses "to any buyer whatsoever," virtually guaranteeing many or most would be trucked to slaughter facilities in Canada or Mexico.
• Ending wild horse roundups. BLM roundups remove about 10,000 horses a year from federal rangelands. Halting them would stop the torrent of wild horses into long- and short-term care, where costs to feed and care for them range between $1.25 and $5.08 a day for each.
• Killing or selling wild horses under conditions that could lead to their slaughter are authorized under provisions of the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, he said.

"It is not a matter of us wanting to exercise either option," Gorey said. But with a budget of $37 million for the wild horse and burro program, the agency can't continue with the current program, he said.

Use of rangelands

Scott Beckstead, an attorney for the Humane Society of the United States, says BLM and the ranching industry contend there are too many wild mustangs, but the federal rangelands could sustain many more if there were fewer cattle.

"I will agree there is an overpopulation of domestic horses," largely because of indiscriminate breeding, said Beckstead. Beckstead is the director of the new 1,120-acre Duchess Sanctuary near Eugene that opened this summer to rescue horses. It shelters 155 horses from Canada that were used in the collection of premarin from pregnant mares for an estrogen replacement drug for women. Ultimately, the sanctuary could hold as many as 400 horses, he said.

As wild horse numbers increase in the absence of roundups, the BLM may come under increased pressure to reduce grazing permits to livestock on federal lands. That could affect ranching families and ranching communities across the West, the agency said. "It is kind of a big snowball once it starts," said BLM's McFadden. "That is the big unknown that is coming."

The environmental impact from rapidly growing wild horse herds promises to be destructive to the open range, he said. Gorey said the BLM's goal is to balance the uses. "The horses and burros need their fair share, and the other uses need their fair share," he said.

Closed slaughter facilities

Cavel International in DeKalb, Ill., the last horse slaughter facility in the nation, shut its doors in September 2007, and two similar operations in Texas closed last year, too. That left an estimated 100,000 domestic horses alive that probably would not be otherwise, said Tom Persechino, spokesman for the 350,000-member American Quarter Horse Association of Amarillo, Texas. "You are talking about 100,000 horses each and every year that now have to be cared for, and somebody has to foot the bill for that," said Persechino. Federal legislation triggering the closures of the domestic horse slaughter facilities, while well-intentioned, was "irresponsible," he said. "It has done more harm than good for horses." Veterinarian Chris Otteman with the Oregon Humane Society said closing the nation's horse slaughter facilities was done without contingency plans. "There has not been a provision for what we do with a 1,500-pound animal that is at the end of life, that needs a place to go." she said. Beckstead, of the Humane Society of the United States, doesn't regret the demise of the slaughter industry. Attitudes toward horses are changing, and people are coming to regard them as companion animals deserving of respect rather than merely livestock, he said. "The slaughter industry was horrendously cruel and a horrible way for horses to meet their end," he said.

Although the problem is an overabundance of horses, the solution for wild horses is birth control, not sending horses to slaughter, said Steelhammer of Equine Outreach in Bend. Gorey said it's not that easy. Wild horse managers successfully dart mares that have been bred as a birth control method at the Assateague Island National Seashore off Maryland's Atlantic coast, he said. "But they are on this little island," said Gorey. "Compare that to BLM having herd management areas that encompass 29 million acres. We are in a real tough situation; there is no question about it."

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