The federal government is tearing apart wild horse families to feed cattle on public land.
The line Robyn Smith gave a reporter at the roundup in Rio Blanco County, Colorado, was “they’re living their best life.” She was watching through a high-powered camera lens as a band of horses galloped together on the range. Twenty minutes later, after a Bureau of Land Management helicopter had driven the band into a pen, she was crying. “That’s a family out there,” she said. “It’s a family broken.”
I have watched wild horses through binoculars only once, and that was from the passenger seat of a pickup on a stretch of BLM land in Wyoming, two Octobers back, on a hunting trip. The BLM has a particular reputation in Adams County only because the federal agency most of us see is the USDA, the Wisconsin DNR, and the county Land and Water Conservation Department, and the federal land most of us see is the Mead Wildlife Area twenty minutes north of the shop. But the pattern is the same. Federal land is supposed to be held in trust for the public. The question is always who it is held in trust for.
Two months ago the same federal apparatus was running the same helicopter-and-pen choreography in North Carolina — the same mustang capture operation breaking up the same kind of families at the same kind of pens. The geography changes. The families break the same way.
The BLM estimates that just over 85,000 wild horses roam federal lands nationwide. The agency also administers grazing permits for millions of cattle on the same public land. The cattle pay a fraction of what the wild-horse holding costs the taxpayer. The agency’s roundup-and-warehouse apparatus exists in this exact ratio: cheap grass for cattle, expensive pens for horses that the cattle are displacing.
The BLM currently houses about 60,000 horses at a cost to federal taxpayers of about $100 million a year. Most of the captured horses will end up in long-term holding facilities that some horse advocates equate with prisons. The agency calls the long-term pens “pastures.” The animals are there for life. The agency’s adoption program placed or sold about 8,000 horses last year, which is a rate that would clear the pens in roughly seven and a half years if the roundups stopped tomorrow. The roundups are not going to stop tomorrow.
The thing I keep coming back to is the cattle. The federal grazing fee for cattle on federal land has had a minimum of $1.35 per animal unit month since the Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978, continued in 1986 by President Reagan’s Executive Order 12548. Adjusted for inflation, that is roughly a 70 percent decline in real value. The Government Accountability Office has been calling the federal grazing program a subsidy since at least 1991. The permits are inheritable. The system is the kind Wendell Berry, in his essay “Solving for Pattern,” warns about — solutions that solve for one interest and generate a new problem and bill the public for the new problem, producing order in one corner and disorder in another. The new problem in this case is the wild horses. By the agency’s reckoning, the wild horse population exceeds the range-wide Appropriate Management Level of roughly 26,700 head the BLM has set. The horses are rounded up. The horses are warehoused. The taxpayer pays for the warehouse. The cattle stay on the land at a 70-percent-discount fee.
Aldo Leopold, who wrote the land ethic from a worn-out farm in the sand counties of south-central Wisconsin — the country I live in, the country this column is written from — was clear on this. A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. The BLM’s roundup treats the land as a stockyard and the horse as a unit of inventory to be inventoried out of existence when the inventory exceeds the carrying capacity. The roundup treats the cattle as a fixed entitlement. The BLM’s pen is the rancher’s permit. The wild horse is the margin.
The wild horse is the most American animal there is. The Mustang was the fighter plane. The Mustangs were the high school teams. The Pony Express ran on them. The cavalry rode them. The iconography is a hundred and fifty years thick. The actual policy is the opposite of the iconography. The actual policy rounds up the family members, partitions the foals from the mothers where the agency can identify them, and pays the taxpayer to warehouse the rest for life.
I am not against cattle ranching. My uncle Pete raised beef cows for thirty years before he sold the place. I have eaten beef at county-fair potlucks and on Christmas Eve and at the Polish dinner the Methodist church puts on in October. I have nothing against the men and women who run cattle on federal land. I have a great deal against a system that lets a permit holder pay $1.35 to graze a cow-and-calf pair for a month on land that is mine and yours, and that then charges me and you $100 million a year to warehouse the horses that were not in the way until the cattle and the horses together made the range unhealthy.
Cindy Day, who adopted Moses out of a previous Piceance roundup, says she used to hate the roundups but now sees them as a sad necessity. She trains Moses every day at a small ranch she bought near Grand Junction. She gives him kisses. He nuzzles her. She volunteers with the nonprofit that helps the BLM administer extra birth control to the captured horses. She is part of the apparatus that softens the apparatus. The BLM does not love the horses. The BLM would not pay a private nonprofit to administer fertility control if the BLM loved the horses. The nonprofit loves the horses. The nonprofit does the work the BLM will not do. The women and the men of the nonprofits are the reason the public thinks the roundup is humane. They are the reason the roundup continues.
I do not say that to be cruel to Cindy Day. She has given Moses a life. She has done right by Moses. The critique is not of her. The critique is of the apparatus she is part of. The BLM uses the adoption program to make the family-breakup operation politically sustainable. The BLM could not run the roundup without the nonprofits. The BLM has built the roundup to depend on the nonprofits.
The mustang is not the problem. The mustang is the witness. The pen is the confession.