The Political Climate
In November, 1993, a group of Western senators defeated the attempt of the Clinton Administration to increase the fees paid by ranchers to graze cattle and sheep on public lands. Bruce Babbitt, the then-new Secretary of the Interior, had made the increase in grazing fees one of his first priorities. The Western senators responded to his initiative by threatening to sabotage President Clinton's economic package if the increase was put into effect. Babbitt's second attempt was likewise greeted with a threat to kill the North American Free Trade Agreement. Determined that the President's prestige not be damaged by losing the NAFTA vote, and facing a fourth Republican filibuster in the Senate, Babbitt was prevailed upon to withdraw the fee increase proposal.

Senator Craig summed up the essence of this confrontation between the Department of the Interior and the ranchers in a statement in November, when he noted that this was not a fight over the discrete issue of grazing fees, but rather a struggle to determine who set policy for public lands in the West -- the ranchers or Bruce Babbitt.

When the Republicans swept to a majority in the 1994 Congressional elections, all chance of changing grazing policy in the West to preserve the ecosystem and the wild animals living in it, faded as pro-ranching interests prevailed.

This is just the most recent page in the long history of the struggle of ranchers to control public lands. The battles have been fought in the public arena around issues such as grazing fees and grazing seasons, but underlying each confrontation is a long battle to exploit the public lands without restriction and to essentially recharacterize a grazing privilege on public lands as a property ownership right.

This battle is exemplified by the current controversy concerning the protection of wild horses on public lands. In many ways, wild horses have come to symbolize the mythic images of the American West. There is considerable fossil evidence that horses were indigenous to the Americas. Wild horses roamed across the Western plains many thousands of years ago. They certainly died out, however, and were reintroduced to the West with the advent of the Spanish explorers and colonists. Horses that escaped from the Spanish or were captured by Native Americans became a mainstay of the Native American culture. Their numbers increased when cattlemen moved into the West and brought their horses with them.

The last remaining herds of wild horses, composed of the descendants of the Spanish horses and quarterhorses who came from the cattlemen's stock, are centered in Nevada. Smaller numbers are found in surrounding states, but Nevada is the last main range of the mustang.

Their presence on the public lands has long infuriated cattlemen, because horses compete with cattle for the scant forage of the Nevada plains. Cattlemen solved the problem in their typical manner. They killed thousands of wild horses that "encroached" on their grazing lands.

The Wild & Free-Roaming Horses & Burros Act
In 1971, when the public learned that wild horses were being rounded up and sold to slaughter, the outcry was so strong that Congress passed the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. 16 U.S.C. § 1331 et seq. The Congressional findings and declaration of policy that introduce the Act state that "wild and free-roaming horses are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West; that they contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people; and that these horses are fast disappearing from the American scene." The legislation was enacted to reflect Congressional intent "that wild free-roaming horses and burros shall be protected from capture, branding, harassment or death; and to accomplish this they are to be considered in the area where presently found, as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands." 16 U.S.C. § 1331. The legislation was aimed at curbing the abuse of horses that had been occurring unchecked in the West.

Despite this protective legislation, however, huge numbers of wild horses have been shot, poisoned and rustled for sale to slaughterhouses. These illegal acts, nearly all of which have gone unpunished, are not the greatest threat to the remaining wild horses, however. It is the action of our own government, charged with the protection of these animals, that threatens to drive wild horses to the edge of extinction. Since 1973, the Bureau of Land Management ["BLM"], the section of the Department of the Interior that exercises jurisdiction over these magnificent animals, has rounded up 146,000 wild horses. BLM appears to be intent on "managing" the wild horse herds out of existence, in order to further the interests -- and profits -- of cattle owners and sheep owners.

The wide -- and it appeared in some circumstances, almost absolute -- protection afforded wild horses under the 1971 Act was modified by initiatives that became the 1978 Public Range Lands Improvement Act. Under this modified scheme, the Secretary of the Interior "shall manage wild free-roaming horses and burros in a manner that is designed to achieve and maintain a thriving ecological balance." 16 U.S.C. § 1333(a).

As part of this management scheme, when the Secretary determines, after review of data concerning the number of wild horses on public lands and the environmental and ecological conditions in those areas, "that an overpopulation exists on a given area of the public lands and that action is necessary to remove excess animals, he shall immediately remove excess animals from the range so as to achieve appropriate management levels." Id. at § 1333(b)(1). Under these provisions, the Secretary is authorized to conduct round-ups of wild horses from their herds and offer them to the public for adoption. There is increasing evidence that these amendments to the legislation have authorized and facilitated the very abuse and slaughter that the Act was designed to prevent.

The Ecological Problem
Approximately 530,000 cattle and 225,000 sheep graze on the scant forage of the 48 million acres of public land in Nevada, which has suffered during the long drought in the area. While commercial interests maintain over three-quarters of a million grazing animals, destined to be slaughtered for food, on Nevada's public lands, the BLM has decided that wild horse herds, whose numbers they set at 25,000, are the real "problem" and so must be removed. All this is possible under the rubric of the maintenance of a "thriving, natural ecological balance."

The very concept of establishing and maintaining a thriving natural ecological balance between wild horses and cattle on public lands shows the folly of this approach. Cattle ranchers wish to extract all possible use from the areas that they lease on the public lands, and wish their cattle to get to the heaviest slaughter weight as quickly as possible. This approach and process contradict and manipulate the natural processes by which a biotic community sustains itself in any environment. The presence of commercially exploited cattle on public lands prevents, by definition, the establishment or maintenance of a thriving natural ecological balance. It is clear that when an agency chooses to "manage" land according to a grazing model, its determinations will be very different from those of an agency following a wildlife model.

Despite the common conception that the West is "cattle country", ranching in Nevada, as in other Western states, is extremely inefficient. Less than 3% of the beef produced in the United States comes from the cattle grazed on the public lands in the eleven Western States. Wisconsin has three times as many cows as Wyoming. Nebraska's cattle and sheep production is over 16 times that of Nevada.

The arid Western ranges are simply unsuitable for grazing cattle and sheep and have already sustained serious damage from overgrazing. As an average steer eats 12,000 pounds of plant range material and 2850 pounds of feedlot food before slaughter, ranching on the Western public lands puts insupportable pressure on the forage and water resources. Ranchers are therefore determined to remove competitors for the scarce resources that they wish to devote to meat production. In this case, the competitors are the wild horses. The Bureau of Land Management is complying with the wishes of the ranchers and removing herds of wild horses in massive numbers.

Wild Horse Round-Ups
The Animal Rights Law Center continues to represent a group of concerned activists in the West who have gathered data that evidence how extreme the threat to the horses has become. The Public Lands Resource Council was formed to challenge the administration of the public lands. The group undertook an aerial count of Nevada's wild horses, to show the public that the size of the wild horse herds has been seriously and intentionally misrepresented by the BLM.

The BLM conducts counts of the wild horse herds to decide how many must be removed from the range to "protect" the forage conditions in Nevada. It has become clear that the number of horses has been greatly exaggerated so that large horse removals are "justified". For example, in 1993, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada estimated that there were 75,000 horses. The Secretary of the Interior said that 60,000 remained. The BLM's own count found 33,000 horses. But an independent count of Nevada's wild horses conducted in 1993 by the Public Lands Resource Council, which included individuals who have previously conducted horse counts for the BLM and are expert in local conditions, led activists to believe that BLM censuses are greatly inflated.

BLM's horse management methods betray their lack of interest in the wellbeing and preservation of wild horses. There is an inherent conflict of interest in entrusting the census of wild horses to persons who will participate in the round-ups. The persons rounding up the horses are paid based on the number of horses that are removed from the range. The incentive to overestimate the horse population is obvious. Moreover, the BLM has awarded the contract to carry out the round-up plans to individuals who have pled guilty to various horse-related crimes. The wellbeing of the horses that are rounded up, and the accuracy of the data on which round-up decisions are made, are being entrusted to persons who have been convicted of illegally killing wild horses.

There is substantial evidence that ranchers have made side-deals with BLM personnel in order to illegally remove wild horses from the public lands for which they hold leases. These horses are not processed for adoption, but are killed as soon as they are rounded up or are shipped for slaughter. No one has been convicted of killing the wild horses whose bodies have been found in piles by the hundreds since the passage of the federal laws that are supposed to protect them. A federal investigation has found evidence that horses that were adopted after they were rounded up were then sent to slaughter, sometimes with the knowledge and assistance of BLM officials. The horses continue to be killed, and blind eyes are being turned on these abuses. There is so much money to be made out of the killing.

Challenging Round-Up Decisions
Challenging the BLM's round-up decisions and methods has proved a difficult process. The basic problem is the power of the cattlegrazers in Nevada. The number of cattle that can be grazed on public lands is determined by "Animal Unit Months" [AUMs], a unit that determines how many animals an acre of land can support. The wild horse and burro legislation requires these Animal Unit months to be allocated between wildlife and the cattle that the holder of a grazing permit wishes to graze. As wild horses are included in the assessment of how much wildlife can be sustained in an area, there is a direct connection between the number of wild horses on a leaseholder's land and the amount of cattle that the leaseholder can place on the land. The presence of wild horses costs the cattle owner money. The leaseholders and cattle owners include some of the most powerful corporations, and some of the most politically well-connected individuals. In this scenario, the wild horses can only lose.

The BLM, now aware of the public interest in and outrage concerning the wild horse round-ups, has taken extraordinary steps to ensure that the public does not have a voice in the round-up decisions. Until recently, the round-up plans were circulated to interested parties for comment. Once the public comments were reviewed, a final decision concerning the round-up was made. Persons who had objected to the round-up proposal were permitted to bring an administrative appeal of the final decision and the round-up would be halted pending the outcome of that process.

The BLM is now following a tighter procedure that has made public input into horse management decision virtually ineffective. The BLM is facilitating the slaughter of wild horses while making itself unaccountable to the public. After the initial comment period, the round-up decisions are being signed by local district managers who have the new power to place their decisions into "full force and effect". The round-up decision is not stayed pending the determination of the merits of an appeal. Anyone challenging a round-up decision cannot stop the agency's actions even if it is later determined to be unjustified or illegal. The challenger has the hollow victory of being declared correct, but the horses will be already gone. Then, a challenger's only avenue of further protest is to file a proceeding in federal court. The BLM is well aware that most people who are interested in wild horses do not have the resources or expertise to initiate federal lawsuits. Such actions take time, considerable amounts of money, and the services of a lawyer.

Undaunted, the BLM -- which regards horses as completely fungible commodities and does not countenance the individual tragedies being inflicted on these horses -- just promises that, if it is determined that it acted in error in determining that there is an excess of horses (and therefore violated the law that protects the horses), it will just take fewer next time. No matter that large numbers of wild horses will have been driven by helicopters in round-ups, forced into trucks to take them --terrified -- to corrals where they will be processed for adoption, exposed to diseases against which they have no natural resistance, abused and humiliated by a handling process that seeks to subdue into manageability animals that have never had human contact, and sent as far as Florida for adoption.

The potential for abuse of horses and abrogation of the protections of the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was immediately apparent when the full force and effect power was delegated to lower-level officials within the BLM. As the Animal Rights Law Center continued to file challenges to individual round-up proposals, we became aware of how potent a grant of power this had been, when combined with an apparent agency determination to eviscerate the protection of wild horses. In April 1994, the Center filed a federal lawsuit, seeking a declaratory judgment that the extension of the power to place a decision into full force and effect to local BLM officials violated the Wild and Free Roaming Horse and Burros Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. The District Court for the District of Columbia and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit refused to hear oral argument on the matter and determined that the Secretary could, apparently without any restriction, delegate the power to make a final agency decision, to any and all local officials of the BLM. We found this decision to be remarkable and inconsistent with general principles of administrative law and statutory construction, and we are left with a difficult fight when challenging plans to remove wild horses from the public lands.

We will continue to contest the BLM's count of the wild horses in Nevada and argue that no round-ups should take place until the vast discrepancy between the BLM count and the private count is explained. We are seeking to dismantle the vast apparatus of secrecy, deceit and corruption that characterizes the present management of public lands and the horses that live on them.

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Source: Animal Rights Law