No Home on the Range

New Legal Menaces for Horses on Public Lands

• Click to read an important April 14, 2006 update!

"Ranching is the first step in the domestication of the landscape, and in the taming of wilderness. The subjugation of the West and the wilderness was a Christian burden, and the cowboy, like the missionary, was doing ‘God's duty’ in civilizing the land. At an even deeper level, the cattle culture is based on a worldview that sees nature as requiring control, and those who do the controlling as powerful people."

- George Weurthner, Welfare Ranching

To the thousands of wild horses and burros eking out a living along the margins of rangelands, ^[1] our government acts as both protector and a threat. It protects some young horses by prosecuting people who kill or send them to slaughter; yet it is a threat because ranchers have a voice in government whereas wild horses don’t. When portrayed as a nuisance to ranchers, horses and burros are subject to roundups and removal from the lands they call home. In short, a horse might appear free at a given moment, but herds are seen as requiring regulation and control.

The ranchers, meanwhile, are growing increasingly out of control. Despite scientific warnings against enactment, the Bush administration has just passed new grazing rules. By privatizing the ownership of fences, pipelines and wells in eleven Western states, the federal Bureau of Land Management will cede control over the amount of water siphoned from public watering spaces into pipelines for cattle ranching. These rules will also delay remedies for destructive grazing. Most important, they’ll restrict public input.

The not-so-wild West

In 1493, Columbus introduced cattle to the Western Hemisphere. ^[2] By the late 1800s, cattle ranching was an established feature of the western plains. Over time, the practice has severely impacted the ecological balance of hundreds of millions of acres. ^[3]

The scale is enormous. Although the government doesn’t keep statistics on how many cattle graze public land, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association estimates that it’s somewhere up to two million, and horse protectionists say the number could be as high as four million. ^[4]

Under the new grazing regulations enacted in June 2005, ranchers will be permitted to expand the grazing areas beyond the allotments that the government already leases to them for below-market prices. This expanded territory is triggered by simple physical hardships such as droughts or weed invasions. When there is not enough forage to meet ranchers’ needs, the businesses can move their cows, or other domesticated animals, into areas often occupied by wild horses.

Daniel R. Patterson, a desert ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity and former Bureau of Land Management employee, fears that the bureau is “trying to reverse years of progress on rangeland restoration to serve a handful of cowmen at great cost to the public interest.” ^[5]

To the thousands of wild horses and burros eking out a living along the margins of rangelands, our government acts as both protector and a threat.

Not only can the handful of cowmen expand their allotments to meet their needs, but they can also graze cattle longer on their original plots of land, even after scientists deem the area visibly degraded. ^[6] Prior to the revisions, ranchers had to start implementing any changes called for by the bureau immediately or, at latest, by the start of the next grazing season. Now, once the bureau suspects damage to the land, the agency is given two years to gather data and assess damage and one year to propose a solution. In addition, ranchers are given five years to begin making changes of ten percent or more. Eight years might pass before any significant reductions are undertaken. ^[7] “Based on the BLM’s slow-moving bureaucracy and history of slow-moving remediation and mitigation, we don’t expect this change to be beneficial for non-cattle interests,” said Greta Anderson, the Center for Biological Diversity’s grazing reform program coordinator. ^[8]

In order to ameliorate such concerns, in August, the Bureau of Land Management agreed to take the opinions of environmental groups into consideration by adding a supplement to the changes. ^[9] But the supplement is not an immediate remedy; it will take months before the modifications are added. ^[10] Conservationists remain wary of considering the supplement a victory “We suspect that the agency is only trying to cover its tracks and avoid legal action on their seriously flawed (statement),” said Anderson. ^[11]

If Anderson is right, under the future reforms, biological diversity specialists will have little more say on the issue. ^[12] Most environmental assessments will henceforth be made by government agencies — agencies where scientists are already struggling for an independent voice. ^[13] The bureau’s new rules “fence the public out of the process,” said Tom Lustig, senior counsel for the National Wildlife Federation, adding that the rules “let grazing trample over wildlife protections.” ^[14]

Scientists meet spin doctors

The new regulations signify not only the Bush administration’s disregard for the environment, but also a willingness to play fast and loose with the facts. When the new regulations were proposed and underwent scientific critique, federal officials changed scientific evidence to meet their own interests.

For instance, the environmental impact statement on the proposed grazing regulations predicted that “[t]he proposed action will have a slow, long-term adverse impact on wildlife and biological diversity in general.” Now, in place of the original critique, the government describes the changes as “beneficial to animals.” ^[15]

Erick Campbell, now retired after 30 years as a bureau biologist, told the Los Angeles Times in June: “The impacts of the proposed changes in the original draft were reversed 180 degrees in the rewritten final version.” ^[16]

Scientists like Campbell will face an even tougher time in the future trying to show how grazing adversely impacts the environment. To comply with the changes, scientists must cooperate with local and state grazing boards, often places where ranchers sit. They must also cede to their own agency heads, frequently loyal to the Bush administration and ranching interests. And as Campbell wrote on The Al Franken Show’s Air America blog site, “In my 30 years with the federal government, this is without question the most heavy-handed and disingenuous administration I have witnessed.” ^[17]

The new grazing regulations do permit ranchers to allow the land to rest more frequently between grazing periods. Bureau Director Kathleen Clarke says this provision will reduce soil erosion and provide more habitats for resident animals. If so, wild horses won’t benefit. They are caught in a double bind. Not only must they compete with cattle ranches for resources, but they also remain outside the scope of legal wildlife protections. This is because the government deems free-living horses “feral” or non-native, saying they resemble the domesticated horses brought over by the Spanish more than 500 years ago. Thus, the government does not view them as having a role in the west’s natural biodiversity. ^[18]

A team of advocates — one scientist and one environmental writer with a PhD in wild horse studies — says their research proves the horses are native. According to research done by Wyoming’s environmental writer Dr. Patricia Fazio and Dr. Jay F. Kirkpatrick, the Science and Conservation Center’s director in Billings, Montana, genetic evidence shows a match between the DNA of modern wild horses with similar beings who disappeared from North America more than 10,000 years ago. Although critics argue that the horses introduced in 1519 were distinct from the earlier residents, Kirkpatrick said he believes ^[19] “the fact that horses were domesticated before they were reintroduced matters little from a biological viewpoint.”

But their view is uncommon. Government officials and many biologists unbendingly support the notion that modern-day horses are feral — that is, animals “having returned to an untamed state from domestication.” ^[20] They argue that because modern-day wild horses are descendants of animals domesticated by Spanish conquistadors that escaped or were released some time after being reintroduced, they fall under the status of feral and cannot be protected as a part of the country’s natural wildlife. ^[21] Although arguably the better question is whether they can survive independently of ownership and control — and apparently they can, for there were once two million of them doing just that — it is their non-native status that drives herd control to this day.

The government and industry have reduced the wild horse population to about 32,000, yet round ups and removals continue. Such methods ostensibly replace the mountain lions, wolves, and grizzly bears, that once acted as natural predators, but themselves fell prey to ranchers and the government’s ruthless efforts to defend the business.

Public sentiment runs against simply killing the horses on site. Thus, the government controls horse populations by turning herds into privatized commodities. Thousands of horses are adopted into private ownership each year as a means of protecting them from a life of starvation and dehydration on the margins of ranchlands. Those removed, but not adopted, spend time in government holding areas, some slaughtered as a last resort. In fact, six months before the new regulations went into place, a law passed making it permissible to kill horses older than ten or those unsuccessfully offered up for adoption three times.

The government deems free-living horses “feral” or non-native, saying they resemble the domesticated horses brought over by the Spanish more than 500 years ago.

American idol

Two years ago, when the new grazing regulations were being fashioned, the Bureau of Land Management was also trying to accomplish another goal — reducing the number of wild horses on public land to 28,000. ^[22] As a result, more than 12,000 wild horses and burros will have been removed by the end of this year alone, and offered for adoption to private owners. ^[23]

Yet ranchers want more. “If the horses are causing damage, then get them off the land,” said Doug Busselman, vice president of the Nevada Farm Bureau Federation. “There is an accountability with permits to make sure the livestock are managed properly, but there is nobody who manages the wild horses.” ^[24]

Grappling with such psychology will take more than reclassifying horses, more than lobbying for bills against horse slaughter. It will take a fundamental revision of the position of ranchers and the products they sell.

“The rancher-cowboy comes from a long tradition of power and status,” writes George Weurnther in Welfare Ranching. “As a producer of beef, a food with considerable symbolic value to Americans, as well as being the personification of American value, the cowboy is firmly ensconced in the nation’s iconography.” ^[25] Dealing with our government’s coddling of ranching interests will present us with a challenge far more profound than lobbying for laws and regulations and temporary “victories.” Indeed, as Weurnther puts the point, “attempts to eliminate or merely reform livestock production will not be successful until the symbolism of ‘meat’ and ‘cowboy’ is carefully deconstructed, and the premise of controlling nature — inherent in the livestock industry — is challenged.”

Footnotes

Bureau of Land Management Approves Rules To Benefit Ranchers

Update: 14 April 2006 - After answering some of the more than 18,000 comments submitted by unspecified sources in reaction to its controversial new grazing rules, in a recently published addendum, the Bureau of Land Management has decided to finalize the proposals. The changes, to be published in the Federal Register shortly, relax the rules and regulations governing ranchers on public land.

The latest policies include provisions allowing:

• Ranchers to share title to wells, pipelines and other resources with the federal government.
• State, county, local and tribal grazing boards to have a greater say in decisions made on public land. Many who sit on these local boards are ranchers themselves.
• No more three-year resting requirements. Now, if ranchers want cattle returned to their land before three years, the Bureau will review annually.
• Ranchers to have two years instead of the original one year to implement a change, such as reducing the number of cattle they graze, after the agency orders that reduction.
• If ranchers must make large-scale reductions (10% plus), they'll get five years to make these major changes.
• Conservation use permits, formerly issued by the Secretary of the Interior and used to prohibit grazing for up to ten years, will become illegal.
• The federal government to give states rights to water used by ranchers on federal land.
• The public to be banned from engaging in the day-to-day decision-making process of state and local grazing boards.

Giving more rights to public lands ranchers, who already lease the land at well-below-market prices, decimate the landscape and push many free-living animals, including wild horses, to the brink of extinction, is intolerable. It is only by denying ranchers a profit that they will ever cease to siphon land and resources from the government, and the wildlife it is supposed to protect. To do this, we must limit society’s demand for beef and all the products ranchers produce.

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