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California Riding Magazine • September, 2010 The Gallop: by Kim F. Miller |
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Sometimes good comes from bad. That may be the case in a hopeful new chapter of America’s wild horse saga. The bad news was the Calico Wild Horse Gather during which the Bureau of Land Management removed 1,922 wild horses from northwest Nevada’s Calico Complex between late December of 2009 and early February. The scope and method of the helicopter round-up drew an unprecedented quantity of immediate and ongoing public outcry. Which leads us to the good news, hopefully. On a broad scale, efforts to stop future gathers took a nudge forward in late July when Congressmen Nick Rahall and Raul Grijalva sent a letter to their Congressional colleagues. It urged a moratorium on gathers until the BLM’s Wild Horse & Burro Management program could be evaluated. Of equally important long term impact is the Soldier Meadows/Return To Freedom Wild Horse Preserve proposal. This is a joint venture between the Lompoc-based wild horse sanctuary and advocacy headquarters, Return To Freedom, and Soldier Meadows Ranch, whose private land in Northwestern Nevada is contained within the Calico Complex. The proposal’s key points are to return most of the Calico horses to their original ranges; restore those ranges and balance cattle grazing as needed to ensure the land’s viability; and establish a preserve on Soldier Meadows’ private land. On the preserve, excess horses could live in a near-wild setting, supported by income from eco-tourism and other wildlife education oriented activities. For more of the proposal’s details, see sidebar (bottom of this article). The pitch to return as many as 1,700 of the captured Calico horses to their home ranges was sent to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in April. In June, Return To Freedom founder/CEO Neda DeMayo and Soldier Meadows Ranch’s Jim Kudrna received a response from BLM director Bob Abbey indicating the agency’s interest in at least parts of the proposal. The next step was for DeMayo and Kudrna to meet with the BLM’s Gene Seidlitz, director of the BLM’s Winnemucca District in Nevada. They expected the meeting to take place in mid-August. Agreeing to return horses to the range would be unprecedented for the BLM, DeMayo acknowledges. The BLM became responsible for managing America’s wild horses on public lands, in accordance with other demands on that land, in 1971. Since then, the agency’s main strategy for maintaining what it determines to be appropriate population levels has been to permanently remove excess horses from the range. The BLM’s adoption program has placed 225,000 horses in private homes since 1971. The rest live in long or short term holding facilities at great cost to tax payers. The horses are often separated from their family bands and, in short term holding in particular, live in cramped quarters that are the antithesis of their free-roaming origins. The SMR/RTF Preserve proposal is not just about returning the Calico horses to their home. It’s about maintaining them over the long haul in balance with the land’s health and its other uses. DeMayo and Kudrna consider it a cost effective alternative to the BLM’s current plan of moving most of the Calico horses to the Midwest for long-term holding. (Editor’s note: Although faced with myriad strains on its own budget, Return To Freedom placed the winning bids on eight Calico stallions offered in a BLM auction in late July. At presstime, RTF hoped to get another 10, even though its 310-acre facility in the Central Coast’s Lompoc is already full.) They hope the preserve will serve as a pilot program that can be modeled elsewhere and estimate it will save the government millions of dollars. Most importantly for the horses, the preserve would greatly reduce, perhaps eliminate, the need for future gathers. As is the basis for all round-ups, the BLM removed horses from the Calico range because it determined that their numbers had exceeded the “appropriate management level.” That means the land could not sustain that many horses and/or could not do so while also serving other demands on it necessary under the multi-use mandate. Water was a key player in the AML determination for the Calico Complex, Kudrna explains. “The BLM analyzed the Soldier Meadows region several years ago, when it was determined that the limiting factor was not forage, but water.” A 1981 BLM map noted 800 water sources, but most of them have since been damaged. Kudrna and his wife Kathy bought the private, 10,000-acre Soldier Meadows Ranch in 2005. Their primary business is cattle ranching and they received grazing access to the Soldier Meadows Allotment, an area of 379,000 acres within which their private land is contained on five ranches. Kudrna and his crew came to know the land and observe its use by wild horses, other wildlife and their cattle. Early on, he estimated that only 150 of the original 800 water sources were functional. As water sources become scarce, the wild horses guarded them carefully, restricting access to other wildlife and damaging the springs with their hooves. “Instead of galloping in for a drink and galloping off, they were camping out at the water sources,” Kudrna relays. He set about repairing the water sources, 49 so far, and has since observed a big improvement in the symbiosis on the range. With more plentiful water, the horses came and went and allowed sheep, antelope and other wildlife to drink their fill. Most of the water source fixes have been achieved by piping water from a natural spring to an area where a pond can be created. Troughs were tried in some spots, but Kudrna saw that only the cattle used them. Horses and other wildlife were not familiar with them. His cattle, he notes, typically only graze on the allotment lands shared by horses one month out of 24. With a solution for the water problem and a growing appreciation for the horses after spending so much time with them, Kudrna got the idea for a wild horse preserve. His proposal to the BLM two years ago, however, generated a no thanks response explaining that the agency’s regulations wouldn’t allow it. Kudrna is optimistic the new proposal will get a better response. This is in part because of the timing: In 2008, the BLM solicited ideas from the public and advocacy groups as its budget burst under the pressure of maintaining 34,000 horses, nearly half of America’s wild horse population, in long and short term holding. Kudrna’s positive outlook is also fueled by SMR’s pairing with Return To Freedom, which brings 13 years of wild horse advocacy to the effort. “This is not a new idea,” acknowledges RTF founder DeMayo. “We’ve been talking about on the range management since 2004.” The join-up with Soldier Meadows Ranch came about when DeMayo noticed that a rancher in the area, Kudrna, wasn’t using his cattle grazing permits. She called him and was encouraged to learn that their ideas aligned and that he’d made a previous attempt to help the horses. If the BLM okays the Calico horses’ relocation to private SMR land, and later back to their herd management areas (HMAs), then comes the next big challenge of attempting to get family bands back together. DeMayo hopes that photos taken during the Calico Gather will identify some family relationships. Helpfully, there are conformation and coloring distinctions between some of the horses taken from different HMAs within the Complex. She wishes advocates had been allowed to better document such identifying factors before the roundup, but is bent on cooperation over the criticism and mud slinging that often accompanies debates over what’s best and realistic for the horses. Kudrna considers it silly that so many have cast his fellow cattle ranchers as the bad guys, a portrayal they typically share with the BLM. “Most cattle ranchers care for the range and are doing the best they can for the range,” he asserts. “This benefits the horses and the cattle, which typically use the same land as the horses for only a month or two of the year. It’s silly to talk about cattle ranchers as the enemy.” As to what’s in it financially for Soldier Meadows Ranch, Kudrna says the proposed fee to maintain wild horses on his private land would generate about the same income as using that land for cattle. These would be horses that had to be removed from the range for any reason, including those that exceed the area’s BLM-determined appropriate management level. The SMR/RTF proposal estimates a minimum savings of $138,608 per year, and more likely $322,000 per year, for the cost of managing the horses removed from the Calico Complex. Range repair and contraception expenses for the BLM should be offset by reductions in long term holding expenses. That’s compared to the current BLM plan of countering population growth in the remaining herds by periodic removals and the attendant costs of transporting and maintaining them. For more information about the Soldier Meadows/Return To Freedom Wild Horse Preserve proposal, visit www.returntofreedom.org.
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