The Nellis Air Force Range in southern Nevada is home to the country’s largest herd of wild horses. Soon it could become their graveyard. These days the depleted range 175 miles northwest of Las Vegas is dotted with emaciated mustangs. Their ribs are barely concealed by hides that are scarred from battles fought over the dwindling supply of food and water. Mares, no longer able to produce milk, have abandoned their young. And stallions have worn down their front hooves digging for water in dried-up mudholes. Just to keep the animals alive, the Air Force has been trucking 18,000 gallons of water a day onto the range since April 1. “We’ve got one helluva mess out here,” says Harley Dickensheets, chief of facilities on the Air Force range. “We’ve got too many horses [and] not enough water. This range is beat. It couldn’t sustain a herd of jack rabbits. A lot of these horses are walking dead.”
The drought has caused the immediate crisis at Nellis, but managing America’s wild horses has been a problem ever since the West was won. In 1971, under pressure from animal-rights groups, Congress enacted special legislation to protect wild free-roaming horses, declaring them “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” The law worked all too well; no longer subject to capture, sale or slaughter, the horses thrived. In the past two decades, the number of wild horses in the United States has grown from an estimated 35,000 to between 50,000 and 75,000.
The job of protecting the horses–while maintaining an ecological equilibrium on the ranges where they roam–belongs to the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Balancing the demands of wildlife activists, cattle ranchers, wild-horse advocates and an impassioned public has not been easy for the cash-strapped bureau. Popular sentiment makes it impossible to sell or destroy the animals, so the BLM has tried to control the population’s growth by rounding up horses and putting them up for “adoption.” But there are more horses than the adoption system can absorb. And animal-rights groups have sometimes disrupted the program by convincing judges that the BLM failed to provide sufficient evidence that the range was overburdened. At Nellis, a two-year interdiction against roundups in the late ’80s may have added 2,000 horses to the range.
During the recent sustained drought, as many as 6,000 horses have been searching the Nellis range for food and water. That has upset the delicate balance between flora and fauna, turning a once thriving ecosystem into an environmental nightmare. The horses’ overgrazing has forced deer and antelope off their habitat at Nellis in search of better forage. Their natural predators, mountain lions, have come down from the hills in search of other prey: orphan foals and mares too weak to trek long distances in search of vegetation. “The wildlife is just about gone,” says Curtis Tucker, BLM area manager in charge of Nellis. “Now what’s left are predators and carrion eaters. I’ve just seen one of the fattest, surliest coyotes of my life out there. He acted like he owned the range.”
In Senate hearings last month, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid called the government’s management of wild horses “an outright failure and total disaster” but refused to blame the crisis on the land-management agency. “We’ve asked BLM to perform miracles without any money,” he said. Reid proposed a series of measures to ease the crisis, including appropriation of $1.4 million in emergency funding. In the meantime, the BLM has earmarked $230,000 to restart a roundup of adoptable horses that foundered last month for lack of funds. Since May wranglers have shipped 1,182 horses off the range for adoption, including 225 orphan foals. With the BLM’s cash injection, up to 800 more horses could be saved by August. But that won’t answer the long-term question of how to handle America’s wild horses–a debate that must be resolved before the mustang, once a living symbol of the Western range, becomes one of its casualties.
