07/14/08 Wild Horse Problem

Wild Horse Problem. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. There is nothing quite as awe-inspiring as seeing a herd of wild horses running free over the landscape. But the Bureau of Land Management is facing some real challenges when it comes to wild horses and burros according to Don Glenn, Division Chief for the BLM's Wild Horse and Burro Program. GLENN: We have to remove horses from the range in order to maintain an ecological balance out there or even achieve it. Right now we are seriously over-populated primarily in Nevada but we've been neglecting some of the other states in order to deal with Nevada's problem so some of the other states the populations getting too big as well. Wild horses can easily double their numbers in as little as 4 years and that can lead to some very serious issues including starvation. GLENN: Under emergency conditions, in other words if we don't remove them, they're going to die from starvation. Now a lot of these animal right people just can't believe that. They think the solution is that we just leave them out there or even turn the 30-thousand we currently have in holding back out on the range. Glenn does not paint a very pretty picture of a horse starving to death. The BLM has been mulling over the possibility of euthanizing some of the horses instead of the alternative. They have adopted some 44-thousand animals since 2001 but with the high cost of caring for animals that has been slowing down. GLENN: We're making every effort to do adoptions. If you look at the funding we spend on adoptions versus the funding we spend on gathering horses off the range, we spend about twice as much on adoptions as we do on gathering horses. So if people tell us we're not trying to adopt them and not making an effort, that's just wrong. Keeping a horse in the private sector takes upwards of $2000 a year so you can easily see that trying to maintain the 30-thousand the BLM has in holding is a massive dollar amount. GLENN: Between '07 and '08 out cost for fuel and feed has gone up by over $4-million dollars and we have to live within the amount of money that Congress appropriates to us which is roughly $37-million dollars. In '08 the cost of just holding the horses will be $26-million which is roughly two-thirds to almost three-fourths our entire budget which does not leave us enough money to continue round ups so we're caught between a rock and a hard place. And of course we have reported that horse abandonment's in the private sector is at an all-time high due to rising costs. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.