Federal Officials Dismiss Colorado Governor's Plea, Plan Wild Horse Roundup

Federal officials will begin capturing hundreds ofmustangsroaming in far northwestern Colorado this week, dismissing a request from Gov. Jared Polis to haltroundupswhile the state and U.S. Bureau of Land Management find a “more humane” option for managing wild horses.

The federal agency’s announcement of its next roundup — in the Piceance-East Douglas rangeland outside Meeker — comes after 145 wild horses died in an equine flu outbreak at a Cañon City holding facility.

The public land where the East Douglas herd lives is suited for no more than 235 horses, according to theBLM, yet there are 1,385mustangson the range. The roundup is scheduled to begin Thursday with a bait-and-trap operation, in which horses are lured into a corral with fresh water and food. Federal officials plan to bring in a helicopter and horseback riders in mid-July to round up moremustangs.

The roundup was originally scheduled for September, but theBLMmoved it to this week because the horses are so malnourished coming out of winter, officials said.

The animals will go to a holding facility in Utah — not the pens on state prison grounds in Cañon City that were the site of the deadliest mustang flu outbreak on record.

The horse deaths, which began April 23 and stopped May 26, incited outcry from mustang advocates around the country and Colorado’s governor and first gentleman, Marlon Reis, an animal rights advocate. Polis already had urged federal officials last summer to pause wild horseroundupsand work with Colorado on a gentler solution to the abundance of horses onpublic lands. That plea came ahead of a helicopter roundup last summer of 684 horses in the Sand Wash Basin in northern Colorado along the Wyoming border.

After the Cañon City outbreak, Polis again wrote to theBLMasking them to call off scheduledroundups.

The federal agency’s Stephanie Connolly, acting state director for theBLM, rebuffed the governor’s request in a June 2 letter, which was released to The Sun on Tuesday. She said that while theBLMappreciates the governor’s “engagement in managing wild horses,” the East Douglas herd is more than six times the size that the land can support. A few hundred of the horses have left the public rangeland, Connolly said, “in search of food and water on nearby private property.”

The herd has grown by about 20% each year, she said. AndBLMresearch found that 80% of the shrubs and grasses consumed on the rangeland last year were eaten by wild horses, which is out of balance for other animals that use the land, she said. Public land managed by the federal agency is leased to cattle and sheep ranchers, as well as used by elk, deer and other wildlife.

The governor’s office told The Sun this week that it was disappointed by theBLM’s decision to move ahead with a “costly and wasteful roundup of our wild horses.” The governor offered “numerous cost-effective and humane alternative methods of management,” including birth control, but those were ignored.

“It is apparent not only that they will not seriously consider better alternatives, allowing only a few weeks for bait-and-trap methods, but that the agency truly doesn’t care to first listen to stakeholders before moving forward,” Polis’ spokesman Conor Cahill said. The governor was particularly disappointed that theBLMannounced its plans for the roundup at the same time it announced a listening session to gather public input.

Polis urged Coloradans to contact theBLM, which is holding its listening session Wednesday night.

The governor did get one of his wishes granted by federal officials: no additional horses are headed to the holding pens in Cañon City.

All of the horses that died in this spring’s outbreak were from the West Douglas rangeland, along the Colorado-Utah border. The craggy, mostly inaccessible land was deemed “unsuitable” for wild horses by theBLM, and last summer, the agency announced an emergency roundup of horses and burros.

The outbreak was caused by a fairly common equine flu virus and was further complicated by a streptococcus bacteria. Most of the horses had not received a flu vaccine despite being hauled to the holding facility seven months earlier, and theBLMhas said it is investigating the reasons for the delay and will release details later.

The American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Campaign) said it was alarmed by the federal plan to accelerate the roundup, calling it inhumane to send moremustangsinto holding facilities that have been plagued with disease. Holding pens across the country are already crowded, said the campaign’s executive directorSuzanne Roy.

Nationwide, the bureau has more than 56,000 wild horses and burros in holding pens or pastures, some awaiting adoption. That includes more than 2,000 horses in Cañon City, where prison inmates care for the animals.

The agency estimates there are about 82,000 wild horses and burros roaming rangeland in 10 Western states, but says the land is appropriate for only about 26,000 of them. In Colorado, about 1,800mustangsremain on range, but the federal goal is 827.