Interior Secretary Zinke's Misunderstanding of Wild Horses Exposed in Congressional Testimony

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's recent testimony beforeCongresshas sparked controversy due to significant misinformation about wild horses. His proposedsolutions, including the potential slaughter of thousands of these federally-protected animals, have raised concerns among advocates and the public.

On Thursday, June 8, 2017, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke appeared before the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee to justify his 2018 budget request toCongress. Responding to a question from Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) about theabundanceof wild horses on public lands in the Western states, Zinke suggested that his solution involved organizing a “seminar” in Nevada to, well,discusssolutions.

Never mind that two weeks earlier, Zinke released his budget with a request toCongressfor authorization to implement a “solution” that went way beyond a seminar on thousands of these federally-protected and publicly-cherished animals.

Essentially, his solution involves killing or slaughtering as many as 46,000 captured wild horses and burros in Bureau of Land Management (BLM) holding facilities to save $4 million – a mere rounding error in the government’s $4 trillion budget. Zinke also plans reduced funding for roundups andfertility control, leaving open the question of what he plans to do with the 46,000 wild horses considered (wrongly) to be “excess” on the range.

You’d never know about Zinke’s lethal plan for America’s wild horses from his testimony. Could it be that he was shielding the American public, which overwhelmingly opposes horse slaughter, from the truth?

And the problems with Zinke’s wild horse testimony didn’t stop there. It also included a string of bad information and factual inaccuracies about the issue and the federal management program.

Key Facts Misrepresented by Secretary Zinke

1. “[B]ysciencethe ranges can accommodate around 22,000 horses or so. That’s what the range can sustain.”

Actually, “science”— in the form of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) — says exactly the opposite. In fact, in 2013, the NAS concludedin a study commissioned byBLMthat theBLM’s population limit (misleadingly called “Appropriate” Management Level, or AML) of 17,000-26,900 wild horses and burros on 27 million acres of land in 10 Western states is “not supported by scientific information” and had no science-based rationale. In fact, to achieve this population limit, theBLMwould have to remove 50,000 wild horses and burros from the range, driving their wild populations down to the near extinction levels that prompted Congress to protect these animals in 1971 because they were “fast disappearing.”

2. “… the birth control part of the horse program has been, by and large, a failure. You gotta shoot the horse twice with a dart within 24 hours. Trying to find a horse in the woods — the same horse — is almost an impossibility.”

There’s so much wrong with this sentence, it’s hard to know where to start. First, the PZP birth control vaccine does work …if you use it.Over 30 years ofsciencetells us that. TheBLM’s problem is that it has used PZP only in a token manner on only a few herds. In fact, with less than $50,000 and a team of six volunteers, the American Wild Horse Conservation's Virginia Range project in Nevada has vaccinated more mares with birth control this year than the entireBLMwild horse and burro program did last year with its $80 million budget! And, we’re implementing the program on a large population (~3,000 horses) in a large habitat area (300,000 acres), something theBLMsays is not possible to do.

Also, you don’t need to dart a horse twice in 24 hours – that’s just flat out wrong. For best efficacy, you should provide a booster shot, but that can be done anywhere from two weeks to a year. And another form of the vaccine –PZP22 – when combined with a regularPZPbooster provides three or more years of infertility based on a recently published study. And: most of the horses don’t live in the woods (they live in the high desert) and it’s actually quite possible to identify, track and locate horses. Our Virginia Range project has over 2,600 horses individually identified by color, markings, social groupings in a database that tracks their movement, births, deaths, injuries and other critical information.

3. Horses are overpopulating and starving on the range.

Both Secretary Zinke and horse slaughter supporter, Rep. Stewart, made this claim. In reality, there is no evidence to support this and here’s why. The overpopulation argument is based on theBLM’s Appropriate Management Levels, which as mentioned before, the NAS determined had no basis inscience. AML’s do not represent the carrying capacity of the range for wild horses, but rather, represent the number of horses theBLMhas decided to allow after giving away nearly 80 percent of available forage resources to privately owned livestock.

The claims of massive mustang starvation, like the AML claims, are not supported byscience, and they are defied by the reality on the ground. This is evidenced by the activities of theBLMitself, which regularly rounds up wild horses that are fit, healthy and thriving on the range. If the Secretary is going to make such a claim, it is incumbent on him to back it up with science and evidence, especially given his confirmation hearing promise to use sound science to guide his department’s policies.

In his question to Secretary Zinke, Rep. Stewart got in a few alternative facts of his own, including blaming horses for turning the Utah range into a dustbowl in a state where wild horses graze on less than a tenth of thepublic landsgrazed bylivestock.

Hopefully at his Nevada “seminar,” Secretary Zinke can get a schooling on the real facts of this situation and on the realsolutionsthat are available now to address concerns. We’re ready to give him that education, but to date, he has refused to give us the opportunity.