They shoot horses

Press, 27 July 1989, Page 12

They shoot horses

From a correspondent in Ely, Nevada, for the “Economist”

A PILE of bones, loosely covered with horse hide, lies in the sagebrush of a Nevada hillside. Mustangs — known outside the west as wild horses — have been part of the American West since their forebears escaped from Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century. Cowboys used to round them up, choosing the best to tame and train. But now they are a pest, say cattlemen in the west, stealing sparse grazing from cows and sheep, And for this the mustangs are being killed, illegally. Some 26,000 horses run free in Nevada, and both the ranchers and the Federal Government (which owns 90 per cent of the land) believe that this is at least 8000 too many. “You can't hunt horses, you can’t harvest them,

you can’t do anything except look at them,” says Mr Bob Hillman, of the Animal Protection Institute, “and to a western livestock user, that’s unacceptable.”

Much of Nevada’s public land is seriously over-grazed. The main reason is bad management. The Bureau of Land Management hands out too many grazing permits far too cheaply, an invitation to over-graze. The ranchers prefer to blame the horses. The bureau, accepting that they have a point, has been trying for years to reduce the wild-horse population in Nevada to 18,000. But lawsuits brought by animal lovers have prevented them. The ranchers are now taking the law into their own hands. In

the past two years about 1000 horses are believed to have been killed in Nevada, 400 of them in the Ely area. The Government is probing the deaths, and a Federal grand jury in Las Vegas has issued search warrants on several Ely ranchers. But the slaughter is hard to pin down. The horses are “gut-shot,” wounded in their stomachs by a small-calibre rifle, so that they can wander miles before they die, their rotting carcases the only evidence.

Eventually, says the investigating district attorney, the Federal Government must come up with a better management plan. And a more humane one.

Copyright — The Economist.