Federal land managers plan to round up and remove 14,000 more wild horses from rangeland across the West this summer and fall, including 1,111 in Colorado.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s plans include three roundups in western Colorado — two of them using helicopters to drive mustangs from above and push them into corrals.
The recently released schedule is angering wild horse advocates who say the federal government is ignoring solutions worked out by a state-federal task force as well as requests by Gov. Jared Polis that the BLM stop using helicopters to capture horses.
“Despite earnest efforts to bring stakeholders round the table with the formation of the Colorado Wild Horse Working Group, we are back where we were in 2022, with more than 1,000 horses being targeted for removals by helicopter,” said Scott Wilson, a photographer who has spent years documenting mustangs on the sagebrush rangelands of western Colorado.
Removing 1,111 mustangs and putting them in holding pens for the rest of their lives would cost taxpayers $53 million, Wilson said, using a BLM estimate that it costs $48,000 per horse to round it up and care for it for life.
The largest Colorado operation on the federal government’s schedule includes removing 911 mustangs by helicopter in August from the Piceance-East Douglas, a herd management area outside of Meeker in northwestern Colorado. The nearly 200,000 acres of public land, shared with wildlife, grazing cattle and oil pumps, should have 235 wild horses at maximum, according to the BLM.
That makes 911 too many, federal land managers said.
The federal agency is also planning to use a helicopter to round up 100 horses from West Douglas rangeland, and 100 more through a bait-and-trap operation at Sand Wash Basin, which is along the Wyoming border.
“When herds grow faster than the land can support, it puts stress on public lands and on the horses,” Steven Hall, a spokesman for the federal agency, said via email. “Colorado is experiencing a record drought, and forage and water sources will be impacted, which will impact wild horses particularly hard.”
The goal is to shrink the wild horse population in Colorado from its current 1,727 horses down to 616 horses.
Going forward, the BLM in Colorado “aims to reduce the size and frequency” of future roundups by expanding fertility-control treatments, Hall said. Herds grow 15% to 20% each year without management, “making fertility control essential to long‑term, humane and sustainable population management,” he said.
The West Douglas area is “not suitable” at all for wild horses, Hall said. Most of the animals there were removed several years ago after wildfire gobbled up what was left of the forage that mustangs eat.
In northwestern Colorado, where the terrain is rugged and filled with canyons and cliffs, helicopters “provide one of the safest, most efficient means of gathering wild horses,” Hall said. “Northwest Colorado has an exceptional record of conducting wild horse gathers with minimal injuries to horses.”
Federal officials and Colorado leaders have been in conflict for years over the management of wild horses.
In 2023, fed up after a few summers of low-flying helicopter roundups that removed thousands of mustangs, lawmakers created the Colorado Wild Horse Working Group. The 23-member task force, including a BLM representative, was created by Senate Bill 275 and given $1.5 million in state funds to support “humane, nonlethal alternatives” for wild horse population control. The group’s main recommendation has been to expand fertility programs in which mares are shot with darts that administer a vaccine that prevents pregnancy for up to four years.
The federal agency’s schedule includes darting about 200 mares in Colorado this year, including in Little Book Cliffs near Palisade and Spring Creek in Disappointment Valley.
In the years prior to the creation of the state working group, the BLM ramped up an aggressive wild horse removal plan, removing about 50,000 mustangs and burros across the West from 2020 to 2023, about twice as many as in the prior four years.
More than 2,200 mustangs have been removed from Colorado rangeland in recent years. Helicopter roundups have included the West Douglas rangeland in 2023, East Douglas in 2022 and Sand Wash Basin in 2021.
The BLM is holding a wild horse adoption next weekend at the Mesa County Fairgrounds. The 20 horses have been trained in haltering, leading and trailer loading, and will be auctioned off March 28. Those interested must have at least 400 square feet of corral space per horse and fill out an application by Monday.
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