Management Challenges Part I

Any internet search for “wild horse management” will lead to dozens of articles and documentaries resting on the premise that “wild horses have no natural predators and multiply at the rate of 20-25% every year”.  This is often recited while announcing yet another helicopter roundup, though the unfortunate herd’s true population probably hasn’t been verified in several years if at all, or where cougar or wolf numbers have expanded and foals seldom reach their second year.  Even when these two factors are known, more progressive population control alternatives have probably never been considered.  And therein lies just one of the shaded badger holes of wild horse management; the “Herd Management Plan”.  The term Plan is somewhat disingenuous, because it is extremely unlikely to be site-specific, responsive to change, or informed by quality, current, objective, scientific data or thorough local knowledge.  Yet, every wild horse and burro lives or dies by it.  

This certainly describes the situation in the Ochoco Mountains of Central Oregon.  The wild horse herd, whether the Forest Service origin story is true, partially true, or completely false, is adapted to its environment.  In summer, the horses meander through grasses so high a mere saddle horse would engorge itself to a certain death.  The wild horse keeps moving, avoids the larkspur and hemlock, knows how to mitigate insect attacks through mud baths and wind currents, and develops ready water sources throughout its range.  The bands roll into winter with healthy fat stores and the wisdom of millennia, to guide them to the elevations, wind breaks, thermal pockets, and forage caches that carry most to the green of spring.

But some will fall, perhaps providing for a cougar or wolf; because wild horses do have natural predators in many areas.  The horse’s loss feeds scavengers, returns a lifetime of nutrients to the earth, and takes predator pressure off deer and elk populations.  Their presence offers a co-evolved compliment of mutual benefit to large ungulate and microbe alike.  In the last decade, without the regular bait trapping to keep the Ochoco Herd at the level prescribed in the 1975 Wild Horse Management Plan (55-65), due to budget constraints, the horses were allowed to increase and fill their biological space on the mountain.  Though time will test the hypothesis, the Big Summit Herd appears to be self-regulating; a situation every manager strives toward.

If the Herd and its habitat remain stable, the Appropriate Management Level (AML) becomes not only self-evident, but is irrelevant; management then amounts to the stewardship of coexistent and external factors, creating as true a Thriving Natural Ecological Balance (see Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, Sec. 3.a.) as can be achieved in the 21st century.  

Instead, the Ochoco National Forest’s Wild Horse Management Plan Environmental Assessment, issued April 17, 2020, proposed an AML of 12-57 horses.  We are not aware of anyone who was not stunned by these numbers.  

The Forest Service determined this range based on their calculations of winter forage.  Although the bulk of the 230-page Environmental Assessment is spent on speculations of future resource damage and conjecture about current resource damage, the Forest Service states that available winter forage is the “most limiting factor”.  And yet…..  annual survival.  Even following some exceptionally-harsh winters, from 120-150 horses have emerged in the unapologetic Ochoco spring.    

The Forest Service has decided that the Big Summit Herd utilizes only 4942 acres of their approximately 27,000-acre assigned Territory during winter, which then was determined to be their “winter range”.  This was meticulously supported by tables, charts, graphs, and studies that had nothing to do with these horses or these mountains.  The data were erroneously established and misapplied.  Winter population surveys were glaringly unscientific, proving nothing about where (all) horses wintered and (all) locations where horses did NOT winter.  When the Forest Service asked us to provide winter sightings we had collected, we produced a map that, by contrast, essentially showed winter horse use throughout the entire Territory.  Our findings - actual locations - were dismissed by the Forest Service in favor of the false premise that winter range is limited to 4942 acres and can only support 12-57 horses.  

The Forest Service, as an agency, operates under a shroud of systemic disdain for wild horses.  The Forest Service grows trees, and thankfully, excels at fighting fire.  They provide campgrounds and open, natural spaces for the weary human community.  They provide habitat for native wildlife; but cannot accept that wild horses are rightfully in this category.  The law mandates that wild horse and burro habitat be “devoted principally but not necessarily exclusively to their welfare” (Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, Sec. 2.c.), and this becomes a source of resentment, while staff are seldom appropriately trained or equipped to properly manage wild horses.  Consequently, from the agency’s upper-level leadership in Washington, DC, and trickling down the food chain to the summer rangeland management student trainee, wild horses are perceived as invasive species and a collective, monumental inconvenience.  The extent to which the Ochoco National Forest deliberately planned for the Herd’s extinction was surprising, but the overt bias and baseless assignment of resource damage were not.  

Obvious to the reasonable person is the high risk to any wild horse population of 12-57; at the mercy of one bad winter or disease outbreak, both of which are made more probable by the unknown multiplier of climate change.  The Forest Service itself admits their AML would not be conducive to genetic viability, but their remedy of importing outside mares for genetic diversity would do nothing to spare the last handful of Ochoco horses from the ravages of lethal environmental events.

This is the core argument of the Ochoco National Forest’s Wild Horse Management Environmental Assessment.  We will continue discussions about the EA, as the revised Herd Management Plan is the most critical and impactful benchmark ever to affect this Herd.  The final decision is expected in early November, which will facilitate one more round of public entreaty for the preservation of this Herd.  When that is ushered into our purview, we will find ourselves in the epic battle for the horses’ continued existence.  Though the formal public comment period has long since closed, everyone who cares about these wild horses can help; by immersion in the issues and the layers of controversy; by learning the language of managing agencies; by discovering the wild ecology of the truth; and by joining with us in the crafting of solutions.  

We need your help!

UPDATE! The Ochoco National Forest has released its "Finding of No Significant Impact" and "Decision Notice" along with a revised Environmental Assessment for its revised Ochoco Wild Horse Management Plan. If you were not aware, the Ochoco National Forest has proposed that the current herd population of approximately 130 horses be reduced permanently to a range of 12-57 horses. We are now in the "Objection" phase, which means the comments previously submitted to the Draft Environmental Assessment have been addressed and we are moving into the final phase. Next year, they will begin capturing horses - If we do not stop them. Formal commenting is not open to general public at this time, but nothing can prevent YOU from contacting them to express your opinion.

Your local Forest Service office can be reached at 541-416-6500.