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Growing Wild Horse Populations Pose Ecological Threat

Wild horses
(Photo by Rick Grybos - CC BY 2.0)
Wild horses in Arizona.

The United States Forest Service and wild horse activists will meet in court Wednesday to discuss the future of the animals on Tonto National Forest land. Last week, a federal judge denied activists a temporary restraining order to stop the Forest Service from rounding up horses near the Salt River.

The Forest Service announced they would temporarily hold off on a round up, but the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group still has a lawsuit pending.  

Some environmentalists are concerned about the horses’ impact on the forest ecosystem. Wild horses consume so much, they can damage the amount of plants in the forest.

“Once you start losing the vegetation, you get mud and other debris that get in the water and that can have a negative impact on a variety of species, including fish,” said Sandy Bahr with the Arizona chapter of the Sierra Club.

The environmental group is calling for an ecological assessment of how the horses are specifically affecting the Tonto land.

Tonto Forest officials can’t manage the animals. They only have the authority to move them. This dates back to the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. Shortly after the act was passed, federal lands were surveyed to find out which contained wild horses and burros. Documents indicate no wild horses were found in Salt River area of the Tonto National Forest. According to the 1973 survey, horses found in the area were stray livestock from surrounding Indian reservations. 

The Bureau of Land Management manages wild horses around the country. Wayne Burkhart advised the agency how to deal with the animals for more than a decade. He said their populations got out of control because they have no effective natural predators and hunting is prohibited.

“The annual increase of horses needs to be checked," he said. "Nature does it in very cruel ways.”

Burkhart said round ups are compassionate compared to the alternatives of "starvation, winter kill, death by lack of water in the drought periods in the desert. Roundups are amazingly humane and those excess horses go to permanent holding pending adoption.”

But the supply of wild horses outpaces the demand for adoption. As of last month, the BLM had nearly 45,000 horses in holding facilities nationwide. Last fiscal year only about 1,800 were adopted. 

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Alexandra Olgin was a Senior Field Correspondent at KJZZ from 2013 to 2016.