Who can blame them? People love mustangs. The horses are noble and free. They are beautiful and loyal. They are icons not just of the wild West but of North America and the rest of civilization.
More than 30,000 captured mustangs and burros live in pens throughout the West and on grassy pastures across the Midwest. Utah is home to about 3,100 wild horses, with hundreds housed in Herriman.
There they wait - for adoptions that are becoming rarer or dates with death that may be coming closer.
The Government Accountability Office, noting the $21 million spent last year to tend to the wild horses on and off the range, says the Bureau of Land Management, to live up to federal law, must start culling the herds through euthanasia, adoption or sale to protect rangelands from overgrazing.
Whenever talk of killing mustangs surfaces, a network of horse and burro lovers objects.
"Every wild-horse herd is unique in its own way," says Karen Sussman, president of the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros in South Dakota. "Regardless of whether they are Spanish or not, they are worthy of protection."
West Jordan resident Cyndi Hogan already had a dozen kids, 10 of them adopted, when she decided to take in a mustang and learn how to gentle wild horses for others to adopt.
"The horse nurtures me," she says.
On a recent misty, muddy day at the BLM's Wild Horse and Burro Center at the mouth of Butterfield Canyon in Herriman, Hogan makes friends with a group of curious geldings awaiting adoption. She muses that she could be happy living right there, next to the corral. She pays $175 a month to board her mustang.
A week ago, Hogan recalls, she took Maya, the first mustang she tamed for someone else, to an adoption event in Heber City. Despite the mare's good showing, no one took her home.
"Adoptions are way down because of the economy," Hogan says.
The BLM has removed 74,000 horses and burros from the range since 2001, but only 46,400 have been adopted. Some of the unadopted animals, according to federal law, should be put down or sold for any purpose - even for meat.
In June, a top BLM official said he would consider euthanization to cull the herds because there were about 5,800 excess wild horses on public lands. Protests erupted. In August, the agency withdrew the proposal to await the GAO report and a meeting of the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board scheduled for today.
"Our preference is to have 30,000 people or groups either adopt or buy the horses that are in [captivity]," says BLM national spokesman Tom Gorey. "We fully support the view that the wild horse is the symbol of the West. The problem is the law also tells us to control the population."
Mustang advocates say that because horses were in North America during the Pleistocene Epoch, they are a native species even though they died out 10,000 years ago and were reintroduced by Spanish conquistadors.
The horses, advocates say, will move rather than overgraze the range. They warn that the BLM's management could wreck the herds' genetic stability. Livestock, not horses, are the problem and the real money pit.
The BLM disagrees. "If we allowed the exponential [population] increase, we would see the horses eating themselves out of house and home," Gorey says. "We'd see destroyed wildlife habitat, erosion. This would be the equivalent of ecological disaster."
Utah State University professor Michael Conover, of the Berryman Institute for Wildlife Damage Management, says that uncontrolled horse populations would thrive only at the expense of antelope, mule deer and other hoofed mammals.
"There will be less forage for everything else - which isn't to say whether horses should or should not be controlled," he says. "There is a debate in society whether horses 'belong.' Some people would say they're not native so they shouldn't be here. Others say they are part of the romantic Old West, therefore they belong. It will come down to personal perspectives."
Very personal. A couple of weeks ago, Dawn Newland, of Neosho, Mo., was in Salt Lake City on business when she decided to visit the mustangs in Butterfield Canyon. She wanted three of them. She already has three wild horses she adopted from a BLM reserve in Oklahoma after nearly losing her mind during a family tragedy.
"I would rather rescue a wild horse than buy a domesticated animal," she says. "I don't think any drug or psychiatrist could bring you more peace."
Taxpayers pay $5.08 per horse per day for the BLM to hold them short term in places such as the Butterfield Canyon corrals. Horses over age 10 - or that have been passed over for adoption three times - live in grassy pastures in the Midwest between Kansas and Oklahoma, where the annual boarding cost is only $465. But those horses live to be 25 or 30, Gorey explains, about twice the age they reach in the wild.
"The good news for burros is they're almost always adopted," Gorey says. "They are cute and gentle. The problem with wild-horse adoptions is most people are not interested in an animal that's over 5 years old."
In Utah, about 3,100 mustangs live on 2.7 million acres of public land. The BLM believes the maximum population should be about 2,200. Roundups here are infrequent, although one is planned for this week in the west desert's Cedar Mountains.
phenetz@sltrib.com
