At one point, the bad guys were chasing the famed Masked Man. He wheeled around his white stallion, Silver, and, aiming his trusty six-shooter straight into the screen, took care of the villains. I ran into the other room for fear of being shot.
My cousins laughed because they knew nothing came out of that screen and that the bullets were fake, but I had seen animals brought down by a gun and lived in fear of being shot.
I was reminded of this episode when I learned the other day of the last-minute maneuver by Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., authorizing the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to shrink the burgeoning wild horses herds by permitting those who adopt the animals to sell them to processing plants to produce meat for human consumption.
I was the director of the BLM from 1997 to 1998. When I took the job, I was vaguely aware of the Wild Horse Act of 1971 but did not realize the deep passions enveloping these feral animals that inhabit many areas of the arid West.
It seemed to me that every teenage girl in America believed these horses to be her personal property. As the BLM director and designated steward under the 1971 Act, I was to protect them at all costs.
My Lone Ranger flashback reminded me we don't always grow out of early misperceptions. During my tenure as the wild horse steward, I came to realize that wild horses don't come in Republican or Democratic breeds. They are, for the most part, descended from large equines that in the early half of the 20th century were put out on free public land to graze during winter and gathered in the following spring to work on agricultural projects.
As the engine-powered tractor began replacing the horse, owners of the horses simply never brought them back into the barn. With no natural predators and an abundance of grazing land upon which to feed, the horses reproduced and reproduced and reproduced. Indeed, some herds have a fertility rate of nearly 25 percent. Put another way, they double their herd size every four years.
During drought years, as much of the West has experienced for the past six years, these non-native animals wreak havoc on arid ecosystems. Their pawing for water and grazing for whatever grass or forbs they can find decimates the landscape. If the drought gets bad enough, many of the wild horses die of dehydration or starvation. The haunting images of skeletal horses slowly wasting away are not readily forgotten by national television audiences.
Since the Wild Horse Act was enacted, there has been a complicity of three institutions -- the news media, Congress and the BLM -- standing in the way of addressing and solving the wild horse problem. The news media love the story because it always guarantees a receptive audience. Horrific images catch people's attention, but the more complex underlying story of the need to manage our Western public landscape goes untold.
Congress for nearly 30 years has simply thrown money at the problem in hopes it would go away. Politicians don't want to face the emotionalism of the wild horse advocates, particularly in an election year.
And the executive branch of our government, through the BLM, was satisfied to maintain the status quo because it maintained a "cowboy operation" that represented steady employment in areas where reliable employment with benefits was a rarity.
What's the answer? There is no single or simple solution, in part because we have reached a serious land and animal management crisis. Scientific studies done for the BLM have concluded the Western public lands can sustain an overall herd size of nearly 29,000 horses. The BLM estimates a current population of nearly 40,000. The number of wild horses needs to be reduced by at least 10,000.
During a budget crisis, such as we now face, the federal government cannot afford to pay the $1 to $5 per day it costs to feed these animals while they are kept in special BLM pastures in Oklahoma or Kansas.
The first constructive step is allowing horses taken off the range to be adopted by individuals. The BLM adoption program has not been a consistent success, but the agency, with the help of Congress, should redouble its effort.
Next, fertility control measures, such as gelding the stallions and inoculating the mares to make them infertile, would significantly reduce their reproduction rate. Additionally, we must consider moving some of the horses to overseas locations where horsepower still means an actual horse. Surely, there are creative and humanitarian ways to cover the transportation costs.
Finally, if all else fails, allow adoptions to be processed and permit individual adopters to decide the fate of their adopted animals. This last alternative is not attractive, but may be the only short-term solution. It might be the bitter pill that produces a long-term solution if the fertility control policy is applied and followed.
In the ensuing weeks, I pray we won't be allured into television images of horses going to the processing plant, but instead will understand we have a responsibility to ensure that public lands and the creatures that inhabit them are managed in a sustainable manner.
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Patrick Shea was director of the Bureau of Land Management from 1997-1998 and deputy assistant secretary of Interior during the Clinton administration. He currently practices law in Salt Lake City.
