It’s hard to imagine how 269 wild burros can “crowd” a huge, 99,000-acre expanse of land, but the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is nevertheless planning to round up and remove most of these animals from their habitat on public lands.
The BLM’s roundup is set to begin on April 30 in Utah’s Sinbad Herd Management Area 30 miles of Green River – a vast area that extends up to 19 miles on both sides of I-70 from the San Rafael Reef to Eagle Canyon.
The operation is part of a federal system that favors privately owned livestock over burros and wild horses on public lands. These animals get blamed for harming rangeland, while the cattle and sheep that far outnumber them get a free pass.
Worse yet, the burros will be rounded up using helicopters, which only serve to terrorize and scatter the animals as they try to avoid capture. This puts them at risk for extreme stress, injury or death as they’re mercilessly chased down. In years past, advocates even captured a video that shows a chopper hitting and upending a burro demonstrating the brutal nature of the process.
The BLM says its goal is to “find balance and stability of the wild herds” and to “preserve and protect wild horses and burros as integral parts of a thriving ecological system.” Yet, the bureau’s actions don’t back up this assertion.
What is balanced about a system that limits burros in the Sinbad HMA to an “appropriate management level” of only 50 to 70 animals, but allows private ranchers to graze more than 1,200 cow-calf pairs in the same region?
As to BLM’s wish to preserve “a thriving ecological balance,” recent scientific evidence indicates burros do much to contribute to the health of the land, not harm it.
A recent study published in Science shows that the presence of burros boosts the availability of water in desert landscapes across the American West. The research, co-authored by Dr. Erick Lundgren from Aarhus University in Denmark, focused on wells dug by wild burros in the Sonoran and Mojave deserts. The findings suggest that the animals are creating unique water sources that are used by more than five dozen native vertebrate species, become vegetation nurseries for keystone trees, and in some cases, represent the only water in the area.
Based on data collected through wildlife cameras, Lundgren documented that burros increased the density of water features, reduced distances between waters and, at times, provided the only water present in surveyed desert ecosystems.
The study cites previous research on the removal in the 1990s of most wild burros from the Ash Meadows Wildlife Reserve in Nevada. After the burros were removed, open springs were choked by vegetation, destroying open-water habitat for endangered native fish populations. Despite best efforts of land managers to mimic the wild burros by manually removing the vegetation, at least one pupfish population went extinct.
The new findings dispel the myth that burros are somehow invasive to their habitat. They are part of, and contribute to, the thriving ecosystem the BLM professes to prize.
The truth is, BLM is preserving an out-of-balance ecosystem that favors the private livestock industry over the desire of most Americans to preserve and protect wild horses and burros on our public lands.
In 2013, the National Academy of Sciences warned that the federally protected burro population was facing a genetic crisis due to small, geographically dispersed populations that are regularly subjected to capture and removals by the BLM. Yet the agency plans to round up most of the burros and wild horses living not just in Utah, but from across the American West over the next five years.
Until the agency follows the lead of science, not special interests, the health of these lands and the wildlife BLM is charged to protect, will remain in jeopardy.
Grace Kuhn | American Wild Horse Campaign
Grace Kuhn is the communications director for the American Wild Horse Campaign and an avid traveler to Utah public lands.