Posted on 06/29/2002 1:14:26 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
While waiting for a helicopter to make another sweep at driving wild horses into a trap, Gary McFadden pondered the circumstances Friday for rounding up the herd that roams near Cold Creek, 50 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"It's kind of a pre-emptive strike," he said after the first 30 of the herd of some 200 crammed into a corral.
"They're in pretty good shape, but their country's not. There's too many animals on it, so they'd just dwindle away," said McFadden, a Bureau of Land Management wild horse specialist.
A persistent dry spell that has lasted more than a year has left Southern Nevada ranges with sparse vegetation, barely enough for the horses, let alone all the other wild animals.
While the steeds from the Cold Creek herd were much fatter and more high-spirited than dozens gathered this week from other ranges outside the Las Vegas Valley, McFadden said he believes it's only a matter of time before they, too, begin to suffer from malnutrition.
The animals he referred to include a couple of mules and more than 200 Rocky Mountain elk that share U.S. Forest Service lands with the horses.
They all compete for prime grazing land that was reseeded after a fire ravaged the area in the summer of 1981.
The elk are either descendants of those that were transplanted in the Spring Mountains from Yellowstone National Park more than six decades ago, or a few generations removed from elk that were released in 1984 in Lovell Canyon, 20 miles southwest of the cabin community of Cold Creek.
With the creek itself, some ponds and springs at the base of a ridge, the horses and elk have plenty of water to drink, unlike the wild horses on the Pahrump side of the Spring Mountains and Red Rock Canyon.
And though people in the area have put out food and salt blocks for the horses in violation of laws that protect wild, free-roaming horses, McFadden said, all of them will not be able to survive under their natural range conditions if the drought continues.
Of the horses corralled Friday, those 5 years old and younger will be trucked to an adoption distribution center in Ridgecrest, Calif.
Older horses that are in poor condition will be sent to long-term holding facilities in the Midwest.
A 1996 Forest Service plan set the appropriate number of horses for the Cold Creek portion of what's called the Wheeler Pass herd at 26 head. That means, technically, the 200 Cold Creek horses could be thinned down to 26 under an emergency gather.
But the National Wild Horse Association objected, saying that number was too low to maintain a genetically viable herd.
Billie Young, the association's president, said a compromise was reached with the Forest Service not to thin the herd to 26 without the Forest Service acknowledging other problems with the range, including too many elk and too many people riding all-terrain vehicles off established trails.
"We asked them to recognize that horses are not the only issue," she said, recalling her discussions with Forest Service officials.
Those discussions resulted in a May 3 letter of agreement that states, in part, "The forces believed to be causing the negative impacts to the territory are the state managed grazing animals -- particularly elk and deer -- and the Forest Service managed horses and human recreational activities."
The letter states that the National Wild Horse Association will assist the BLM and the Forest Service in an emergency gather "consisting of approximately 100 to 150 horses."
Forest Service District Ranger Steve Holdsambeck, who signed the letter, said his agency will reassess the range impacts in light of horses, elk and all-terrain vehicles that have deteriorated parts of the range and its plant life.
"We're going to come up with another report that might adjust the numbers of horses and elk," he said. "It most certainly will come out with a way to control the ATV explosion here."
He estimated that one-fifth of the 315,648 acres of Forest Service land in the Spring Mountains is occupied by horses around Cold Creek.
The study will consider the combined impacts of horses, elk, and ATVs on the 57 rare or sensitive species in the Spring Mountains, of which 25 are found nowhere else in the world.
Actually, the horse originally evolved in North America 55 million years ago. ( The Evolution of the Horse) While the truly "native" species went extinct only 8K years ago, I have no problems with the re-introduced species being referred to as "native". Wild horses/ponies/donkys are cool. I don't mind them running around loose out in the woods. I'm just thankful the early explorers didn't re-introduce mastadons and elephants.
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