Is this any way to treat a friend of man?

There are 27,369 free-roaming wild horses in the United States. 13,251 of them are in Nevada.

If you intend to photograph Cortez, bring your long lens. He is a handsome horse, in a middle-aged Brando sort of way, rugged, Roman-nosed—that's actually what they call a round-mugged horse—a bit of fear, a lot of defiance, though it's unclear where the fear ends and the defiance begins. The photographer steps forward, Cortez steps back. The photographer shuffles north, Cortez shuffles south. Click. There he is. Sometimes even the uncatchable ones get caught.

Cortez is a mustang—a wild horse—born and raised the property of no man on the parched rangeland of the American West, rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management in one of its periodic "gathers," adopted out to someone who promised to take good care of him, sold as bucking stock into a rodeo, scarred with spurs, sent to a slaughter auction in Prescott, Arizona, and saved by Jill Curtis, founder and owner of Las Vegas' Shiloh Horse Rescue. Today Cortez, who is around 13 years old, lives at Shiloh's 60-horse sanctuary at the far south end of Las Vegas Boulevard, just across the street from the long rows of motor homes at Wheeler's RV. Soon he'll move to Shiloh's new 40-acre facility in Sandy Valley. Curtis would love someday to find an even larger place for Cortez, a sanctuary in the wild where he can live as he was born.

For decades, the U.S. government has been trying to decide just how many wild horses the western range can support, and how to humanely reduce the herds to that number. Adopted mustangs aren't supposed to wind up in the rodeo and on the auction block. But as long as we slaughter horses in this country, there will be slaughter auctions. And no matter how good the intentions of the BLM, as long as there are slaughter auctions, wild horses, legally or illegally, will wind up on the block next to their domestic cousins. And people like Jill Curtis will not always be there to save them.

Almost half of America's wild horses live in Nevada, so it makes sense that America's mustang problem is very much Nevada's problem. But this is not a story about mustangs alone. This is a story about American horses, wild and domestic, racehorses and pet horses and workhorses. It is a story about where they live, and how they die.

Horse news from the summer of 2003:

An unheralded gelding named Funny Cide, owned by a group of old high-school buddies from upstate New York, has just won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes. Tobey Maguire has produced a film based on Laura Hillenbrand's best-selling book about the great Depression-era champion, Seabiscuit. A reporter named Barbara Bayer, writing in a racing industry magazine called The Blood-Horse, tells us that the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner and 1987 Horse of the Year, Ferdinand, has almost certainly been "disposed of" in a Japanese slaughterhouse. On July 25, the day of the Seabiscuit opening, the Las Vegas Sun reports that three wild horses have been found, killed by gunshot, in Eastern Nevada. These are, the paper reports, "the latest in a two-year string of killing." It has been a year since the BLM rounded up 30 horses in the Red Rock Canyon and Lake Mead areas to save them from starvation during the drought-stricken summer. Six months have passed since the BLM rounded up 800 horses in Eureka County and horse rescue groups scrambled to buy as many of them as possible; the horses, it turned out, were far from designated Herd Management Areas and therefore were not entitled to the protections normally given to wild horses under the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act and could be sold without limitation to buyers who could send them on to slaughterhouses.

Horse news from 2004:

In February, U.S. Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Republican from Kentucky, purchases three daughters of the slaughtered Ferdinand. "We are doing this in Ferdinand's memory, as a way to honor him," Whitfield's wife, Connie, tells The Blood-Horse. "These mares are not being bred to have foals to race. They are being bred as a way to carry on the Ferdinand family line." It has been one year since John Sweeney, a Republican congressman from New York, introduced a bill that would prohibit the slaughter of American horses for human consumption. The bill has 94 co-sponsors, but nothing has become of it. A Senate version of the bill has been introduced by Nevada Republican John Ensign; nothing has become of that, either. In May, Cavel International, a slaughterhouse in DeKalb, Illinois, reopens two years after being gutted by fire. Cavel is one of three plants in the nation that process horse meat for human consumption. There is virtually no market for such meat in the United States; it is shipped overseas, particularly to France and Japan. Slaughtered horses, contrary to popular belief, are used only for human consumption, not for pet food. In October, the Equine Protection Network begins an awareness campaign with the slogan, "Keep America's Horses in the Stable and off the Table." In December, 2004, Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana, upset that BLM herd areas have more wild horses than they are supposed to have, introduces legislation that will allow the sale "without limitation" of any "excess" wild horse that is either more than 10 years old or has been offered unsuccessfully for adoption three times. The words "without limitation" mean, in essence, that wild horses—the only horses with a degree of protection from slaughter—will, for the first time since the 1971 act, no longer be protected. The bill has no co-sponsors. It is attached at the 11th hour to an omnibus appropriations bill. The bill passes.

In the public discourse over wild horses, just about everything that's happened in the last few million years is something to fight about. Jay F. Kirkpatrick, the Cornell-trained director of the Science and Conservation Center in Billings, Montana, and environmental writer Patricia M. Fazio posit in a recent article that an ancestor of the modern horse evolved in the Americas between 3.4 and 3.9 million years ago, and made its way to Asia via the Bering land bridge beginning two to three million years ago. Subsequently, for reasons not entirely understood, the horse went extinct in America. Wild horse advocates say that it was this earlier American horse that, over many millennia in the eastern hemisphere, evolved into the modern-day horse.

In the 1500s, Spanish explorers and conquerors brought—or, perhaps, returned—the horse to the Americas. A number of the Spanish horses—horses of all breeds and colors—escaped or were released, and quickly adapted to the wild, establishing distinctive patterns of herd behavior, reproduction and foraging. Later, as the U.S. expanded, ranchers, prospectors, and cavalrymen released more horses into the wild, and they joined the existing herds. Many horse advocates consider that today's wild herds represent a return to the way things were—the natural order of things in North America circa 10,000 B.C. or so. Ranchers and others who seek tight controls on herd populations understandably consider this line of thinking—even if it may be true—to be a bit strange.

Even people well disposed to the horses themselves often dismiss the notion that the free-roaming horse must roam free at all costs. Discussing the proposed wild- horse education center at Red Rock Canyon's Oliver Ranch, Las Vegas Sun columnist Susan Snyder wrote last year, "I hope [the center] stresses that the 'wild' horse and burros hovering near death from starvation and dehydration on our public lands exist because we abandoned their domestic ancestors when we no longer needed them. They are more like abandoned house cats than endangered tortoises."

This is precisely the argument of ranchers and supporters of the Burns amendment, who try whenever possible to use the term "feral" rather than "wild" to refer to the horses. They argue that the horses have no place in the natural ecosystems of the American range, while horse advocates—when they wisely set aside the ancient-ancestor argument—point out that after 500 years, the horses have become about as indigenous as you can get without actually being indigenous: They have adapted completely to the land and have complex social networks that have now been around for several hundred generations (and which may indeed represent an innate genetic memory of ancient herd behavior).

Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, ranchers and miners would periodically draft horses from the herds, use them for labor—particularly during the summer cattle-grazing season—and then release them back to the herd. Wild horses thus had a place in the economy of the West. After World War II, though, the range became motorized. Trucks could do many times the work of horses, and the herds no longer filled any economic necessity. At this point, their role in the lives of many ranchers became that of competitors for forage and water that the ranchers needed for their cattle. A useful beast of burden—and a source of essentially free labor—had become little more than a pest.

These postwar years saw the rise of the "mustangers," men who made their living rounding up wild horses and selling them for slaughter. Soon the mustangers found that helicopters made the capture of horses far more efficient. In Nevada, a woman named Velma B. Johnson launched a campaign to end these limitless roundups of wild horses. Enlisting the help of school children—and acquiring the media-friendly nickname "Wild Horse Annie"—Johnson helped create a 1952 ban on the use of aircraft in Storey County, Nevada, roundups. By 1955, a similar bill had been passed for all of Nevada, and in 1959 a national bill, "The Wild Horse Annie Act," was passed, prohibiting the use of motor vehicles in roundups as well as banning the pollution of watering holes as a means of trapping horses. Enforcement was lax, though, and only with the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, passed unanimously by both houses of Congress, did wild horses win meaningful nationwide protections.

Horse news from 2005:

In January, Nick Rahall, a Democratic congressman from West Virginia, joins Ed Whitfield, the erstwhile purchaser of Ferdinand's daughters, to introduce a bill that would roll back the Burns amendment—removing the words "without limitation" and stipulating that "no free-roaming horse or burro or its remains may be sold or transferred for consideration for processing into commercial products." The bill has 60 co-sponsors, including Nevada's Shelley Berkley. Meanwhile, longtime Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia has introduced the same bill in the Senate. Neither bill has yet gone to a vote. The BLM, meanwhile, is trying to make the best of the Burns Amendment, with a stated policy of trying to sell as many as possible of the "excess" 8,400 horses to buyers who will give them proper care—particularly to horse-rescue groups and Native American tribes. On March 21, the BLM announces two sales to tribes: 120 horses have been bought by the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota, and 141 by the Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota. In April, a former rodeo clown named Dustin Herbert travels to Canon City, Colorado, and purchases six Wyoming wild horses under the provisions of the Burns amendment. He tells the BLM that he is buying the horses, which cost $50 apiece, for a church youth camp. Within three days the horses have been slaughtered at Cavel International.

News from the horse auction, Cedar City, Utah:

A man brings his horse to the livestock auction and is approached by Jill Curtis:

MAN: "I've had him for 21 years. He was my childhood friend. Now I have too many kids. I can't take care of him anymore."

CURTIS: "So why don't you put him to sleep?"

MAN: "I couldn't watch that."

CURTIS: "Do you know what will happen to that horse when you auction it off?"

She tells the man, and he is horrified. He sells her the horse for $40. It gets healthy at Shiloh and is adopted into a new family. Most of the horses at Shiloh are not mustangs caught in the crosshairs of a Big Public Issue, but domestic horses like this one, horses that people have simply given up on.

Horse news from the past month or so:

In late April, the BLM learns that the Rosebud Sioux Tribe has traded 87 of the horses it purchased to a horse dealer. The dealer, who gave the tribe younger horses in return, has resold the older ones for slaughter. Before the end of the month, 35 of the horses have been killed at Cavel. Kathleen Clarke, the director of the BLM, intervenes to prevent the slaughter of the remaining horses. She arranges for Ford Motor Company, maker of the Mustang sports car, to purchase 16 or them, and begins searching for acceptable buyers for the others. On April 27, the BLM suspends horse sales, as well as delivery of 950 that have already been purchased. On the same day, John Ensign says he is prepared to reintroduce his anti-slaughter bill. By May 19, the BLM resumes selling horses under the Burns amendment, but now requires that buyers sign documents promising not to misrepresent the purpose of the purchase and not to sell the horses to slaughter or knowingly transfer them to those who will. The bureau claims there will be criminal penalties for breaking this promise. The problem, though, is that the Burns amendment is still in effect, and the bill clearly obliges the BLM to sell the horses "without limitation." Legal challenges to the BLM's new limitations seem certain to follow. Meanwhile, Ford announces that it will pay to move 2,000 wild horses from BLM custody to private sanctuaries; the company will also raise funds to help sanctuaries and Native American tribes continue to buy horses.

The Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 is one of those curious pieces of legislation that manages to be a landmark achievement while leaving just about everyone on all sides of the issue vaguely annoyed. The act protects wild horses and burros from "capture, branding, harassment and death" and directs that "no wild free-roaming horse or burro or its remains may be sold or transferred for consideration for processing into commercial products." It is this latter wording that was superseded by the Burns amendment. The 1971 act also establishes that the territory for wild horses should be in "the areas where [they are] presently found" and calls on the BLM to conduct an inventory.

Working under this directive, the bureau created Herd Management Areas (HMAs) on 29.5 million acres of public land across the West. By way of comparison, the BLM manages 160 million acres of land authorized for cattle grazing—acreage that overlaps with the HMAs. In the BLM's initial inventory, the nation's wild-horse population was estimated at 17,000—a number wild-horse advocates considered either a historic low or a vast underestimation.

The act directed the BLM to set "appropriate management levels" (AMLs)—the number of horses that can thrive on the range in harmony with the land's ecosystem and its other authorized uses. When the population was above this level, the bureau was to remove "excess animals" from the range. This was the root of the bureau's "gathers"—roundups of wild horses for subsequent adoption. In these gathers, a BLM "Judas horse" leads a group of mustangs into a portable corral, and then the horses are transported to a BLM facility for veterinary care and preparation for adoption. The 1971 act called on the BLM "to determine whether appropriate management levels should be achieved by the removal or destruction of excess animals, or other options (such as sterilization or natural controls on population levels)." In practice, the bureau has depended almost exclusively on gathers and adoptions to manage the wild-horse population. Though the act gave the BLM the authority to euthanize healthy "excess" horses, the bureau, according to spokesman Tom Gorey, opted from the start not to use it, and since 1988 the federal government has in its appropriations denied federal funds for destruction of healthy mustangs.

For the first 10 years after the act's passage, the BLM's gathers were notoriously inefficient. According to BLM censuses, unmanaged wild- horse populations increase an average of 20 percent each year, and by 1980 there were an estimated 64,535 free-roaming mustangs in the American West. The 1959 Wild Horse Annie Act, by outlawing the use of motor vehicles and helicopters for roundups, had made the BLM's efforts almost impossible. The 1959 act, however, was designed to stop mustangers from harvesting horses for slaughter; now that slaughter of wild horses was prohibited, the case could be made that the prohibition was no longer necessary. The 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act gave the BLM authority to use helicopters for gathers, and by the 1980s, gathers began gradually to reduce the wild-horse population. The BLM is now gathering around 10,000 horses a year. The bureau's most recent census, announced in late May, puts the number of free-roaming wild horses and burros at 31,760—27,369 horses and 4,391 burros, to be exact, though the BLM customarily discusses the animals jointly. (In Nevada the figures are 13,251 horses and 1,464 burros.) Last year's national figure was 37,135, so the BLM has made considerable progress toward its target management level of 28,000.

A reduction of 32,000 animals—fast-reproducing animals with no natural predators—over 25 years, without resorting to either euthanasia or quick unrestricted sales, would seem at least a moderate success, worthy of at least a light pat on the back. Nevertheless, the BLM remains under attack from all sides. Some wild-horse advocates are still unconvinced that gathers are really necessary, and point to the inequitable distribution of public land among horses and cattle. Several organizations point to a 1982 National Academy of Sciences Report that argues that horses and cattle can coexist quite efficiently on shared rangeland: "The fact that two species live together and have similar diets does not necessarily imply competition," the report says, and argues that moderate grazing by two species can actually increase vegetation production on the range. The report also holds that "forage use by wild equids remains a small fraction of the total forage use by domestic animals on western public ranges." Even at the high 1980 wild-horse population figures, cattle used 23 times more forage than did wild horses. The report says the BLM's population estimates were low and its reproduction rate estimates were high—that is, wild-horse populations did not spiral out of control in the 1970s, but were severely understated in the first place. (BLM spokesman Gorey says that census figures have become more accurate with the use of helicopters and, more recently, GIS mapping.)

Ranchers, of course, could respond to the NAS findings by pointing first of all to the scarcity of forage and water on much of the arid western range and arguing that sharing is fine if there's enough to share; they could also argue that cows eat more grass than horses because there are far more cows, and there are far more cows because cows have an economic purpose. (The BLM does not count head of cattle, but measures livestock use of the range in Animal Unit Months—the amount of forage needed to sustain one cow for one month. Livestock used 7.3 million AUMs in 2004.) Finally, ranchers can point to the fact that even today the mustang population remains thousands above the BLM's appropriate management level.

But what has bigger policy implications than the arguments of either the horse advocates or the ranchers is the expense of caring for the 22,500 wild horses and burros that have already been gathered but have not been adopted. Gathered mustangs are put up for adoption at facilities across the nation. If you wish to adopt one, you'll have to fill out a BLM application and guarantee that you have appropriate facilities for the horse—a minimum of 400 square feet of living space, proper fencing materials, proper vehicles for transport, etc.—and, more importantly, that you have appropriate intentions to care for the animal long-term. Once an adoption is approved (the fee is only $125), you must care properly for the horse for one year, during which the BLM may check up on it. After a year, you'll need to have a "qualified person, such as a veterinarian, county extension agent, or humane official" certify that you've given the animal "humane care and treatment." Only then will you receive title to your new mustang. (The same rules apply for burro adoptions.) One more thing: A wild horse is called a wild horse because it is wild. If you get a young one, and you know what you're doing, you should be able to train it. If you get a horse older than 5, well, good luck. For this reason, the BLM tries to round up mostly younger, more adoptable horses, but because it must maintain a natural balance of ages in the herd, it has to take older horses, too. These are the horses that have been most likely to end up remaining with the BLM, in "long-term care."

Since 1973, more than 203,000 wild horses and burros have been adopted, but that hasn't been enough. Even with 7,000 successful adoptions each year—each arranged at an expense to the BLM of around $1,400—the BLM is left with a backlog of thousands of horses it must feed and maintain. The bureau's admirable caution, combined with more successful gathers in the field, has created a problem commonly referred to as "no room in the pipeline." Because the initial goal is to bring rangeland populations down to appropriate management levels, gathered horses are not released back into the wild. In Nevada, horses the BLM rounds up are initially housed at a 40-acre site in Palomino Valley, where they are checked by veterinarians, vaccinated and de-wormed. This process takes a minimum of 30 days, though the average stay, according to Nevada BLM spokeswoman Maxine Shane, is 90 days. After that the horses are offered for adoption, and those that are not adopted are sent to long-term care on 23,000 acres of open pasture the BLM is leasing at several sites in Kansas and Oklahoma. The BLM's total budget for its Wild Horse and Burro Program is $39 million. The estimated cost of holding horses in short-term and long-term care facilities for fiscal year 2005 is $20.1 million. With more than half of its total budget going toward care of gathered horses rather than actual management of horses on the range, the BLM has understood for some time that something needed to change.

But the bureau could hardly have been wishing for what it got: the Burns amendment, with its directive for sale without limitation and its removal of 33 years of protection of the wild horse from slaughter. In public statements since the amendment's passage, Burns has said that his intent was not to see excess horses slaughtered, but the implications of the amendment's language are clear, and so is the statement Burns made to the Billings Gazette in April 2004: "I think what we need to do is put some language in this thing that allows the BLM to sell excess wild horses. I'd prefer to sell 'em to whomever. Maybe some of them will end up going to slaughter."

That only 41 horses have been slaughtered since the amendment passed in December is a testimony to the BLM's stubborn adherence to its old, anti-slaughter mission. From Kathleen Clarke's intervention to save the Rosebud Sioux horses to the BLM's temporary suspension of sales to its search for appropriate buyers to its gutsy—if legally dodgy—restrictions on what buyers may and may not do with the horses they buy, the bureau has done its best to undermine the spirit, and perhaps even the letter, of the Burns amendment. Perhaps most promising have been the bureau's negotiations to get the nation's three horse slaughterhouses to refuse to purchase any horse that has ever been wild—even those that have been sold under the Burns amendment—a status that can be ascertained by the BLM freeze mark on each horse. There is reason to believe these negotiations will be successful, since the BLM and the slaughterhouses have a prior agreement in which slaughterhouses promise not to purchase adopted horses. Such agreements are hardly foolproof, but short of the abolition of slaughter, they may be the bureau's best option.

Horse and goat news from Las Vegas Boulevard:

A small, brown, snub-nosed goat named Ferdinand wanders among the geldings and mares at Shiloh. Ferdinand jumps on a chair, head-butts a ewe, sniffs immodestly at a formerly wild burro named Tequila. At one point, he approaches a bantam hen and issues a curiously chicken-like series of clucks. They say goats help calm the horses around them, but, on this melting late-spring morning, Ferdinand is the jumpiest animal on the ranch.

Ferdinand lies down, stands up, kicks some dirt and dashes into the stable, where a small, shaggy dog is pawing at a wooden plank in cat-like search of a mouse. At the back of the stable—a silhouette: a 3-year-old mare named Astoria and her 3-week-old foal named Bluff, who was born in Chandler, Arizona, at a livestock auction, not long before his mother was to be sold to slaughter with him still in the womb. Pregnant horses look heavier, fattened-up; they sell well at auction. Jill Curtis purchased Astoria and Bluff when Bluff was just 12 hours old, rescuing them from winding up like the original Ferdinand, the great racehorse, somewhere in a human stomach on the far side of the ocean.

Curtis opens the stable and Bluff darts out; Astoria saunters after him. Bluff circles a corral, picking up speed with each step. The sleepy horses outside shake themselves in the sun and start to run, too. The small, quiet world of the sanctuary is stirred up, electric for a moment, filled with the simple, limitless possibilities of ending up, against very long odds, alive.

Horse news from a big back-East newspaper:

On Friday, May 6, 2005, two days before it actually appears in the Washington Post, a Washington Post article is posted on the website of Conrad Burns. The piece, an essay by Wyoming freelance writer Sharon Salisbury O'Toole, begins with a description of the state's Red Desert—a description that includes the phrases "magical experience," "living landscape," "myriad wildlife species" and "vistas that never end"—and proceeds to offer an unqualified defense of the Burns amendment. O'Toole, who owns sheep, writes that her animals now graze at Red Desert, but used to graze closer to home, at Willow Creek, before the wild horses drove them out. She says that the Burns amendment is "necessary to sustain the health of the horse herds, the ranching economy, and the ecological diversity I love in the Red Desert and areas like it." Then she claims that the Burns amendment was co-sponsored by Nevada senators Harry Reid and John Ensign.

On May 15, the Las Vegas Review-Journal runs O'Toole's article under a watercolor of a galloping mustang and the heading "America's Heritage of Wild Horses." Like the Post, the R-J fails to note that neither Reid nor Ensign co-sponsored the Burns amendment, and that the amendment, in fact, had no co-sponsors. Both the Post and the Review-Journal print corrections, but not before fueling a peculiar little firestorm in which the office of Conrad Burns tells everyone who'll listen that while Reid did not co-sponsor the amendment, he helped draft it. In a May 12 article, David Kihara of the Las Vegas Sun gives us the view from the Reid camp, where spokeswoman Tessa Hafen says that Reid neither supported nor helped draft the Burns amendment. Hafen then says that the office intended to request a correction from the Post. Kihara's Sun article, you'll note, appears three days before the R-J reprints O'Toole's essay, complete with the mistaken assertion that Reid and Ensign co-sponsored the Burns amendment.

There are 201 Herd Management Areas in the West, and 102 of them are in Nevada. The Burns amendment will, one way or another, accelerate the BLM's progress toward meeting and maintaining its management levels in these areas, and will also reduce the number of horses in long- and short-term care. Meanwhile, the BLM's old adoption program continues unchanged and separate from the sales program. Ideally, the BLM would like to reduce the number of gathers and avoid overburdening the market for compassionate long-term care of wild horses. The great hope, at the moment, lies with immunocontraception through injections of a drug called porcine zonae pellucidae (PZP). Derived from pig cells, PZP prevents female horses from becoming pregnant for two years, and new formulations may extend the contraception period to four years. The social dynamics of the herd—not to mention the invasive procedure—make selective gelding of stallions ineffective, but immunocontraception of a certain number of females seems promising after tests on 800 mares. PZP is believed to be effective 90 percent of the time, and a 2001 study by the University of California, Davis Center for Equine Health found the drug had no ill effects. This year the BLM hopes to test the contraceptive on 1,000 mares. Tom Gorey says that if the technique continues to prove safe and effective, it could allow the BLM to cut its gathers by 50 percent, from 10,000 to 5,000 horses a year. (Organizations that question the necessity of gathers also have high hopes for PZP. The American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign, for instance, proposes a number of scientific and economic measures, including immunocontraception, ecotourism, and a program that would—instead of contracting with the long-term care facilities back East—pay western ranchers a per-horse fee to allow larger numbers of mustangs to remain on the range.)

In the meantime, the fate of the wild horses and burros depends on the kindness of purchasers. Gorey points with particular gratitude to Florida cattle rancher Larry Jones, who bought 30 mustangs to live on his 1,000-acre ranch. "He just loves them," says Gorey, "says they follow him around like dogs." The most promising purchasers—those who can buy in larger numbers and commit to caring for the horses long-term—are Indian tribes and horse sanctuaries. On March 1, the BLM announced its first sale under the Burns amendment, with 200 mares sold to a sanctuary called Wild Horses Wyoming. Gorey says that Wild Horses Wyoming is trying to secure more land, and has expressed interest in eventually buying as many as 5,000 horses. Meanwhile, the BLM will continue to pursue smaller-scale deals such as the March 9 sale of 13 mustangs to Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue of Lancaster, California, which has one 46-acre ranch and is developing 160 more acres in Twin Oaks. Lifesavers is a sponsor of the annual Wild Horse and Burro Expo, which will be held this year August 19-21 at Reno's Livestock Events Center. Unlike livestock markets across the nation, where buyers assemble to purchase domestic horses for slaughter, the expo is devoted to promoting and protecting wild horses. Its website is calling on horse aficionados to purchase mustangs over age 10 and those offered unsuccessfully three times for adoption ("three-strike horses," in the parlance of the wild-horse world)—in other words, to prevent the Burns amendment from becoming the gateway to wholesale slaughter of mustangs.

Horse news from the Nevada Legislature:

In 2001, State Assemblywoman Barbara Buckley, a Democrat from Las Vegas, introduces a bill to give the wild horse equal billing with the bighorn sheep as Nevada's state animal. The bill is supported by a group of letter-writing Henderson sixth-graders; it is opposed by legislators from Nevada's rangelands. The bill fails ... In 2005, the wild horse becomes a finalist to appear on Nevada's state quarter, which will hit the nation's cash registers in January 2006. The bighorn sheep is another finalist. Nevadans are invited to vote over the Internet. Public officials are concerned that a victory for the wild horse will upset the state's ranchers. In early May, Department of Wildlife Spokesman Chris Healy tells the R-J that he would prefer the bighorn to win.

So who are these ranchers, and why on Earth would a coin upset them? Is the issue really—and this is nearly always the public argument—that wild horses forage on public lands that ranchers would prefer be the domain of their cattle? Can it really be—and this is the public argument with a bit of spin on it—that the horses, which have no natural predators and, after all, are not indigenous to the land, do extensive damage to rangelands? This latter argument gets us into all sorts of interesting areas regarding whether horses, which graze, drink and move on, covering vast territories, do more or less damage to the range than cows, which tend to find a spot and stay there, eating and drinking and resting until they're ready to eat and drink again. If one wishes, one can even become engaged in an intense discussion of the equine digestive system, which horse advocates argue does not degrade food as thoroughly as the bovine system and thus contributes substantial nutrients back into the soil.

All of this is not unimportant, but it fogs the central issue. Livestock are permitted to graze on 160 million acres of public land in the United States. Wild horses are protected on 29.5 million acres, most of which is multiple-use land, which means it is shared by horses and cattle. Even if 31,760 wild horses could thoroughly dominate and substantially destroy 29.5 million acres of land—and this has not been shown to be the case—it would hardly be true that they have, as pro-Burns editorials have put it, "overrun the West."

The conflict, then, is less ecological, or even economic, than cultural. And if horse advocates and ranchers are to be able to work together, the cultural problem cannot be overlooked. First of all, ranchers must deal with urban America's conception that they are "freeloading" on public land with grazing fees of $1.90 per Animal Unit Month. Here in the city, we have a tendency to conflate "public land" with "park land": What are these private citizens, earning their private incomes, doing there? As the U.S. expanded westward in the 19th century, some lands were homesteaded and became private property, others remained vacant and eventually became federal land. Today, the federal government owns vast tracts of land throughout the West, including 83 percent of Nevada. These lands have historically provided spring-fall forage for the nation's cattle (in the winter the cattle must return to the rancher's private base) and have also been the site for mining and timber harvesting and oil exploration and exploitation. In other words, the private uses of public lands have made substantial contributions not only to the economy of the West, but of the nation. Globalization, environmental regulation and changes in the livestock industry have put a dent in the national impact of these uses—horse advocates point out that only 3 percent of the nation's beef supply today comes from public rangelands west of the Mississippi—but they remain the economic lifeblood of the rural West.

Ranchers often compare their leasing of public lands to leasing an unfurnished apartment: It is up to them to dig wells and irrigate the land and provide water pumps in inhospitable areas so that not only cattle but horses, too, can drink. It is up to them to build roads and fences and gates. They rotate their cattle on different rangelands to allow grazed areas to recover. BLM officials cannot be on public lands at all times: In essence, the ranchers are the nation's surrogate land managers, and one can imagine that their presence goes far to prevent open spaces from becoming lawless, polluted badlands. They are, after all, substantially invested in the health of the range. If it goes bad, they go bust.

In the reasonable order of things, the wild horse would be seen by the rancher as, at worst, an annoyance, an occasionally burdensome responsibility—Why do they get to drink water from the wells I dug?—and creators of a perhaps frustrating but not-unsustainable dent in the amount of available grass and water for their cattle. All of these irritants could be seen as a legitimate price—part of the overall trade-off of grazing-rights-for-stewardship—for use of public lands. Over the past 30 years, however, western ranchers have grown suspicious that every outside attempt to protect a species or preserve the land or clean the water is really a cloaked effort to drive them out of business and off the land. Among the plans that have spooked them is the effort, inaugurated in 1987 by a pair of Rutgers University professors, to create a "Buffalo Commons" on the Great Plains. The idea of creating a vast ranch-free realm in which decimated buffalo herds can recover and roam free sounds quite nice, in fact, until you run into the inconvenient fact that some people live and work on the land in question.

In the 1990s, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt aggressively sought to federalize traditionally state-held water rights in wilderness areas. Meanwhile, the endangered species act was being applied more broadly each year and further limiting traditional land uses in the ranges and forests of the West. According to a 1999 article, "War on the West," by William Perry Pendley, president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, ranchers were particularly enraged by Babbitt's 1994 Range Reform, which proposed to replace traditional Grazing Advisory Boards—peopled by ranchers—with Multiple Resource Advisory Councils, consisting of representatives from outside disciplines—including representatives from outside the region. Symptomatic of the disconnect between Washington and those who work the rural West were statements such as the one made in the Environmental Protection Agency's 1993 National Performance Review, which proclaimed the agency's attempt to broaden its mission, making "ecosystem protection a primary goal of the Agency, on par with human health." This may be seen as the EPA simply taking a legitimate long view in which ecosystem protection is seen as essential to continued human health. But the ham-fisted language was part of a larger cultural sensibility in which those who lived off the land were seen as at best anachronistic and at worst as villains. Conversations on sustainable land uses were often undermined by mutual arrogance, with environmentalists assuming the mantel of scientific and moral truth and ranchers (or lumberjacks, or miners) figuratively rolling their eyes and muttering under their breath, "We live here and work here. Our fathers lived here and worked here. And their fathers, too. Don't you think that just maybe we KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING?!"

The Clinton years exacerbated the traditional cultural rift between the rural West and the urban East, between those who argued for ecosystems and those who worked on the land, between advocates of local control and those who believed that federal control—or at least more substantial federal input—would be better for the environment. The Bush years have not healed the rift, but only altered the equation in an odd way: Ranchers are still on the defensive, but now environmentalists feel that they're on the defensive, too.

Now, into the breach, into the canyon between two cultural forces, both of whom feel shortchanged and not a little threatened, gallop the wild horses. There are, no doubt, ranchers who fear that any expanded protections for wild horses is just another wedge to ultimately end cattle ranching in the American West. (Pendley even cites a bumper sticker, "Cattle Free By '93.") Wild-horse advocates, meanwhile, fear that the Burns amendment is just a starting point for an eventual, rancher-friendly "zeroing out" of American wild-horse herds through a combination of sales, adoptions and slaughter. The wild horse has always been a screen upon which America has projected silly abstractions: The 1971 legislation hailed mustangs not so much as living, eating, drinking, suffering, playing, reproducing beings but as "symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the American West" (to which the cowboys could understandably respond, "What about us?"). But today's symbolism, in which the mustang and the ranchers are portrayed as rival endangered species in a zero-sum game, is both harmful and inaccurate. The interests of wild horses and western ranchers should not be subsumed into the culture wars. The issue must not be framed as a contest between "environmentalist extremists" and "exploiters of the public land." Such categorizations do nothing but create animosity where intelligent discussion and sound management is necessary. Wild horses, ranchers and the BLM can have a cooperative and mutually beneficial relationship, one in which ranchers ranch, land managers manage land, free-roaming horses—at sustainable levels—roam free, and nobody—not economically, not culturally, not physically—gets slaughtered.

But what of the 65,000 domestic horses slaughtered in the United States in 2004—not to mention those who, like Ferdinand, are sold abroad and slaughtered? In the wake of Ferdinand's slaughter, one of the more haunting equine headlines of recent years was this, from Bloodhorse.com, last October 29: "Silver Charm Sold to Japan." Silver Charm won the 1997 Kentucky Derby and later retired with career earnings of nearly $7 million. His sale to Japan, of course, is no guarantee of demise in a slaughterhouse. The more likely result is a long, successful career at stud and death at a ripe old age, either of natural causes or euthanasia. But that was the plan when Ferdinand was sold, too. Ferdinand's new owners, though, decided that he was a failure at stud—his offspring were either too few or too slow. He was, at that point, worthless alive and worth a few hundred at the slaughterhouse. Barbara Bayer's 2003 report on the death of Ferdinand says that, in Japan—where, as in Belgium, Italy and France, horseflesh is considered a delicacy—this treatment is hardly considered outrageous.

Why, then, does horse slaughter stir American emotions so? Why do opinion polls consistently show that we oppose it? Why, in 1998, did a voter initiative make California the first state to ban it?

For one thing, there's the slaughter process, in which horses line up, one after another, and proceed into the meat-packing plant. In assembly line fashion, each horse is rendered unconscious by a spike into the forehead from a captive bolt gun, and then, still alive, strung up by a hind leg and bled to death. The horses in line watch all this—including foals watching their mothers killed and vice-versa. There have been reports of horses slipping on blood, and others of them becoming so panicked that they defecated and urinated on themselves The captive bolt gun was designed for use on cattle, and one problem with the horse slaughter process is that the horses, which have much longer necks than cows, sometimes turn their heads aside when the bolt is fired. Often they are hit multiple times before the bolt hits its intended mark. On occasion, a horse will still be conscious when it is strung up and bled.

Only horses intended for human consumption are slaughtered. Horses must come to the slaughter plant alive and aware; they cannot be chemically euthanized or anesthetized, because meat for human consumption cannot contain the chemicals used to sedate a horse or put it to sleep. Pet food comes not from slaughter, but from the "rendering" of animal corpses. These are animals that have died of natural causes, have been killed in accidents or which have been euthanized. Here the skins are taken for leather and the rest of the body is ground up and super-heated and separated into meat-and-bone-meal for pet food and oil for animal-feed supplements. The rendering process, while a bit gruesome to describe, does not necessitate the slaughter of a live animal. Equine slaughter is not necessary to keep the nation's dogs well fed.

Still, one might ask why, in a country that slaughters its fair share of livestock, are we so touchy about the fate of our horses? They are not closer to us on the evolutionary ladder than cows, and they are less intelligent than pigs. Here the issue becomes a cultural one: First, we do not eat horseflesh in the United States, and it is therefore questionable whether we should be processing it for foreign tables or selling our horses to be slaughtered abroad. Second, horses have never been widely bred and raised for their meat in this country. Their cultural role in the U.S. has been almost exclusively as beasts of burden and companions.

Jill Curtis travels regularly to the livestock market in Cedar City, Utah, where horses are sold the first Thursday of each month. There she bids against so-called "killer buyers" who intend to purchase horses for slaughter. She sees horses that have been family pets wind up at flesh-auction because it can cost $200 to euthanize a horse, but it's possible to earn $200 selling the horse at auction. For a $400 turnaround, she says, these families subject their pets to slaughter. She says that slaughter is not an uncommon end for rent-by-the-hour trail horses, as well as for racehorses across the country. (Though the Ferdinand slaughter started an anti-slaughter groundswell in the thoroughbred industry.) "We see working horses, pleasure horses, young, old, babies," says Curtis. "No horse is safe."

One problem, says Curtis, is that there is too much breeding. In the U.S., spaying and neutering of cats and dogs has prevented the kind of chronic large-scale abandonment of these animals seen in many foreign countries. In the same way, Curtis says, the gelding of stallions—a procedure that costs as little as $150—would prevent the conception of thousands of unwanted foals each year that eventually wind up at slaughter auctions. "Even in this valley there's so much back-yard breeding," says Curtis. People breed their horses and then, unable to sell the offspring and unwilling to raise it, they send it to auction. Curtis says that for all intents and purposes, these horses have been bred for slaughter: There is an insidious relationship between overbreeding and slaughter, in which breeding provides an ample supply of horses for slaughter, and slaughter offers cost-effective disposal of the products of overbreeding. If horse owners realized they had to take long-term responsibility for the horses they breed, says Curtis, they would breed them less. In essence, slaughter provides an economic incentive for failing to geld stallions, for overbreeding mares, and for refusing to euthanize old, sick horses.

It would help, Curtis says, if the veterinary industry created some sort of program to reduce the cost of euthanasia. But the ultimate goal is the one proposed by politicians like John Ensign and John Sweeney: a ban on horse slaughter—not just the slaughter of wild horses, but of all horses.

Horse news from Jill Curtis:

"After auction the horses are sent to the slaughterhouse in double-decker cattle trucks. The horses can't even stand up in them. Sometimes the floor on the upper deck gives in and the horses land on the lower deck. The great grandson of Secretariat was bought for slaughter and trampled on his way into the trailer. This was at the auction in New Holland, Pennsylvania. My friend was there, and she saw him fall, and she called me and said, 'We've got to buy this horse.' We've had him here for four-and-a-half months now. We've gotten him healthy, and I've adopted him myself. His name is Cabrillo. He had ulcers from stress. He was just 4 years old when that happened."