Loving wild horses too much kills them

To the editor:

Linda Lee's heartfelt but misguided plea for more wild horses (Thursday letter, "Too few horses") is typical of the lack of a practical understanding of range management in Nevada and the West. The horses on the Spring Range are "feral," descendants of escaped or abandoned ranch stock. No amount of romantic speculation about descending from the stock of Spanish conquistadors, which is common for those with an unbridled love of wild horses and Old West fantasies, can change this fact.

The range in any horse herd area can only support so many horses. Common sense dictates that you manage horse herds for poor range conditions, so that in the bad years the animals are not starved and dying. Just as important in the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the range must be managed to a thriving, natural ecological balance. That means that wild horses do not damage the habitat to the point that wildlife and ranch livestock that share the range are hurt. There are no livestock on the Spring Mountains, but the wildlife suffers when the numbers of horses get too high.

The problem is that after the last removal, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service had to admit that the horse numbers were higher than their estimates to start with, and that the removal never brought the numbers down to a proper level. The result was that horse numbers started too high during this period, and another removal is long overdue. The answer is not to leave horses on the range until a crisis presents itself, when they damage the habitat and animals start dying.

Gus Cothran, cited by Ms. Lee, is a well-known horse expert, but he is not a population ecologist. However, his population theories on horses are probably sound. The problem is that if you religiously follow Mr. Cothran's doctrine, you would not allow a higher population of horses that would damage the range in most years, as Ms. Lee and others cry for. You would have to completely remove horses from the Spring Range and Red Rock Canyon.

So if you want horses on the Spring Mountains, you are going to have to live with appropriate, low numbers. Healthy herd genetics will have to be maintained by periodically bringing in horses from far-away herds, just like the BLM has said it will do in its horse plans.

You can continue to delude yourself, but this brand of management is ranching, not managing a wild, free-roaming population. What you do with the excess horses is another matter. Decades ago, some ranchers figured that it was more cost-effective to dump the horses on the Spring Mountains, rather than round them up and sell them. I recommend that we dump them in Costa Mesa, Calif. - Ms. Lee's city of residence.

Craig Stevenson

Las Vegas

The writer is a wildlife biologist, retired from the Nevada Department of Wildlife.