Since the first day of July there has not been a day that I have not been onsite at a roundup, editing roundup footage and/or editing footage of more than one roundup taken by the team in field at Wild Horse Education. The 2024 removal schedule is record breaking; in July alone more wild horses and burros were captured than in the entire year of 2013, 2014, or 2015…
Each roundup represents a gateway into overarching issues with the entire Wild Horse and Burro Program like the failure of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to finalize an enforceable welfare policy. Often overlooked, are the site-specific planning and data deficits that lead to each and every removal.
Feeling emotionally and physically exhausted, I heard my phone signal that I had received a text message.
I expected it to be another text where someone needed something for a meeting, a report or some urgent matter. I flipped the screen on the phone and it was a picture.
RAN founder, Manda Kalimian, had sent me a picture taken on her cell phone. She was out standing with three Medicine Hat paints in a beautiful field. Manda was at the Silbernagel ranch in North Dakota. At the ranch, Rewilding America Now is supporting our 3 Medicine Hat Horses as well as 16 wild horses rescued from a failed sanctuary. RAN is carrying out research to measure carbon sequestration through free-roaming herds of herbivores in native prairie habitat.
These three beautiful wild horses had been captured during a brutal winter roundup at the Pancake Complex in Nevada in 2022. On this first day of this operation in the snow and biting cold, a young colt snapped his leg and worldwide attention fell on this remote place.
The attention helped catapult the fight into federal court as the roundup rages on.
Just like the intensity of a roundup itself, the pressure to educate attorneys and organize data is like a soul wringing game of beat-the-clock. BLM had released the ten-year roundup plan and began the operation before the appeal period even ended. The pressure was on to save this herd.
Over ten years of removals would drive this population down to levels that would threaten the survival of genetics that speak loudly to the history of the land; the Damele Curly unique to the ranching communities that were coming onto land where the Medicine Hats once held importance to the native population. Together, the genetic mix that is the Pancake Complex has sustained the living legacy for generations.
The first hit on this herd was hard. Over 2,000 wild horses were captured from the over 1.2 million acre Complex.
We were told by many we could never win this case. But the ten-year plan was defeated in court. The lawsuit won earlier this year shot down the ten-year plan because it failed in analysis. Importantly, the court recognized a removal plan is not a management plan. For decades BLM has denied the public the ability to address monitoring, habitat restoration and preservation of unique living legacies carried in the beating hearts of our wild ones. We now have the chance to fight to preserve one of our last large herds that represent the legacy of the American West.
Unfortunately, the first roundup BLM rushed to complete under the poorly crafted plan had happened. Wild horses I have known for nearly two decades were gone with fragmented families left on the range.
An old Medicine Hat I have known since his prime, sired foals that grew and began to form their own families. Although the old man remained free, I found none of his offspring on the range, they had been captured and taken to facilities off-limits to public view. The search to find them was not easy… but three were found.
Manda brought them into a new life… to be a part of a new legacy. A legacy rooted in hope and healing. A legacy grounded in data and science.
One text message. One picture. A journey of many years, emotions and “blood, sweat and tears.”
One picture can remind all of us that even though there are rough days and hard battles ahead, if we stay the course a new beginning is still possible.
Laura Leigh, RAN Wild Horse and Legal Affairs Advisor
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