Currently the BLM in Wyoming is planning to remove thousands of wild horses as part of management of the checkerboard in agreement with the Rock Springs Grazing Association.  This includes zeroing out some herd areas including Salt Wells Creek, while drastically reducing others.  Once these herd management areas are gone we will lose them forever. Wild horses are part of the American West and a symbol of freedom to all Americans.  

We are asking you to sign this petition and share it with everyone you know.  This comprehensive petition offers the state of Wyoming (and others as well) a revenue positive way to preserve wild horses in the West while still managing their numbers. It offers a better way forward for everyone. 

 

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon
State Capitol
200 West 24th Street
Cheyenne WY 82002

CC:
BLM Rock Springs Field Office Leadership
280 US-191
Rock Springs WY 82901

PROPOSAL FOR REVENUE-POSITIVE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY FOR WILD FREE-ROAMING HORSES IN WYOMING

Dear Mr. Gordon and Wyoming BLM Field Office:

We are writing to ask that you and your office stop the BLM’s current proposal to “zero-out”the wild horse herds in the Salt Wells Creek HMA, Great Divide Basin HMA, and a portion ofAdobe Town HMA, and instead consider implementing a management strategy utilizing a combination of roundups and fertility control measures modeled after the management strategy used for 100 years for the Chincoteague / Assateague Island wild ponies and 50 years for the Grayson Highlands wild horses, a strategy that has been demonstrated to be revenue-positive.

We understand that the population of the horses needs to be managed to an appropriate number. The Adobe Town, Salt Wells Creek, and Great Divide Basin HMAs encompass 2,427,220 acres of land in Sweetwater, Carbon, and Fremont counties. The AML for Adobe Town HMA is 610-800 horses. The AML for Salt Wells Creek HMA is 251-365 horses. The AML for Great Divide Basin HMA is 415-600 horses. We do not oppose any plans to use bait-trapping roundups or fertility control measures to keep these herds within these designated AML numbers. We are only opposed to the plan to “zero-out” these herds, thereby removing all wild horses from these designated HMAs. The plan to zero-out these herds ignores the potential revenue that wild horse tourism could bring in to the state of Wyoming. Leaving wild horses on HMAs within AML does not impact other sources of revenue that the state depends on, such as livestock grazing or oil drilling.

IMPACT OF TOURISM REVENUE IN WYOMING

According to “The Economic Impact of Travel in Wyoming”, a report prepared by Dean Runyan Associates for the calendar year 2024, travel is Wyoming’s fourth biggest source of revenue just behind Mining, Manufacturing, and Oil & Gas, with Agriculture coming in fifth. In 2024, tourism generated $1.4 billion in earnings and $285.7 million in tax revenue. Direct travel spending grew from $4.8 billion in 2023 to $4.9 billion in 2024, a 1.6% increase.  Between 2014 and 2024, Wyoming travel spending grew at an average annual rate of 3.9%.  Direct travel-generated employment grew from 33,410 to 33,850 jobs in 2024, a 1.3%increase from the prior year. Between 2014 and 2024, Wyoming travel-generated employment grew at an average annual rate of 1.2%. Tourism also improves the economy by secondary impacts of strengthening professional and business services, financial institutions, and trade to the tune of millions of dollars annually and thousands of local jobs maintained. In addition to maintaining jobs, tourism increases tax revenue. Overall, tax revenue (local and state) generated by travel spending grew from $265.7 million in 2023 to $277.2 million in 2024, a 4.3% increase. Local tax revenue increased 3.5%, while state tax revenue increased 4.9%. Sales tax (local and state) increased 6.7% and made up approximately 57.3% of total tax revenues. Approximately 41% of total travel-generated taxes were generated by state sales tax.  Of that total, $33.8 million was returned to local governments.

UNTAPPED POTENTIAL FOR WILD HORSE TOURISM

I believe that Wyoming is overlooking an untapped source of revenue in wild horse tourism.  Certainly, Yellowstone and the Grand Teton National Parks currently drive a large portion of the existing tourism to Wyoming. However, the development of wild horse tourism is a significantly untapped source of tourism revenue in Wyoming. Few images of the West are more iconic than a herd of wild horses galloping across the landscape.

The mustang, with its agility, stamina, and raw power, became the horse of choice for many cowboys. These hardy creatures, born from the wild landscapes of the American West, were perfectly suited to the demanding tasks of herding cattle, navigating treacherous terrains, and enduring long days in the saddle. There would be no West as we know it, nor even the modern Quarter Horse breed, without the mustang of old.

As natural resources face increasing demands and livestock management has centralized, many of today’s ranchers consider the wild horses that built the American West to be nothing more than a nuisance animal. This leads to conflict with wild horse conservationists who wish to preserve the heritage of the wild horse.

But it is the successful leaders and business visionaries who are often the ones who see a “waste product” or “nuisance animal” and turn it into something positive and productive.  The wild, free-roaming horses are living symbols and cultural icons of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West. More practically, they represent an undeveloped source of tourism revenue for Americans wishing to reconnect with their roots and international tourists wanting to experience the American West that they have read about in books and seen in movies.

Wyoming is one of only ten US states where visitors from all over the country and even the world can come visit free-roaming wild horses. We were just in Salt Wells Creek this previous weekend and there were visitors from Germany and Croatia who had come specifically to see the wild horses. Just leaving the horses out on the range as they are, with no additional input or development, already attracts international tourism.

If the state wanted to maximize the tourism potential to the areas around Rock Springs and tourism revenue to Sweetwater, Carbon, and Fremont counties with very little investment and minimal infrastructure development, you could consider small measures such as putting in a primitive campground or pit toilet, or even just a designated area to park RVs in or near the HMA grounds.

COST OF CURRENT MANAGEMENT STRATEGY

The current proposal is to remove 3,624 wild horses from the Salt Wells, Adobe Town, and Great Divide Basin HMAs. According to BLM website publications, this is likely to take multiple years and a combination of helicopter gathers and bait trapping. 

Between 2018 and 2022 the USFS conducted a similar operation in Devils Garden HMA, removing a total of 2,333 horses over that 4 year period with a combination of helicopter gathers and bait trapping. Only 328 of these gathered horses were adopted or sold. The cost to the American public for that roundup was $2.5 million dollars just to gather the horses, not to mention the estimated $100,250,000 it will cost to feed and house the 2,000 unadopted horses in long-term holding for the rest of their lives.

Furthermore, because the USFS does not use fertility control, after the roundup efforts were complete in 2023, the population of Devils Garden HMA was still at 1,205, approximately 800 horses over target AML, so despite this exorbitant amount of money spent, their efforts were largely wasted.

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR REVENUE-POSITIVE WILD HORSE MANAGEMENT

There are already successful models for revenue-positive free-roaming horse management.

One example of how this can be done successfully is the Chincoteague Pony Pennings which will enter its 100th year this July. To maintain the population at an appropriate level, the saltwater cowboys round up the horses each year, removing the foals and returning the breeding adult pairs and only a few foals marked as “buybacks” to keep the population stable. The 50-70 horses that are removed are then put up for auction. 

This annual roundup attracts up to 50,000 tourists each July, boosting economic activity in various local businesses. The subsequent horse auction is a major source of income for the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, generating more than $400,000 annually in the past 5 years and a record $547,700 in 2024.

Another similar example is the Highland Pony auction of the free-roaming horses of the Grayson Highlands State Park in Virginia. The wild horses there are a local attraction, with over 50% of the tourist traffic to the state park specifically visiting to see and photograph the wild horses. This herd has been monitored and managed since 1975 by the Wilburn Ridge Pony Association. This nonprofit group facilitates the annual gather of the herd each fall by bait-trapping, designating excess foals for auction and a few foals as “buybacks” to be re-released along with the adults back into the park similar to the Chincoteague model. They have a population of about 150 in a park of about 4,500 acres. They usually have between 15 and 26 foals each year at auction with proceeds as high as $500,000. The profits go toward supporting the remaining herd and are also distributed to two local fire departments.

PROPOSAL TO USE A REVENUE-POSITIVE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY IN WYOMING

We believe that Wyoming could profit significantly by copying this model. By combining fertility control measures with annual bait-trap gathers, I believe that western states like Wyoming with HMA territory could actually generate net positive revenue through tourism and horse auctions, while at the same time reducing the number of Mustangs that need to be adopted each year and reducing the burden on taxpayers of unadopted Mustangs in long-term holding. In this era focusing on government efficiency, this management strategy creates a win-win scenario where revenue is generated at the state and local level, wasteful spending is minimized, and public lands are successfully managed for multiple uses (livestock grazing, mining/drilling, hunting, recreation/ tourism, and sustained yields of natural resources), without any one use degrading or eliminating another, per BLM and USFS mandates. This also protects and preserves the genetic heritage of the Wyoming Mustang which is the origin of the rare and unique curly horse.

IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS OF REVENUE-POSITIVE STRATEGY

Helicopter roundups are expensive, costing about $800-1000 per animal. Bait trapping is significantly less expensive, about $400 per horse per AWHC data. Bait trapping operations have been successfully conducted on Wyoming HMAs previously. Shayne Sampson and Cameron Warner are two contractors listed in BLM online publications who have successfully done bait trapping gathers in Adobe Town HMA in the past. Wild horses reliably use the same water sources, so even in areas with plentiful forage, erecting semi-permanent paneling around the water sources utilized by the herds would be a feasible method of bait trapping.

Rather than have one very expensive helicopter gather every few years, resulting in hundreds or thousands of horses that never get adopted and spend the rest of their lives at the taxpayers’ expense in long-term holding, we believe it would be better to turn the wild horses, and even the gather itself, into a tourist attraction. If the herd were managed this way, the mares could be provided with fertility control, which cost about $220 per mare, at the time of the annual gather allowing for a much slower growth rate. A certain percent of mares would be allowed to give birth each year to maintain genetic viability of the herds. Excess horses would be removed annually during the publicized and advertised gather and then those horses auctioned. Since fertility control measures could be reliably implemented while mares are penned during the annual gather rather than relying on individual darters to access them across vast acreage throughout the year, we could more reliably reduce the number of foals being born per year.

If we applied this management strategy using AML numbers for Salt Wells as an example, the numbers break down as follows. The cost for bait trapping the entire Salt Wells herd would be about $450,000 for the first year. If 250-300 horses were returned to the range, which is well within the AML for that HMA, it would only cost about $120,000 annually for a bait trap gather in subsequent years and this would leave enough breeding adults to maintain genetic viability.

Assuming approximately half of the horses are female, and we only want 30% of them to reproduce (50 out of 150) it would cost about $22,000 to administer fertility control to the entire population of Salt Wells mares before they were re-released. This cost could be reduced slightly if mares over 18 years old are permanently sterilized. So for less than half of the cost of housing a single wild horse in long-term holding for its entire life (about $50,000), the entire Salt Wells herd could receive fertility treatment each year.

If the herds were penned and separated in portable corrals on the range, the fertility control could be administered without ever transporting the adults off of the range thus saving in transport cost. Potentially, the BLM could partner with and even designate some of the fertility management to a nonprofit advocacy organization like the Alliance for the Protection of Wild Equines (APWE), a group of volunteers working to photograph and catalog the animals remaining in the HMAs. This group studies the health and genetics of the herds and could help make recommendations on which horses would be good candidates for fertility control treatment, which could be allowed to reproduce, and which horses should be removed from the range for adoption.

The ideal horses to target for removal each year to maintain AML would be yearlings and horses over 18-20. These horses designated for removal (about 50-70 per year for Salt Wells numbers) would be transported to a local facility in Rock Springs or Green River for auction. Assuming we then auction off 50-70 horses each year following the Chincoteague and Grayson Highlands model, the auction could generate a conservative estimate of $400,000-500,000 in direct revenue from the auction in addition to secondary revenue from tourism to the area, leaving an annual profit of over $200,000.

If this system is duplicated across multiple HMAs, then you are looking at reducing the number of wild horses being born in Wyoming HMAs each year to approximately 385 foals total divided across all 14 HMAs in the state. This would be a much more cost-effective way to achieve population stability. It is far easier to find homes for 385 horses per year than for 3,000. Events like Mustang Heritage Foundation’s Extreme Mustang Makeover which draws between 3,000 and 5,000 spectators annually and is paired with an annual Mustang auction that has placed over 500 horses in a single day. Mustang Madness and other Mustang challenge events are growing in popularity. Wyoming could capitalize on this by publicizing and televising the roundup and subsequent auction.

MUSTANG COMPETITION EVENT AND AUCTION WEEKEND FESTIVITIES

In order to really capitalize on the tourism potential of the Mustang to the state of Wyoming, we would propose a three day event celebrating Western heritage and incorporating a competition celebrating the versatility of the Mustang horse for ranch work, as trail horses, endurance mounts, steady kids’ horses; in rodeo sports such as reining, cutting, and barrel racing; and English disciplines such as dressage, eventing, and show jumping. A competition like this would be an ideal way to showcase the potential that these newly gathered horses have and thus promote their marketability and desirability.

On the final day of competition after the awards ceremony, the Mustang auction would commence. The competitors would have the option to offer their horses up for sale as well. This gives an avenue for trainers to purchase an unhandled horse at auction for a reasonable price, train that Mustang for a year or two, bring it back to competition now with an increased market value, sell the horse at auction and repeat the process with a new unhandled Mustang the next year. This takes an unhandled horse and gives that horse a job and a good home, and generates sales tax and tourism income to Wyoming twice in the process.

Rock Springs or Green River would be two likely choices for an event like this. Rock Springs is the existing home of the Sweetwater Event Complex which already hosts equestrian events such as the Red Desert Roundup Rodeo and the National High Schools Finals Rodeo, so their events complex would be able to easily accommodate a Mustang- themed promotional competition and auction. The Green River Rodeo Arena is a similar facility slightly further away.

We would propose a three-day versatility competition with adult and youth in-hand and under-saddle divisions. This competition would be open to any BLM or USFS or NAMAR Mustang or burro, that has been out of holding for at least one year.  Examples of possible events:

• In-hand Trail Class (Agility)
• In-hand Liberty Freestyle
• In-hand Conformation Class (Form-to-Function)
• Dressage (May opt for Western or English patterns)
• Reining (Novice horse, Open)
• Under-Saddle Trail (Mountain Trail)
• Under Saddle Ease of Handling (Working Equitation Obstacles)
• Under Saddle Speed and Maneuverability (Barrels or Poles)
• Pony Express Team Relay Race
• Mounted Archery
• Gymkhana Games and Costume Party

A sample week calendar of events could look something like this:

Sunday - Thursday: 
HMA closed to public except for designated viewers at bait traps. Horses are collected in bait traps around water sources and sorted by BLM personnel, optional assistance provided by APWE personnel.

Friday:
-Early Morning (On Range) - mares treated with fertility control and released with stallions from trap sites.
- horses designated for auction loaded into trucks and transported to holding facility. Optional, a cowboy “drive” of gathered horses from a point A to point B within the fairgrounds behind fence paneling for public viewing.

• Early Morning (Fairgrounds) Opening parade.
• All day (Fairgrounds) Festivities and competitions.
• Afternoon (Fairgrounds) - gathered horses loaded into chutes and tagged with numbers for auction. Public viewing period for gathered Mustangs begins.

Saturday
⁃ All day (Fairgrounds). Competitions and Demonstrations continue.

Sunday
⁃ Morning (Fairgrounds) Awards Ceremony and Parade of Mustangs
⁃ Afternoon (Fairgrounds) – Mustang Auction*
⁃ Evening (Fairgrounds) – Closing Ceremony, Freestyle Performances, and Concert
⁃ Evening (On Range). Buybacks released back onto range.

* Payments made for adopted Mustangs, horses are branded/ gelded and shipping arranged. Local transport (<5 hours) and mares can be taken home same day. Geldings needing distant transport held at Rock Springs BLM facility for 3 weeks to heal.

CLOSING

Wyoming is called the “Cowboy State” because of its rich ranching history. But you can’t have cattle or cowboys without the mustangs that carried them across our open plains and rugged frontiers. It would be a tragedy in this modern era if we erased one of the foundations of our Western legacy – the wild mustang.

These horses captured our imaginations and helped cowboys build and shape the American West. How can we remove them from our natural landscapes and let them spend the rest of their lives in a holding pen? They deserve more from us. They deserve a thoughtful stewardship and management strategy that allows them to live on the landscape, reproduce at a rate that does not threaten the ecological balance with wildlife or threaten their habitat with overgrazing, and coexist with domestic livestock grazing rights and other rangeland uses.

Thank you for considering our petition.

Warmly,

Hollynn Larrabee
Ellis Daragon
Stephanie Robey-Shepard

and all co-signors of this petition online

 

SOURCES

• Analysis: Tax Dollars Fuel Livestock Industry’s Wild Horse Roundups. American Wild Horse Conservation. Jan 24, 2022. https://www.americanwildhorse.org/stories/analysis-tax-dollars-fuel-livestock-industrys-wild-horse-roundups-7840
• After the 2022 Devil’s Garden Wild Horse Roundup and Removal. American Wild Horse Conservation. Mar 7, 2023. https://www.americanwildhorse.org/stories/after-the-2022-devils-garden-wild-horse-roundup-and-removal-8055
• The Economic Impact of Travel in Wyoming, 2024 Calendar Year. Primary Research by Dean Runyan Associates.
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QNsBX4S0NW7q1p8RmgjkUQy1PuImZVLN/edit
• The Mustang’s Role in American History and Their Connection to the Wild West. Fading
• Hoofbeats Blog. https://fadinghoofbeats.com/the-mustangs-role-in-american-history-and-their-connection-to-the-wild-west/ Feb 20, 2024.
• Solberg, Otto. Ponies of the Grayson Highlands. The Appalachian Voice.
• https://appvoices.org/2016/12/15/ponies-of-the-grayson-highlands/
• Pony Penning Auction Statistics.
• https://chincoteaguepedigrees.com/pedigree/auctiondata.php