Dolores – Advocates for wild horses Monday urged humane treatment for the 90 or so animals of the Spring Creek herd that the Bureau of Land Management says it will round up Aug. 21 from the battered desert rangeland of Disappointment Valley.
The BLM intends to cut the herd from just over 100 horses to about 35 in an effort to restore some health to the range, which also supports a few hundred head of cattle as well as elk and other wildlife. The area also is being considered for oil and gas development.
BLM officials held a hearing Monday in Dolores on their plans to ultimately cull 58 adults and 15 foals from the Spring Creek herd, the smallest of four wild federally managed herds in the state.
Cowboys and a helicopter pilot, employed by one of the two contractors nationwide who do this type of work for the BLM, will try to remove the 73 animals as well as several wild horses that have strayed outside the confines of their 22,000-acre Spring Creek Herd Management Area.
Horses under 10 years old will be offered for adoption, placed in sanctuaries or sent to the BLM’s long-term holding facility in Cañon City to await other adoption events, according to the BLM’s plans. Horses 10 or older can be sold for slaughter under a new law signed by President Bush in December.
The dozen or so people at Monday’s hearing said they were there to ask for protection of the wild horses.
“These horses out at Spring Creek have been one of the enjoyments of my family for the last 40 years,” said cattle rancher Robert Conner. “Some of the better blood should be kept out there to protect the herd.”
For more than a century, wild horses have toughed it out around Spring Creek, a trickle of milky, salt-laden water that probably would kill any horse that hadn’t grown up with it. Some ranchers say these horses aren’t wild at all, just feral. They are not the descendants of the first Spanish mustangs brought to North America. They probably are the descendants of horses brought into western Colorado by a Montana wrangler who had a short-lived, hastily abandoned venture of selling stolen steeds to the U.S. cavalry in southwestern Colorado.
In 1971, Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act and called all of these undomesticated animals “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” The law provided for herd-management areas and attempted to protect the animals from slaughter.
Colorado has four herds, roughly 1,000 horses tucked into the Little Bookcliffs Range, and the Spring Creek, Sandwash and Piceance basins. The Spring Creek herd has had 300 animals removed from its ranks since 1985.
Pati Temple of the Colorado chapter of the National Mustang Association submitted a list Monday of requests – from providing horses with water after the roundup to keeping different bands of the herd separated – that she said would lessen harm to the horses.
“We realize it’s probably necessary to do a roundup, but we don’t want the animals to have unnecessary trauma,” Temple said.
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or edraper@denverpost.com.
