Mustang roundup highlights conflict

DEVILS GARDEN, Modoc National Forest, Calif. — Two dozen wild horses rumbled from the shimmering heat-haze like a mirage, driven ahead of a low-flying helicopter toward a trap that would take them forever from the remote frontier between California, Oregon and Nevada.

For almost a century, from the 1870s until 1971, the mustangs that roamed the West were hunted to near extinction. Many ended up as dog food before federal protections 33 years ago preserved a species second only to the buffalo as an icon of the American West.

Now the burgeoning horse population has run into an age-old Western conflict between nature and agriculture over the region's sparse resources, particularly water. That fight, environmental activists said, is too often won by ranchers they accuse of exploiting recent drought-emergency wild horse roundups to return cattle to land where horses once roamed.

"The cattle ranchers had good political connections and the horses don't," said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, after the last horses were removed this month from northwest Wyoming because of the drought.

The Bush administration began a drive three years ago to return all mustang herds to the levels determined 30 years ago by the law that protects the herds. So far, the effort has cost $27 million, and the administration is seeking an additional $19.5 million to finish the job by 2007.

On California's Modoc Plateau, the "horses are all real healthy. People wonder why we're taking them off the range, but it all has to do with range management," said K.C. Pasero, who oversees the federal Bureau of Land Management's wild horse program for northern California and northwest Nevada.

Cattleman Dennis Smith of Cedarville, in California's farthest northeast corner, said too many horses on the land would "eat themselves out of a home. Pretty soon there'd be no forage for cattle or horses."

An aerial count before the roundup found 701 horses here in what by far is California's largest herd, on land the U.S. Forest Service says should sustain only about 300. The count surely missed a hundred horses or more, officials said, with the herd growing at a rate of 20 percent a year.

Both projections are disputed by Karen Sussman, president of the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros, who accuses the government of routinely overestimating herds' population and growth.