‘We need to think outside the box’: Wyoming lawmakers seek new ways to address wild horse overpopulation

(Lander, WY) – The federal Good Neighbor Authority does not provide an avenue for states to collaborate with federal government entities on wild horse management, a legislative committee heard this month. 

The report came from Wyoming State Forestry Division Assistant State Forester for Operations Matt Marshall, who was asked to evaluate whether the GNA “could be used to support wild horse management on Bureau of Land Management lands.”

“Based on that review, we believe that the current Good Neighbor Authority framework is structured primarily as a land and vegetative restoration authority rather than population management authority,” he told the Wyoming Legislature’s Select Federal Natural Resources Management Committee during a July 13 meeting in Lander. “We did not identify wild horse management activities such as gathers, fertility controls or herd management as expressly identified Good Neighbor Authority project categories.”

Slaughter

Wyoming Rep. Robert Wharff, R-Evanston, said he had requested the GNA topic for this month’s meeting because the number of wild horses in Wyoming has exceeded federal Appropriate Management Levels for “a long time,” so “it’s time that we start looking at other alternatives” to address the problem, because “what we’re doing right now is clearly not working.”

“We need to think outside the box,” Wharff said, recalling the efforts of former Wyoming lawmaker Sue Wallace to develop a horse slaughter plant in the state. 

“I would like to kind of pick up where she left off and see if we can’t do that,” Wharff said. “I mean, I don’t think that’s the primary objective, but I do think that it’s a resource that could be put to good use.”

Wyoming Rep. Bob Davis, R-Baggs, agreed that, while a “certain percentage” of wild horses in the state are eligible for adoption, others represent a “utility crop.”

“At a certain point there’s nothing you can do with a horse,” he said. “Perhaps (we) need to revisit the slaughter situation.” 

Legislative staffers offered a report on the history of horse slaughter in the United States earlier in the meeting, noting that, prior to 2005, U.S. law allowed horses to be slaughtered “as a product that could be used for human food following an inspection.”

That practice was later restricted by the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2006, which prohibited the use of federal funding to pay for inspections of horse slaughter facilities, according to the report.

By contrast, the report said Wyoming law considers horse slaughter in the context of stray animals, which the Wyoming Livestock Board is authorized to “dispose of” – meaning, “to sell, send to slaughter, or destroy.”

Tribal success

It could be legal to site a horse slaughter facility on the Wind River Reservation, Shoshone and Arapaho Tribal Fish and Game Director Art Lawson said later in the meeting, responding to a question from the committee – but he also pointed out that the effort would likely face significant “roadblocks.”

“(It) would be a big issue – even just entertaining that idea,” Lawson said. “It’s one thing we’ve talked about, but not very much, because we know there’s a lot of issues surrounding those slaughterhouses.”

Northern Arapaho Business Council Co-Chairwoman Kimberly Whiteman Harjo said tribal leaders would want to “ask our people how they feel and what their perspective is on slaughtering those animals and even consuming those animals” before pursuing a project like that. 

“I don’t want to make that decision for them,” she said, adding, “We’re walking a fine line when we talk about consumption, just because in America … something that we do not practice is eating horses.”

Instead, Harjo said tribal community members would likely be more interested in using the horses to celebrate “our heritage,” or to expand therapeutic programs like the one currently offered through Wind River Cares. 

“Our horses are healers,” she said. “And for us Native Americans, horses are a big part of how we lived. They’re a big part of how we hunted our food.”

She also suggested curbing the number of wild horses by increasing enforcement efforts targeting individuals who dump the animals on tribal lands – and elsewhere in the state.

“That contributed a whole lot to our problem that we had on the reservation,” she said. 

She was referring to the overabundance of wild horses that existed on the reservation before tribal leaders took steps to address the issue in recent years.

“We did have a horse problem,” NABC Chairman Keenan Groesbeck told the committee this month, estimating that there were up to 9,000 feral horses on the reservation at one point. “(They were) eating us out of house and home.”

The population of feral horses on the reservation now stands at about 1,500, Groesbeck said – a number that Lawson said should be manageable for the foreseeable future.

“We believe we saved our reservation for the next hundred years,” Lawson said. “It’s really not a problem for us anymore. … And if it does get into a problem, we’ll do little manageable roundups instead of the big roundups that we had to do to control the population.”

Later in the meeting, Davis wondered whether state officials could use the successful wild horse gathers on the reservation to show that local – rather than federal – herd management efforts can be more effective.

“Is this an avenue that we could go down with the horses to show that the state could actually lead in a management program in cooperation with the BLM?” he asked. “We just listened to what the tribes were saying – they’ve knocked them down to 1,500, and now they think that’s a number they can manage. Is there any avenue there going down that way to show that we would lead best?”

The committee decided to begin the conversation by reaching out to Wyoming’s congressional delegation to discuss the potential for cooperative management of wild horses in the state.

“I want to get it done,” Wharff said. “I’m tired of talking about it.”