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Proposal to sterilize Oregon’s wild horses criticized

Risk of infection, lack of follow-up care cited

By Emily Cureton, OPB
Published: July 26, 2019, 8:15pm
2 Photos
A nursing colt ducks between his mother’s legs on May 29 at a BLM corral in Hines, Ore.
A nursing colt ducks between his mother’s legs on May 29 at a BLM corral in Hines, Ore. Emily Cureton/OPB Photo Gallery

Among the many horses, fence panels and mounds of manure at a Bureau of Land Management wild horse corral, a nursing colt ducked between his mother’s legs.

The mare swung around him to watch a tractor lift hay bales the size of cars. Like more than 11,000 wild horses last year, she was removed from public rangeland. She gave birth at this BLM corral in Eastern Oregon, and the collar around her neck means it could be her last foal: She’d been tagged to undergo surgical sterilization.

The procedure hasn’t been widely performed on wild horses before, but after years of opposition, the BLM hopes to operate on test mares as soon as next month.

The National Academy of Sciences looked at the practice and issued a report in 2013, saying it didn’t recommend spay surgery due to risks of infection and the difficulty of providing follow-up care. When the BLM published its plan to move ahead with ovariectomy via colpotomy, animal rights groups sued. Again it triggered a strong reaction, with more than 11,300 public comments pouring into the agency, according to a BLM spokeswoman.

The BLM has long been under pressure to bring down horse herd numbers across 10 Western states without resorting to slaughter. Relatively few of the horses it rounds up are adopted or sold — just a few thousand last year, compared to the 48,000 wild horses kept in corrals or private facilities and leased pastures. The agency spends $50 million a year to run that holding system. The horses left on public rangeland share it with millions of privately owned cattle, which are authorized to graze under BLM permits.

“It’s a balancing act between multiple uses, in terms of identifying how many horses can this area sustain, without negatively impacting wildlife habitat, recreation and livestock grazing opportunities,” BLM wild horse specialist Rob Sharp said.

The BLM claims that wild horse herds double every four years without intervention. Federal law calls the horses “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West,” but it limits where they can roam to areas identified 50 years ago. Water sources in those areas have run dry before. Sharp said, in Eastern Oregon, the BLM has trucked thousands of gallons a day to keep wild horses from dying or trespassing onto private land in search of water.

“The general public does not stand to see starving and dying horses on the range,” Sharp said. “Unfortunately, I think that will be the impetus for major change in this program.”

The BLM’s wild horse and burro program is eyeing the Oregon spay experiment as a model for the West. Stallions have been castrated before, but Sharp said that’s not effective for long-term population control, since one stud can get many mares pregnant.

The spay procedure is increasingly outdated among domestic horse veterinarians, said Dr. Regina Turner, head of the Equine Reproduction & Behavior Service at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s not affiliated with the BLM or any advocacy groups commenting on the spay study. She last performed ovariectomy via colpotomy — the kind of procedure the BLM is planning — in the 1990s.

“It can be done humanely, with minimal stress to the mare, if it’s done with proper pain control, and done efficiently and quickly by someone who’s experienced at the procedure,” Turner said. “But, I’ll be honest, it would not be my first choice,” she added.

The procedure involves a surgeon making an incision and using a chain to crush a mare’s ovaries internally by feel, without help from the tiny cameras Turner deploys in her practice. Spaying isn’t used as a birth control method for domestic horses, and is more often performed to alter behavior “usually if there is an animal the owners don’t put a lot of value on,” Turner said.

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