Activists take on cowboys to stop drone on the range

IT IS horse versus helicopter in the American desert. On one side, 40,000 horses spread over ten states whose presence on the range is a last vestige of the Old West.

On the other, a group of weathered cowboys whose chosen method of round-up involves rotors more than wrangling.

More than 1,200 horses have been captured in the past month under the dry, horizon-to-horizon skies of northeastern California and neighbouring Nevada as part of a nationwide push to take 12,000 of them off public lands.

But the cowboys' livelihoods are under threat as opposition has intensified over costs, both in dollars and dead animals. Seven horses have died in the current operation and last winter a round-up in Nevada resulted in more than 100 deaths.

Animal rights activist Simone Netherlands said: "They're running at full speed for miles and miles for hours, with babies, little babies, and they don't let up on them. They're stressing them out to the max."

The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the round-ups, says the operations are humane and that it must reduce the wild horse population to more sustainable levels.

Nevertheless, after pressure from members of Congress, the bureau has now asked the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a technical review of the programme.

The debate over round-ups dates back to the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, which protected what was then a faltering wild horse population and made it illegal for cowboys to round up horses on their own for sport or profit.

Dave Cattoor, 68, a round-up expert who has been herding horses since he was 12, said: "A cowboy really wasn't a cowboy if you didn't rope a wild horse. But they stopped that."

Now, horses that are captured are offered for adoption, but with demand low and the cost of feed high, the government often ends up sending them to large private ranches.

In 2009, about 70 per cent of the programme's $40.6 million (26.4m) budget was spent holding 34,500 horses and burros, a system that the Government Accountability Office has concluded will "overwhelm the programme" if not controlled.

For critics like Deniz Bolbol, the pattern of round-up, removal and stockpiling is an example of the bureau's catering to private interests on public lands, namely by favouring livestock ranchers — who pay the government for the right to graze — over wild horses, which cannot be sold for slaughter.

"We remove wild horses from the public lands so private livestock can graze, and then we ship the wild horses to private ranchers in the Midwest where we stockpile them and pay private ranchers," said Bolbol, a spokeswoman for the group In Defence of Animals, which has sued to stop the round-ups. "This is what you call a racket."

And while Cattoor calls Bolbol and other protesters "fanatics", he does not think the government's reliance on big, periodic round-ups makes much sense either, saying the bureau needs more steady maintenance of the wild herds, which can double in size every four years.

Perhaps the only other thing the two sides can agree on is that the horses — the estimated populations of which range from about 120 in New Mexico to more than 17,000 in Nevada — are magnificent.

Art DiGrazia, the operations chief for one of the bureau's wild horse and burro offices in California, said some of the mustangs on the range were descended from army cavalry horses, which were bred for size, speed and strength and left there or given to ranchers.

"They have the intelligence and endurance to work out in this country," said DiGrazia. "They'll know before you know that there's something out there going on."

The method of capture is simple: horses are located from helicopters, which have been used in round-ups since the mid-1970s, and pushed toward the trap site, essentially a funnel shaped by two netted walls that lead into a temporary corral.

Once the herd runs into the funnel, Cattoor lets loose a "Judas horse", which is trained to lead the rest into the trap, where they slowly settle into their new lives as kept animals.

But things don't always go according to plan. One recent morning, after several successful runs, Cattoor and his team lost a group of four horses when they split up and headed to a patch of trees for cover - where helicopters cannot follow.

Opponents of the round-up watched the escape happily from a public viewing station several hundred feet away.

"These wild horse advocates love it when the horse beats the helicopter," Cattoor said. "And they do sometimes win."