This is the last of three stories about free-roaming horses in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. Click here to read the first and second parts.
ALPINE, Ariz. (CN) — The dark brown foal remained close to her mother as a man held a bowl of warm milk up to her nose one morning in late March.
“Don’t move it,” Simone Netherlands told the man. “Let her do the work.”
Other horses inched closer to the week-old foal, but her father chased them off. Just down the road, emu strolled across a ranch while zebras grazed on another.
The foal’s parents are rescues from the Alpine herd in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, where the Forest Service removes horses it deems unauthorized to be on the land. Nearly 300 miles from the rest, the foal and nine others from the Alpine herd now reside at Netherlands’ ranch in Prescott.
“We’d like to save them all, but we can’t,” Netherlands said as the foal finally sipped from the bowl. “This little tiny baby would have ended up in a slaughterhouse for human consumption.”
Hundreds of horses roam free in the 73,000-acre Black River watershed in the Apache-Sitgreaves, making up the Alpine herd. How and when they made their way to this portion of the forest remains shrouded in controversy, but now, conservationists are pushing the Forest Service to remove them from nearly all public lands.
Some scientists, like Julie Murphree, a wildlife management professor at Arizona State University and a member of the Wild Horse Fire Brigade, say it is possible to manage small herds of about 100 horses without destroying native wildlife. But nobody even agrees on how many horses are out there, let alone how many there should be.
Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest Supervisor Bob Lever said the number is between 400 and 600. But John Koleszar, president of Arizona’s big game hunting association, says there are 800 in the watershed. Netherlands, president of the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group, says Forest Service removals and a recent shooting dropped the number below 200.
If left unchecked, horses will reproduce at a rate of 15-20% per year; a population can double in only four years. Without any form of management, free-roaming herds can outgrow and outcompete other herbivores for forage, destroying the habitats of smaller species along the way. Some scientists say the Forest Service can manage small numbers of horses to minimize environmental impact without ridding the land of horses entirely.
The Forest Service doesn’t have the personnel to manage the Alpine herd, Lever said, even in reduced numbers. Instead, it removes them entirely, baiting horses into corrals to relocate them to holding pens, where the Bureau of Land Management spends nearly $150 million per year maintaining them. The removals are ongoing, Lever said. They halted in the winter because the snow made most of the forest inaccessible but continued last weekend.
“They are rounding them up during the worst possible time of the year: the height of foaling season,” Netherlands said.
Three foals have already gone missing, she said, and were most likely injured or euthanized in the roundup process. Netherlands said the management group raised enough funds to take the more than 40 horses in the auction to the Wild Horse Refuge in Colorado, but the refuge has limited space.
Aside from removing the horses from what she says is their natural home, Netherlands said the removals are especially inhumane because the horses are often auctioned off to “kill buyers” who ship them to other countries as food in high-class cuisine.
“They know that they’re ending up in slaughter, but they don’t care,” she said.
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