Wild Horses: Caretaker welcomes mustangs on Oklahoma ranch

BARTLESVILLE, Okla. --

A slight wind makes the tall-grass prairie sing, softly, softly.

Crickets add a raspy chirp. Water trickles and the Earth breathes.

In the distance, a herd of 100 mustangs comes into view, running in the early fall morning light, chased by nothing but themselves.

A band of five white wild horses, one more majestic than the next, crosses a gravel road at a trot, tossing off royal glances.

Three dappled grays stand their ground, blocking the road. They don't look up. They're as still as statues, busy doing nothing.

They're old, long in the tooth, sway-backed, hard of hearing.

Robert Hughes finally honks the horn of his idling white Ford Raptor truck, adorned with an EAT BEEF license plate.

The spell is broken. The three old geldings shuffle off, taking plenty of time. That's all they have as they live out their lives on the prairie.

"They're survivors. They're immune to almost everything," Hughes says, noting wild horses have thicker skin than domestic animals, sturdier hoofs to handle rocky terrain and centuries of experience dodging disease, predators and man. "It's survival of the fittest."

For these horses, that could mean living into their 30s -- all on the American taxpayers' dime at about $475 per horse per year.

"We operate an old folks' home for unadoptable wild horses," says John Hughes, Robert's father who once ran 10,000 head of cattle on rich grazing land he owned or leased. "We're really grass farmers."

Now they have 1,500 wild horses on their home ranch of nearly 13,000 acres. And he's leasing land to care for another 2,700 mustangs in two separate pastures nearby.

All told, the U.S. government should owe him about $2 million for the 4,200 wild horses the ranch is running this year, a steady paycheck that doesn't come with the same risks as the cattle market.

"This year, running cattle would have made more money" since the price of beef rose, Hughes says. "But the horse program is safest. We've kind of got it down to a science. It'd be kind of tough to give up."

HORSE ADOPTIONS FELL

Since 1989, the Hughes ranch has been home to thousands of America's wild horses. They were rounded up in the West, half from Nevada, to make the 1,400-mile trailer trek to the Midwest.

These mustangs are too ornery, too old or just too many for people to adopt at $125 a pop, especially during a down economy.

The Hughes ranch is the oldest continual pasture in the Bureau of Land Management's long-term holding program for wild horses.

For a decade, Hughes had a near monopoly. Then, mustang adoptions fell and the need for holding rose as the BLM pulled more mustangs off the range in 10 Western states. Adoptions plunged below 3,000 in 2011, or less than half the past annual rates of 6,000 to 7,000. At the same time, the BLM rounded up nearly 10,000 wild horses this year.

Now, the BLM has contracts with 21 long-term holding facilities, most in Oklahoma and Kansas, but also in Iowa and South Dakota. They range in size from 1,100 acres to 32,000 acres and together hold about 30,000 wild horses. The BLM is looking for more pastures, too.

The agency is also holding more than 11,000 wild horses in at least 23 short-term holding facilities, which cost the taxpayer five times more -- about $2,500 per horse per year. The short-term holding time has increased as well, to as high as 200 days in some facilities.

The total taxpayer bill: $43.2 million for holding in 2011, or more than half the total $75.8 million budget for the Wild Horse and Burro program. That's six times the $7 million in holding costs in 2000, according to a 2008 audit of the agency's program.

"If not controlled, off-the-range holding costs will continue to overwhelm the program," warned the General Accounting Office.

The GAO recommended a solution to the growing wild horse warehousing problem, which the BLM rejected out of hand: "humanely" destroying excess animals or selling them for slaughter.

"There is vocal opposition to that," BLM spokesman Tom Gorey says. "We made it clear that isn't on the table."

John Hughes doesn't like the idea either. He adopted three wild horses the first year of the holding program, when he also took in mares. More than 100 foals were born on his place, he says. He paid $125 each for the trio and broke them to help run his ranch.

And the worst part of his job?

"Having to put them down when they're not in good shape," Hughes says. "It's the teeth that go first. They get long in the tooth and can't cut the hay while eating it."

Hughes figures the death rate from the aging wild horses on his place is about 7 percent a year, so he brings in new mustangs regularly.

"It's like getting new dogs," Robert Hughes said of the newcomers, who start in corrals for up to a month. "They all get along after a while."

MIDWEST WATER AND LAND ABUNDANT

The horses come already vaccinated and gelded, and a veterinarian and the BLM checks on them. Otherwise it's "pretty much a hands-free environment for the horses," Robert Hughes says.

Nowadays, the horses that arrive together tend to stick together, roaming as "bachelor bands" with little fighting since no mares are about.

The bands favor the same "stomping grounds" and congregate on high places, pounding down the dirt, as well as around water holes.

Managed a bit like cattle, the wild horses are rotated from pasture to pasture every 30 days to give the grassland a rest. And in winter, when they're given extra hay and alfalfa, they run up to the feeding truck at the sound of an old rotary fire-engine siren.

"They're siren broke," Robert Hughes says. "Blow it on a hill and they come running from two canyons over."

He also knows what they don't like: "It's hot air balloons and helicopters -- and a man on a horseback."

The wild horses were sent to the Midwest because the sparse Western range couldn't support them, according to the BLM.

In Nevada, it takes about 240 acres of the Great Basin's widely scattered forage to support one wild horse, the agency says, based on an average mustang eating 1,000 pounds per month.

In contrast, the Midwest prairie is a hearty buffet, thick with head-high Indian grass, big and little bluestem, and switch grass. It takes eight to 10 acres of native grass to feed the average wild horse and only two acres if the grass is improved or fertilized to build protein.

Water is abundant, too, from springs and creeks, with a drink never more than a quarter-mile away on the Hughes place. Average rainfall is 40 inches a year here, about five times more than Nevada.

"In the West, the horses may have to go miles to get their groceries," John Hughes says. "And they don't get supplemental food in the winter. Look at the West: There's a lot of Earth that doesn't have a lot on it."

Not a lot -- except for seemingly limitless land, plenty of room to run free. Instead, wild horses in the Midwest are fenced in, fed like domestic animals and forever away from their kin.

260,000 HORSES OFF RANGE

Wild horse advocates don't like the setup because the horses are removed from the West and separated by sex in different pastures. Males are gelded to ensure no breeding.

Stephanie Boyles of the U.S. Humane Society says it's a better end than the slaughterhouse. But she said holding mustangs off the Western ranges violates the intent of the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, which aimed to protect them as free-roaming animals.

"The pastures are wonderful, but they have to keep mares away from the stallions, and that's not a natural system at all," Boyles says. "They can't be in family bands. And it's extremely expensive."

The Humane Society advocates far more aggressive population control on the range to limit the wild horse population. The BLM should vaccinate more mares to prevent births for four to five years and immediately return them to the range after roundups, Boyles says.

As for males, opinion is divided whether it's a good idea to geld some of the wild horses before returning them to the range.

The BLM has been releasing more vaccinated mares and some gelded males. It's also been trying to skew the sex ratio to 60 percent male and 40 percent female; but the program is just under way, and some wild horse advocates fear it could lead to inbreeding in smaller herds.

No matter what, Boyles and other wild horse advocates contend the BLM can't afford to keep warehousing more and more wild horses.

Since the 1971 Act was passed, BLM has "removed over 260,000 wild horses from the range, and we still aren't near the appropriate management levels," Boyles says. "And they're still doing it. They keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result."

Debbie Collins, a marketing specialist for the BLM's wild horse program, says the agency is confident in its new strategy of fertility control combined with a new census to determine how many mustangs are on the range and where. The agency is also trying to boost adoptions by working with more wild horse advocates and other interested groups.

"The goal is to gather only as many horses as we can adopt," she says. "We count on adoptions to make this program work."

Meanwhile, the BLM is exploring public-private partnerships to open eco-sanctuaries, a new idea to ease the caretaking burden on the agency but one that might not save money for some time.

"We work on the premise that we have to take care of the horses," Collins says. "Some people think they can provide sanctuary, but not a lot of places can. People say, 'We've got 20 acres and a pond.'"

ROUNDUPS AND POPULATION CONTROL

And then there's Dayton Hyde, an 86-year-old rancher and founder of the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in South Dakota. He's holding 500 mustangs on about 15,000 acres near Mount Rushmore.

Hyde began working with the BLM in 1988, a year before John Hughes started in Oklahoma.

Hyde's relationship with the federal agency didn't last long. He's been running his nonprofit sanctuary with staff and volunteers as a tourist operation for two decades -- at no taxpayer cost.

"What's wrong with the program is it gave political control to the BLM," says Hyde, who thinks the agency tries to please too many special interests. "I always felt it was an unworkable act."

Hyde's sanctuary takes in rescued wild horses and maintains a nonreproducing herd by gelding the males. He also uses drift fences to manage where the mustangs graze, something he thinks the BLM should do along with a better fertility program on the range.

"We would have semi-wild horses," Hyde says, adding that's how Europe manages its wild horses. "You have to have some measure of control."

Hyde was a rancher in Oregon when Reno secretary Velma Johnson, or Wild Horse Annie, won her campaign to save the mustangs when the 1971 Act passed. They were friends, although he was often on the opposite side, arguing against putting the government in charge.

Hyde believed it would be better to allow state and federal authorities to regulate humane roundups by ranchers and to use population control methods to stop herds from doubling every four or five years.

"She wasn't the most practical woman, but I think she would agree we've got to consider the biology of the wild horses," Hyde says of Johnson.

"There's always more emotion than common sense. Sooner or later, the government's going to get tired of handing out wild horse money."