S6. E17: Erik Molvar: The American Wild Horse Crisis
“It is not hyperbole to say that livestock grazing on Western public lands is the single biggest and most important environmental impact that does the most damage. And, also causes the most widespread impact of any of the things that damage public lands, including oil and gas development, including strip mining and mountaintop removal, including, damming, the rivers. Livestock raising is the most pervasive and the most ecologically harmful - and it's everywhere.”
- Erik Molvar
In the United States, we have around 80,000 wild horses living on Western public lands. For decades, there's been a battle between the people who want these horses to stay and roam freely and the people who want them gone. Many of the people who want them gone are either a part of, or connected to the cattle industry. And, the agency that makes these decisions, whether the horses stay or go, is the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM.
There are herds living on public lands throughout the Western United States. And one of, or maybe the most, beloved herd is the Onaqui. They live in Utah, around 60 miles from Salt Lake City. Because they're close to a city, people visit them often. The horses have become accustomed to a human audience, so they don't flee when they see humans. They trust them. Or at least they did until a couple of weeks ago when 435 of these majestic and very free horses were rounded up with helicopters by the BLM.
124 of them will become part of a birth control program and be released into the wild. But the other 300 will be put in a government holding facility. Eventually, some might get adopted, but many will remain and holding for years. These roundups happen all the time, but the Onaqui roundup got a lot of publicity because these horses were so adored.
The BLM’s reason for rounding up our horses is that they degrade public lands when the herds get too large. Now, these same lands are rented for use for millions and millions of cattle and sheep. The horses are a teeny tiny fraction of animals that live on that land.
Today's conversation is with Erik Molvar. He is not a wild horse advocate. He's a wildlife biologist and the executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group dedicated to protecting and restoring wildlife and watersheds across the American West. I asked Erik to come onto the show so that I could better understand how and why these roundups continue to happen.
What I learned is that the entire thing is a scam.
Learn More About the Western Watersheds Project
Sign Our Petition to Help Stop the Inhumane Round-Up of America’s Wild Horses
Transcript:
Erik: [00:00:15] It is not hyperbole to say that livestock grazing on western public lands has the single biggest and most important environmental impact whilst doing the most damage. As well as the most widespread impact, of any of the things that damage public lands, including oil and gas development, strip mining and mountaintop removal and damming the rivers. Livestock grazing is the most pervasive and the most ecologically harmful, and it's everywhere.
Elizabeth: [00:00:53] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz and this is Species Unite. For the next two weeks, we are asking you to join us in our mission to change the way that the world treats animals and become a member of Species’ Unite. Members are heroes for animals and the benefits of joining are pretty awesome. For a monthly donation of any size, even two bucks, you will receive access to exclusive content, outtakes, bonus podcast episodes, updates and newsletters, priority access to all Species Unite events and a welcome pack from yours truly. So, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click become a member. In the United States, we have around 80,000 thousand wild horses on western public lands and for decades there's been a battle between the people who want these horses to stay and roam freely, and the people who want them gone. Many of the people who want them gone are either a part of or connected to the cattle industry. The people who decide whether the horses stay or go, is the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM. There are herds throughout the western United States and one of, or maybe the most beloved herd is the Onochie. They live in Utah, and because they're close to Salt Lake City, people visit them, often photograph them, and watch them. The horses have become accustomed to a human audience so they don't flee when they see humans. They trust them. Or at least they did until a couple of weeks ago, when four hundred and thirty five of them were rounded up with helicopters by the BLM. One hundred and twenty four of them will become part of a birth control program and be released to the wild, but the other 300 will be put in a government holding facility. Eventually, some might get adopted, but many will remain in holding. This isn't new. These roundups happen all the time, but the Onochie roundup got a lot of publicity because these horses were so loved. The BLM reason for rounding up our horses is that they degrade public lands when the herds get too large. Now, these same lands are rented for use for millions and millions of cattle and sheep. The horses are a teeny tiny fraction of animals on that land. Today's conversation is with Erik Molvar. He is not a wild horse advocate, he's a wildlife biologist and the executive director of the Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group dedicated to protecting and restoring wildlife and watersheds across the American West. I asked Erik to come on the show so that I could better understand how and why these roundups continue to happen, and what I learned is that the entire thing is a scam. Thank you so much for joining us today. I follow the horse stuff. I always see what's happening, but I’m not that involved in it. But with the onochie I just saw it every day, everywhere. I kept reading about it. I watched the video of you at the capital and your first line is, I'm not a wild horse advocate. I thought it was awesome to have someone who's not going to come on and discuss how it's such an emotional issue, but someone who's saying listen, this is what the truth is of what's happening.
Erik: [00:04:48] That's our angle. Western Watersheds Project doesn't have a position, per say, on wild horses, but we do want to prevent the livestock industry from using wild horses to distract the public from the damage that's being done by domestic livestock on public lands. That's exactly what the livestock industry is doing, they've created a very pervasive narrative. Wild horses are overpopulated and they're doing incredible damage to the public lands, so we have to get rid of them. The reality is that the livestock industry outnumbers wild horses with their cattle and sheep. It's hard to even measure the environmental damage that wild horses are doing out on western public land. It gets lost in data. For example, in the western United States, there are 18.5 million cattle and there are 2.5 million sheep. In those same states, there are maybe 95 thousand wild horses. A half of one percent of the total impact of domestic livestock is what you can attribute to wild horses. That doesn't even count the fact that wild horses forage differently from cattle in a way that's more ecologically compatible with arid western lands.
Elizabeth: [00:06:10] For people who don't know, because a lot of people don't even know we have wild horses, and they certainly don't know about this ongoing battle that's been going on for decades. Will you just talk a little bit about how this all started and has become so heated? The whole story that the BLM has been telling for so many years, that they're destroying the land, and that's why they have to keep the herd so small.
Erik: [00:06:34] Well, the story really starts millions of years ago because wild horses evolved in North America millions of years ago. According to a scientific study from 2011, there were two to seven million wild horses, by the end of the seventeen hundreds in North America. The horses were then domesticated by the indigenous peoples and of course, as the Euro-American immigrants came west, there were wild horses out there that could be captured and ridden. The wild horses we're seeing as a resource for a while. There were these folks called Mustangs who would go out, round up wild horses, drive them into the railroad shipping yards and sell them off for meatpacking plants. But things continued on and the wild horses got fewer and fewer until there were about twenty two thousand of them left in the entire western United States. Then at that point, the wild horse activists went to Congress again and said, Hey, these animals are disappearing. We need protective legislation to conserve them. Then the Congress at that juncture passed the wild and free ranging Horses and Burros Act. Which basically took the wild horses away from the private livestock sphere and designated them as wild horses that belonged to the public and that were to only be managed by the Bureau of Land Management. That agency was supposed to set up herd areas that were going to be for the wild horses to be conserved and was supposed to manage those wild horses to keep them within what was called a thriving natural ecological balance, which is what the law requires. This is the system which then went forward. Now, of course, the livestock industry uses those same herd areas and herd management areas that are used by the wild horses. They resent the fact that the wild horses are eating grass that their cattle and sheep might be eating. So they see the wild horses as cutting into their profits. There has been a long standing campaign by the livestock industry to do everything they can to get rid of wild horses. They advocate for lowering the appropriate management levels to really low levels, which the BLM has done. They advocate for building slaughterhouses in the United States, which sometimes has been legal and sometimes has been illegal over the years. Basically, they would like to get rid of them, and that's where we are today with this wild horse program that the Bureau of Land Management. It really feels like it's owned and operated by the livestock industry because the Bureau of Land Management is very much a captive industry that takes its marching orders from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the American Sheep Industry Association and other big lobby groups for the livestock industry.
Elizabeth: [00:09:32] So, the American people do not want wild horses being shipped to slaughter, nor do they want them losing all their land. Correct?
Erik: [00:09:41] I've heard a lot of statistics. I've heard that 80 percent of the American public supports wild horses on public lands. That might indeed be true. I don't know that because I haven't seen the polling, but certainly I have seen and heard from a lot more people that want to go out and see and enjoy wild horses out on public lands. I run into saying, I want to go out on the public lands and see cattle and sheep. I think you can say that wild horses are part of the public interest. Whereas the livestock that are running on public lands are part of private corporations that are there for their own private profits. It's a clash between the public interest and the private interest.
Elizabeth: [00:10:21] Talk about the Western Watersheds project and what you guys actually do, because I want to better understand the way cattle are destroying the land, like before the horses even get in the picture.
Erik: [00:10:32] Mainly now we're focusing on the much larger issue of federal public lands. Where you have hundreds of millions of acres of public lands, which are all being leased for cattle and sheep under the BLM Rangeland Management program. We are losing money by having livestock on our public lands. These livestock are doing tremendous ecological damage and essentially it's a really antiquated system. Initially the way the livestock industry was, was that it was free to go out and run your cattle and your sheep on public lands. There weren't any limits. There was a lot of overgrazing. There were range wars between cattle and sheep operations where they were actually killing each other and tying herding dogs to wagons and burning the whole show down. There were hot wars happening all over the West, over who gets to own and control the federal lands, which were free. Then we had grazing allotments. But it wasn't until the late 60s, early 1970s that there started to be regulations about, how much does it cost to rent these public lands? They settled on, when they first started, a dollar thirty five an animal unit a month and of course, the Bureau of Land Management measures livestock grazing by an animal unit. Which is one cow calf tear or five sheep or one wild horse for that matter, for one month of time. That's an animal unit month, and that is the basic currency for livestock grazing. It costs a dollar and thirty five cents and today, the cost for leasing public land is a dollar and thirty five cents per animal unit month, just like it was 50 years ago. If you correct it for inflation, it would be about ten bucks an animal unit month. If you go by the market rates, the ranchers are charging each other to rent private lands for livestock grazing. One animal unit a month in these western public land states costs you twenty two dollars. These public lands ranchers are getting a screaming deal and the cost to the American public to actually administer this whole grazing program through the Bureau of Land Management. In order to do all the paperwork for these grazing leases, to run their disputes through the Interior Board of Land appeals. To hire range managers and take them out in the field and occasionally see what's going on out there, far exceeds what the taxpayers are getting back in these grazing rents. In fact, it is not hyperbole to say that livestock grazing on Western public lands is the single biggest and most important environmental impact that does the most damage. Also, it’s the most widespread impact of any of the things that damage public lands. Including oil and gas development, strip mining and mountaintop removal and damming the rivers. Livestock grazing is the most pervasive and the most ecologically harmful, and it's everywhere.
Elizabeth: [00:13:32] How? Why is that? What is it doing to the land?
Erik: [00:13:36] Let's start with the cattle. So, each of these species are a little different. Cattle were bred and out of an animal that originated in the boggy forests of Northern Europe. So they're used to really wet climates with abundant rainfall, rich deep soils and high productivity. When you dump them out in the arid west, in the desert, what you get is cattle that want to concentrate along the stream sides and around the springs because that's where all the moist vegetation is located. As a consequence, they denude those areas on the stream sides. Well, in the first place those valley bottom stream side habitats are the richest, most biodiverse oases in the desert. So, you're destroying the most important wildlife habitat. For a second thing, once you get heavy cattle grazing that wipes out the willows and other shrubs that are along the watercourse. That means there's nothing shading the stream anymore. It breaks down the stream banks. The silt erodes into the water. They're constantly using it as an open sewer for their urine and defecation, so it destroys the actual water quality. It changes the whole morphology of the stream channel. So instead of having narrow, deep stream channels that are cool and clear and support trout, you get wide, shallow, muddy water, murky streams that won't support the native fish anymore. So, you're destroying your aquatic ecosystems as well. Now, domestic sheep are a whole different story. The cattle pretty much concentrate on grasses. Sheep are more omnivorous, so they'll eat some grass, but they really like the wildflowers and they'll eat shrubs too. So they come through and they graze in very large flocks and very dense formations. They kind of come through and they eat everything. It's not even like a lawn mower. It's like a herd of locusts that move across the landscape and basically wipe out all the vegetation as they go. Both of these species, because of the heavy overgrazing by the cattle and the heavy overgrazing by the sheep, and the fact that they have curly hair, are bringing in an invasive weed called cheatgrass and cheatgrass is an annual grass. Now, the native grasses in the intermountain west are what are called perennial bunch grasses, so they grow in a clump. They can live 30, 40, 50, 60 years. They're deep rooted. Their roots go down in dense networks for six feet or more. There's a lot of carbon storage in the ground. They're resistant to a light level of grazing, but they're not evolved to have the heavy level of grazing that that cattle or sheep put on them. So when cattle and sheep come out, they wipe out these native perennial bunch grasses by simply grazing them over and over and over again year after year. If they were to graze them every once in a while and the grass got a chance to recover, then it would grow back just fine. But if you hammer the same grass plant year after year after year after year, eventually you're going to kill it, and that's what happens. Meanwhile, these animals with their high densities and their hooves are breaking up the biological soil crusts. Now, if you ever have been out to say Bryce Canyon or Zion National Park or Canyonlands. You'll see these little signs up to say Don't bust the crust, because if you step on it, it can take 30 years, 50 years, 100 years for that crust to grow back. It's a very complex web of microscopic organisms. Think of it as like the lungs of the soil that really enable the grasses to thrive. So you're breaking that up as well and turning it into dust and wiping out the perennial bunch grasses. So you're basically creating this large, disturbed, overgrazed area, which is perfect habitat for an invader like cheatgrass, which specializes in colonizing newly disturbed habitats.
Elizabeth: [00:17:34] So is a lot of the land already just gone?
Erik: [00:17:37] There are tens of millions of acres that have been converted over to this cheat grass. This cheat grass, cattle will eat it. Wild horses will eat it during the spring when it's green. Even deer and elk will. Sometimes in the spring when it's green, but once it's dry, it doesn't have any forage value, and none of the other wildlife have any habitat value from it. So it's an ecological desert, if you will. If you look out at the sagebrush desert, you think, ‘Oh, that looks all the same, there's nothing out there.’ But there are sage grouse, there are pocket gophers and their pygmy rabbits, and there are hawks and eagles that live out there. There are burrowing owls, there are swift foxes. There's a whole ecosystem that has evolved to take advantage and adapt to this dry sagebrush habitat and thrive. It's very bio diverse. But once you take it over to a cheat grass mono culture, then all of that wildlife disappears and basically, it's a silent landscape.
Elizabeth: [00:18:35] Wow. That’s as depressing as it gets.
Erik: [00:18:38] It's an ecological armageddon that's mediated by cattle and sheep
Elizabeth: [00:18:43] And nothing's changing, right? Is there more cattle each year or as many?
Erik: [00:18:50] As many every year. One of the funny things. Well, I guess it's not all that funny, but one of the ironic things is that the Bureau of Land Management likes to say, “Well, we really don't have any more cattle now than we had back in the 1960s and 70s”. But the reality is that back in the 1960s, the average cow was 700 pounds. Today, the average slaughter weight for a cow is 1400 pounds. So they're twice as big as they used to be. So if you have the same number of cows, they're twice as big. They're going to be eating twice as much. The overgrazing is going to be twice as bad. It's getting worse all the time because of course, the livestock industry wants bigger and bigger cows that are growing faster and faster. They can sell more beef and make bigger profits because it's a business, and that's just exactly what you would expect the business to do.
Elizabeth: [00:19:46] So with the horses, the numbers are pretty tiny. I mean, they're very tiny compared to the sheep and the cattle. But yet they're still getting the blame for what's happening to the land?
Erik: [00:19:58] Well, absolutely. I mean, you saw William Perry Pendley, who was the interim director of the Bureau of Land Management under Trump, at a Society of Environmental Journalists conference down in Fort Collins. Wild horses were the number one problem facing the Bureau of Land Management. It's a joke. I mean, this is an agency that is facing problems from habitat fragmentation, from oil and gas. It's an agency that's facing this massive cheatgrass problem. Overgrazing from cattle, disappearance of sage grouse. I mean, you can think of any number of enormous real environmental problems this agency is facing. The wild horses don't even make the list. I mean, their environmental impact is minimal. Yet the agency is trying to point everybody's attention to the wild horses, so it doesn't have to deal with the problems that the agency itself is authorizing.
Elizabeth: [00:20:51] It's just insane that this is allowed to continue to happen year after year after year and that somehow they get away with blaming the horses. For people who don't know, because a lot of people, I think that aren't in the West are really not in the know on a lot of this. Will you just talk about what the BLM actually does with the horses? Like what a roundup entails? Because there's a whole lot of hoopla to get these horses off the land, and it's really destructive and cruel on top of it. Is this part of the big show like, “Oh, we're managing the land, like this is a huge environmental problem, but we're fixing it?”
Erik: [00:21:29] I can't really pretend to get into the head of a Bureau of Land Management manager because the whole system doesn't make sense. Now, as far as the wild horse program and the way that they manage wild horses. The agency first sets what's called an appropriate management level. That's supposed to be the number of horses that the land can sustain and still maintain that thriving natural ecological balance. But in reality, what it is is an arbitrary number that somebody pulls out of the air. That will be small enough to appease the livestock industry, but hopefully enough of them to appease the wild horse advocates. It's a political exercise. It has nothing to do with science. Any time a BLM official tells you that the number of wild horses they're setting in the appropriate management level is due to science. They are lying to you, it has nothing to do with science. I'm a published scientist. There is no science involved in this BML setting, none. That's the first thing that happens. They set the BML. Now, when the horses start to exceed that arbitrary quota, then the agency will come out and they will do what's called a gather. Sometimes they will do what's called bait trapping, which is where they put some food or some water inside a corral and then when the horses come in to get it, they close the gate and capture them. That's the easy way to capture them. But most of the time they do a helicopter roundup where they send out. Usually a helicopter jockey who got military training may be in Afghanistan or someplace like that and is a really hotshot helicopter pilot, and they will herd the horses at very low elevations. Sometimes over very long distances, sometimes running them for 10 miles or more. They will hurd them in a big pod toward a wild horse corral, which is called a trap, and with big wing walls to funnel them into the holding pens. Then once they panic them into the trap, they close the gate and they've caught them. Then once they're in the trap, then they're loaded onto trucks. Sometimes it's very hot when they do this. I mean, I was out at Onochie for the roundup and it was 90 plus degrees out there. It was hot. These horses were in these hot sardine cans of stock trailers for, I don't know how long, several hours before they even started rolling off to the short term holding facility. They truck them off to these short term holding facilities, which are basically bare dirt corrals that can hold hundreds or thousands of horses and they stay there for months or even a year. At some point, the BLM will have an auction and try and auction off horses where the younger males and females might get adopted to become saddle horses and then those that are too old or too small or not pretty enough or for whatever reason, don't get adopted. Those get shipped off the longer term holding. Now, remember, you're taking these horses off of land that the BLM charges a dollar thirty five per horse. Equivalent to the livestock industry, so that's what the land is worth when we're taking them away. Then the agency puts them on private lands, where it costs the taxpayer 60 dollars per month per horse for thousands of horses. They've got tens of thousands of horses in long term holding and the public is paying for them to be on private land somewhere. The sickest part of this whole thing. A lot of times they're putting these wild horses on land out in the Midwest that are productive with deep soils and abundant moisture, the kind of lands that are ecologically appropriate for cattle. We're taking wild horses out of the desert where the public can see them. We're putting them out on private lands in the east, where the public can't see them, and displacing cattle from areas where they're ecologically appropriate so that we can now increase the number of cows out in the desert where they're complete ecological misfits and they're doing tremendous damage.
Elizabeth: [00:25:29] How is this possible that it just keeps happening, right?
Erik: [00:25:35] Well, it's happening because the Bureau of Land Management is deeply corrupt and the livestock industry, of course, when they get fewer wild horses out of western public lands, they get more cheap grazing. So, they laugh all the way to the bank and out in the Midwest when they're leasing land to wild horses for 60 dollars, an animal unit month, which is above market value. They're laughing all the way to the bank. So they're making money on both ends. Then there's this whole industry of helicopter wranglers contractors that are making millions to do these roundups. So everybody's got their hand in the till. Everybody is taking the taxpayers' money and enriching themselves with it. So it's a happy little ecosystem of people who are making pretty good money. Damn, that is wild horse roundups.
Elizabeth: [00:26:22] I mean, it's basically a gigantic scam. All the advocates, the wild horse advocates who have been screaming about this for years and years. They are saying, this is a scam, this is insane. But because the BLM and people who support the cattle industry, etc, are so serious about it saying, “Oh no, we need to do this?” Otherwise the land is going to be destroyed. People fall for it and it just baffles me, it completely baffles me that this can still be happening, even though everybody really knows what a joke it is.
Erik: [00:27:04] Well, let's look at anarchy in particular.
Elizabeth: [00:27:07] Well, could you just explain to people what anarchy is and what the anarchy horses are and why this particular roundup was such an enormous heartbreak?
Erik: [00:27:17] Well, the Onochie Mountain Wild Horse Herd is only located about an hour's drive west of Salt Lake City. So, it's near a major city that is really accessible to the public. These horses get a lot of visitors from the public who come out to view the wild horses, to photograph the wild horses. There's even wild horse safari companies that take the public out to see the wild horses in Onochie. As a consequence of having all that human proximity, they've become very habituated to having humans around and very tolerant of them. So, if you're out in the red desert of Wyoming, you might be able to approach a horse within 50 feet, but then they'll flee and anarchy. You can get closer and the horses won't flee. They're very used to people, and so people have become very attached to them individually. A lot of the wild horse viewers have named for the different animals and follow individual horses, so they're almost like kind of wildlife celebrities. The Bureau of Land Management told the public that the onochie herd is overpopulated and it's damaging the range, and we are concerned about their health and they're in declining condition, so we have to remove them. Well, I was out in Onochie in February and I went out and saw what was going on out there and all the areas that had concentrations of cattle in the lowlands of the valley bottoms near the stock watering facilities. Those places were grazed down to bare dirt and then I went up to see the wild horses and the wild horses were up in the foothills. The grass in the foothills was seven inches tall. It was in good shape. They had plenty to eat. So the cattle which were concentrating near the water, were completely destroying the range in those particular areas. But there were other areas of the wild horse range that were in good shape. Then I came back in April and in February there was an area of about thirty two thousand acres that had been fenced off to keep the wild horses out because there had been a fire that burned there and they wanted to keep the wild horses out. They also closed the cattle in order to give the grass a chance to recover. Well, in February, they started putting cattle in that closed area, and the horses couldn't get to it, but the cattle could. So the cattle ate that grass bank down to bare dirt there and basically reversed all of the regrowth and regeneration that happened over the course of the three or four years where the livestock and horses were excluded and the horses were fenced out. Then the BLM said, “Oh, well, there's not enough forage out for these horses. The only humane thing to do, for their own good, is to kill them. We're going to have to euthanize them if we don't gather them. We don't want to be cruel to these animals. Let us round them up.” So they went ahead and started to do this. Well, I went and crunched the numbers for the livestock that were permitted in the Onochie Mountain Wild Horse Herd Management area. There were 19,000 animal unit months of cattle and sheep. The wild horses in their overpopulated numbers, four hundred and seventy four wild horses turned out to be five thousand six hundred animal unit months. So basically, the cattle had the equivalent of one thousand six hundred and thirty three wild horses living out there year round. That's how much cattle and sheep were being permitted and that's what was eating the forage, not the four hundred and seventy four wild horses. That was a minor component of what was eating the forage. So it came the time of the roundup, which I did happen to attend. It was the first time I'd ever been to a roundup. I was told by some of the observers that were there, wild horse advocates and experts, that this roundup was one of the more humane and well-run and smoothly oiled machines that they'd ever seen. But to me, it still looked like a pretty horrific thing to do to an animal. If I got in the helicopter and I rounded up a herd of horses and ran them for 10 miles, I'd be in jail. Yet the Bureau of Land Management is not only permitted but encouraged to do this.
Elizabeth: [00:31:43] I'm sure they were on their best behavior because this had gotten so much attention.
Erik: [00:31:47] I think they were and they had only one wild horse die in this roundup. I am told that that's an unusually low number for rounding up such a large number of horses, and you could see why. I mean, these are wild animals. They're not meant to be pinned up in a pen in high concentrations with stallions that are going to fight each other and kick each other and bite each other. They're not meant to be herded onto semi trucks any more than. Can you imagine taking a herd of elk and crowding them into the back of a semi truck. It would be a disaster. That's what they're doing with wild horses. I mean, you just don't do this with wild animals. It's not a responsible thing to do. It's animal cruelty, honestly. Animal cruelty is not Western watersheds project kind of focus or issue, but just as a casual observer, I mean, if I had horses, I sure wouldn't want to treat it that way.
Elizabeth: [00:32:45] No, no, no. It's vicious. Then the roundups don't stop. I mean, they just go all summer long, right?
Erik: [00:32:52] It's like a traveling circus. I mean, I just got word today from one of our associates that they're going to be going to the Red Desert in October. They're now up in Oregon, rounding up, and they're going to be heading out somewhere else in the west desert of Utah later this summer. They pack up their helicopters and their semi trailers, and they're their panel corrals and their tarps and they just move this circus around the West, you know, getting maybe $75,000 a day of taxpayer money to round up the public's wild horses and take them away.
Elizabeth: [00:33:28] We have so little left that, as you know, is just so incredible in this country to remove things like the wild horses. It's heartbreaking, it's devastating.
Erik: [00:33:41] Well, and for the livestock industry, it's a habitual thing. For them the wild horses is only one part of a broader campaign to basically cleanse the public lands of every native type and any other type of wild animal that doesn't fit right in with their business model. So they're out there paying USDA Wildlife Services, which is a cynically named agency that flies helicopters and fixed wing planes and shoots coyotes and wolves from the air and traps the mountain lions and kills them. They're trying to poison the prairie dogs, in areas where their prairie dogs live because prairie dogs eat grass, too. They're trying to get rid of the beavers because the beavers build dams and the culverts of roads, and then they wash out their ranch roads and their access roads. They want to trap and remove the beavers. I mean, every kind of wildlife that you can think of that could possibly even be a casual inconvenience to the livestock industry. They want to get rid of it because they believe it's their manifest destiny to tame the wilderness and domesticate the land and bring it under human dominion and control. That's what all of this quote unquote management is all about in the western public lands that are managed by the BLM. It's all about making the way smooth and easy for the profit making industries that are there squeezing the public lands to enrich themselves.
Elizabeth: [00:35:11] Is this a Woof eradication program and Idaho too?
Erik: [00:35:15] Absolutely, yes. In Western Watersheds Project just won a settlement against the Wildlife Service, who has been aggressively pursuing wolf killing. We got them to the settlement that says they cannot use M40 for cyanide bombs, which are these deadly dangerous land mines in Idaho right now. They cannot kill wolves in the wilderness, which they had been. They cannot kill wolves in the Wood River Valley or the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, which they had been. They cannot kill wolves that are hanging around in areas that have cattle just because they're hanging around. They have to wait until the wolves are actually deprecated on a cow and actually eat a cow before they then attack the wolves. I mean, these are all major limitations on the free for all that this single agency has been perpetrating, not just in Idaho, but all over the West, focusing not just on wolves, but also on coyotes, also on mountain lions, also on myriad other native species and wildlife. For the agriculture industry, it's part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They're all about taming the land. I'm a taxpayer too. I want to see wildlife when I go out on public lands. I think most Americans want to see wildlife. Yet the lands are being managed for this tiny, tiny fraction of the population. Even in the West. Ranchers make up less than two percent of the total population, so ninety eight plus percent are non ranchers. What about their interests in public land? They have equal status. It's unclear to me why we even have commercial use on public lands at all. I mean, why shouldn't they be managed for biodiversity and healthy lands and to produce water, which in the arid west is the single most precious commodity more precious than gold, more precious than oil. Well I mean, we would have so much more water flowing off these public lands if we weren't polluting them with livestock, for example.
Elizabeth: [00:37:15] How does this change? Like what needs to happen?
Erik: [00:37:19] Well, fundamentally I mean, there have been people like me in the environmental and conservation movement that have been working on these issues for 50 and 60 years, and change is very, very slow. In fact, it's so slow that you hardly even notice it's happening. Sometimes you don't notice at all that it's happening and you have to look back over the span of decades to notice that there's a difference. Because these agencies are deeply entrenched in their ways of doing things. These agencies aren't about, let's bring science and expertise and know how to really manage these lands. Well, it's a very weird, Byzantine, messed up political culture that these agencies have inside them. That penalizes initiative, that penalizes innovation, that penalizes intelligence and science and responsible outcomes and reward. Basically business as usual in doing things the way we've always done them.
Elizabeth: [00:38:17] There's still hope, though, right? Will change happen?
Erik: [00:38:22] The thing about social change people, people wrongly think that progress works like this. You work really hard, you put your nose to the grindstone, you get a little bit of progress every year and little by little, you climb that hill until you stand on a summit at the end of the day. That's not how progress works. How progress works is people get mad. They put on pressure, the pressure builds and builds and builds. It's like a pressure cooker until it hits a critical mass, and then boom. You get a whole lot of progress all at once because it blows the lid off and then things will be the same for a long period of time again until people get fed up. That's how change happens and you just don't know how close we are to that decisive moment. When the politicians suddenly realize that they're sitting on climate disaster, a biodiversity crisis, all kinds of economic issues that are tied to those and they have to do something about it. Then all of a sudden, the light will come on and they will start doing things in a decisive way. That really hasn't happened in this nation since the late 1960s or early 1970s. That's when we got the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act. You know, all of the big environmental legislation happened because the lid blew off. Things got so bad that the rivers caught on fire and politicians woke up and said ‘we've been run over by ourselves. Let's take a look at what went wrong and let's do something different.’ So they did, and we're hitting one of those points again. I might live to see it and that's why I continue to work so hard and that's why I remain optimistic because you have to be. Because if you are not optimistic, there's no point in doing this work because there's nothing to fight for. If it's all pointless, you have to keep fighting and each one of us has to keep fighting. If enough of us get out there and start fighting, the change will come.
Elizabeth: [00:40:31] You're right. I'm glad you're fighting and I'm glad you're in it. I was really glad to see what happened with the onochie, just the amount of outrage because it brought a lot of attention to all of this.
Erik: [00:40:40] This will be the teachable moment, there will no longer be any more roundups that anarchy because of this. They will switch over to birth control instead as a way to manage the hurt populations, and they won't ever have to do another round up again. They could do this right.
Elizabeth: [00:40:57] Let's hope that that's the reality and that starts happening elsewhere and there's no more.
Erik: [00:41:02] That would be the easy way, but it wouldn't be the cowboy way.
Elizabeth: [00:41:05] It wouldn't be the big money way. There wouldn't be any helicopters involved.
Erik: [00:41:12] It would be a better way and it would be a better answer for the American public, it would be a better answer for the health of the native ecosystems. Frankly, my organization joined with other conservation groups and wild horse groups together to send a letter to Deb Haaland saying, let's just take all the cattle and sheep out of these wild horse herd management areas entirely. There is no reason that we have to truck these cows and sheep into public lands, and then the wild horses won't be up against the wall of, say, being quote unquote overpopulated. The range will be in much better shape to accommodate many more animals, not just wild horses, but elk, mule, deer and pronghorn, antelope and jack rabbits and all the species that depend on them.
Elizabeth: [00:41:53] Let's hope that happens. What a better world. Thank you for making this a better world, Erik, and for all the fighting you do and the work you do. It's absolutely awesome, and we need you. So thank you.
Erik: [00:42:08] Well, it is my privilege to do this work.
Elizabeth: [00:42:21] To learn more about Erik and the Western Watersheds Project go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare moment, please do us a favor subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it, become a member of Species Unite. To do so, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Become a member. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, our intern Talia Fine and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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