Aspen Peak - Niche Media - Aspen living at its peak
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living in Jackson, Wyoming, crafting a piece on Wyoming wranglers when he documented a wild-horse roundup. "I was shocked," Anaquad-Kleinert says. "The footage is undisputable. It shows how hard they pushed those horses. They ran them for miles. They were sweaty and exhausted, over- heated. What I saw changed my life." T he scene haunted the documentarian. He knew he had to investigate. David Glenn, a Colorado horse advocate, introduced Anaquad- Kleinert to the Spring Creek Herd. Glenn took him out to see the wild horses, and it was love at first sight—or more like mutual respect at first sight. Anaquad-Kleinert and his camera faced off with a majestic, monarch lead stallion. The stallion charged toward Anaquad-Kleinert and puffed out his chest. It was a mock charge, but one with intent: The stallion was com- municating, This is my family band, be respectful. The Spring Creek Herd gave Anaquad-Kleinert a specific case study to document the plight of the mustangs. Kleinert Over the next five-plus years, Anaquad- immersed himself in the issues, documenting two more roundups that left Spring Creek Herd with dangerously low numbers. According to the BLM's data, before the 2011 roundup there were 83 mus- tangs in the herd; 39 were removed and 8 died (7 were roundup-related deaths), leav- ing only 36 wild horses on the range. What has happened at Spring Creek goes to the core of wild-horse advocates' complaints— excessive roundups that always point to leave mustang populations too low to maintain healthy, sustainable herds. The issue is complex, but critics the numbers. Anaquad-Kleinert's film makes a strong case for these mismanagement claims. According to the research of Dr. Ernest Gus Cothran Jr. of Texas A&M University, one of the nation's leading equine experts, a healthy herd, where inbreeding is not an issue, needs to maintain numbers between a minimum of 120 and 150 horses of breed- ing age. Seventy percent of the BLM herds are below this number; the Spring Creek Herd falls well below this benchmark, which doesn't take into account that 7 of the remaining 18 mares in the herd were given a fertility drug to lower the number of repro- ducing mares in the herd. Besides genetic viability, a healthy herd also has to be behaviorally functional. Karen Sussman, executive director and president of The International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros (whose first president was Wild Horse Annie), has spent the past 12 years studying herd dynamics and behavior. At her conservation center in South Dakota, Sussman has studied three intact herds, totaling more than 300 mustangs. Sussman has been in the unique position to observe the behavior of herds with vastly different histories. Two of the herds, the White Sands Herd and the Gila Herd, were rarely rounded up; her other two herds, the Catnip and the Virginia Range, were repeatedly rounded up. Sussman explains, "This has given me a wonderful baseline of healthy behavioral 128 aspenpeak-magazine.com costing taxpayers nearly $36 million a year. Giving back some of this land to the horses would immediately solve the overpopulation and cost issues. In most herd areas, horses are outnumbered by big game and cattle, so the damage they might inflict on the range is small by comparison, yet they are often singled out by the BLM as the main culprit—hence, the roundups. This makes advocates suspicious. When Anaquad-Kleinert points out the small numbers of Spring Creek Herd, it defies explanation. What gives? James believes the answer is simple: It has to do with big business. In Colorado this means claims for gas, oil, and uranium mining. And in America, no one is surprised to hear that big business influences government policy. Filmmaker James Anaquad-Kleinert has been studying the Spring Creek Herd since 2007. standards for wild horses and the opportunity [to] compare the behavior of healthy social herds with herds whose family bands have been disrupted by roundups and thrown into chaos every few years." She admits to being shocked by the differences in behavior. The herds that were rounded up frequently did not form strong family bands with good mentorship to teach acceptable social behavior and respect. A mus- tang family band is an intimately connected group of horses that have bonded together for protection and companionship; the core members of the band, the lead stallion and the mare, normally stay together for life. "What I observed," Sussman says, "were mares just eight months to a year old, coming into their first cycle, and they were being bred by young rogue stallions. I would see breeding at one, two, three years of age. This increased the fertility rates in these herds. The mothers were immature, with no role models; they simply walked away from their foals when they were just two or three months old, some- times even at birth." "In a healthy herd," Sussman continues, "the mares don't leave the harem and have their first foal until they are four or five. They never abandon their babies. And stallions stay in the band they were born in for several years. Stallions in behaviorally healthy herds don't become harem lead- ers until they are 8 to 10 years old." "Roundups destroy the family culture of wild horses, leading to dysfunctional behavior," Sussman concludes. "This is why indiscriminate helicopter roundups are so destructive to both healthy herds and a healthy range. We have to protect the integrity of the family band. That's the heart and soul of mustang culture." Besides herd size, critics also point to the reduction of herd management areas. Under the 1971 law, BLM gave wild of the wild horses ultimately says more about an How one feels about the government's management individual's ideology than about the mustangs. horses 40 million acres of public land to live on. Over the past four decades, these lands have been reduced by 15.5 million acres. Originally, 303 herd areas were supposed to be maintained for wild horses and burros; 111 of those herd areas have been zeroed out, meaning all the mustangs have been rounded up and permanently removed. Currently, according to BLM numbers, 33,000 wild horses roam the public land and 46,900 are in government holding facilities,