Newspaper column: They shoot sage grouse don’t they

Wild horses being warehoused at Palomino Valley near Reno. (Photo by Jo Mitchell)

Our government masters too often seem downright schizophrenic.

Take the raging debates over what to do about two species — sage grouse and wild horses.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is hell bent to list the chicken-sized bird under the Endangered Species Act because they fear the population could become extinct, as reported in this week’s newspaper column, available online at The Ely Times and the Elko Daily Free Press. (There are more than 40 comments on the Elko posting.) Such a listing would hurt farmers, ranchers, miners, recreation and oil and gas exploration on public and private land. Yet, the birds are legally hunted in Nevada and other states.

One study estimates there are 535,000 sage grouse ranging across 11 Western states, yet between 2001 and 2007 hunters bagged 207,000 sage grouse — and that doesn’t count the untold numbers that were wounded, escaping the game bag but later died. About 1,000 to 3,000 sage grouse are harvested each year in Nevada alone.

Sage grouse

On the other hand, there are an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 wild horses — actually feral horses, since they are not native to the region — roaming the Western range lands, though Bureau of Land Management officials say the open range can only sustain 27,000. Under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, it is illegal to harass or harm such horses and burros. Doing so is punishable by a fine of $2,000 or a year in jail.

Sometime next year the free-roaming wild horse population is expected to hit 69,000. The BLM already has 47,000 wild horses warehoused in corrals.

So, the federal government says there are too few sage grouse, but it is legal to shoot them, while there are too many wild horses, but it is illegal to shoot them.

Even though the sage grouse population is such that, even if it is declining at the rate estimated by the federal government, the birds can survive for several centuries in the wild, there is a push to list them as threatened or endangered.

In a strongly worded in-house memo written in August 2013, Joan Guilfoyle, the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro division chief, warned, “The wild horse and burro program is nearing the point of financial insolvency due to undesirable trends in every aspect of the program.”

More than 60 percent of the BLM’s $70 million annual budget for managing wild horses and burros is consumed by warehousing the animals in corrals, one of the largest of which is in Palomino Valley near Reno.

The humane thing to do with starving horses on the range is not to round them up and house them for the rest of their unnatural lives at taxpayer expense. Contraception and, yes, euthanasia have to be options.

Read the entire column at Ely or Elko.