THE AMERICAN MUSTANG


recommendations from that review into new management approaches where possible.


2. Continue to protect the health and well-being of animals in the Program with a new Compre- hensive Animal Welfare Program initiated in 2012 and expected to be fully implemented in 2015. The BLM will use this animal welfare auditing approach to improve animal care and handling, wherever possible, with a new em- phasis on consistency, monitoring, accountabil- ity, and reporting and demonstrating the BLM’s success in this area within the Agency as well as to the public and political interests.


3. Increase the use of contraceptives, fertility con- trol, and other techniques as methods of popu- lation growth suppression and increase research in this area through a new aggressive call for innovative and problem-solving re- search in the field.


4. Increase the use of public/private partnerships to expand adoption opportunities for WH&B and move more excess animals that have been removed from the range into lower cost Eco- Sanctuaries.


There may never be a perfect solution to the sus- tainable management of wild horses and burros that protects their habitat and provides for the produc- tivity and other uses of the public lands under BLM and FS management. However, the BLM and FS are committed to the protection, management, and control of wild free-roaming horses and burros and continue to strive for that thriving natural ecological balance.


2. On the Range Management


Under the 1971 Act, WH&Bs are considered an in- tegral part of the national system of public lands in the areas where they were found in 1971. Under this law, the Bureau is not permitted to introduce WH&Bs into new areas where they did not exist in 1971 and determines through land use planning decisions where animals will and will not be man- aged. The BLM’s goal is to manage healthyWH&B populations on healthy rangelands. To achieve this goal, the BLM designates herd management areas (HMAs) for the long-term maintenance of WH&B herds and collects data about the animals and their habitat. Wild horses and burros are considered comparably with other resource values in planning for their management. This means WH&Bs are the same as other resource values (e.g., cultural, historic, scenic, rangelands, timber, and minerals). Wild horses and burros are a resource value, as opposed to a land use (e.g., livestock grazing or tim- ber harvest). The BLM is chartered to sustain the health and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future genera- tions, within a multiple-use environment. In addi- tion to managing the land, the BLM is responsible for managing the resource values such as WH&Bs


as well as resource uses such as fish and wildlife habitat, mineral and energy development, livestock grazing, timber production, cultural resource protec- tion, rights of way, and outdoor recreation.


Habitat


The habitat for WH&Bs is composed of four essen- tial components: forage, water, cover, and space. These components must be present within the HMA in sufficient amounts to sustain healthyWH&Bpop- ulations and healthy rangelands over the long term. If one or more of the key habitat components are missing, the HMA may be considered unsuitable for year-round use. In these situations, the BLM may consider not designating the area for the manage- ment of WH&Bs and remove all of the horses and burros from the area. Along with inadequate hab- itat, other factors contribute to a decision not to manage some areas for WH&Bs. The analysis and rationale for these decisions are presented in land use plans. The following are reasons that portions of the original 53.8 M acres of lands originally iden- tified as having WH&Bs present in 1971 are not being managed for them: land was never under BLM management (6.7 M); intermingled with pri- vate lands or where water was privately owned (7.5 M acres); transferred to other agencies (2 M); with- drawn due to urban development, court decisions, highway construction (1.5 M); populated by pri- vately owned and claimed horses (1.5 M); substan- tially in conflict with other resource values such as habitat for threatened or endangered species (1.6 M), and missing a critical habitat component such as winter forage and, therefore, unsuitable for WH&B use (1.2 M). This means that today the BLM man- ages WH&Bs on approximately 32 M acres of which 27Macres are lands under BLM management and 5 M are lands managed by other agencies or under private ownership.7 Many WH&B populations live in very arid low productive rangeland sites. Available water is of- ten the most limiting factor in an HMA. Due to this low production and other uses of public lands, large acreage of lands may be needed to sustain relatively small populations of WH&Bs. Typically BLM HMAs do not have 100 horses on 50,000 acres in a contained area but hundreds of horses on hundreds of thousands or millions of acres of open rangelands. These are hot and cold or high altitude desert eco- systems often characterized by the types of brush and scrub trees present more than the edible plants or grasses present. Grass typically does not cover the ground as one would expect to see in the East, Midwest, or even in the short or tall grass prairie areas of the West. The majority of wild horse hab- itats are located in the cold desert areas of the Great Basin, where altitudes are typically 5000 feet above sea level and temperatures vary from below 0°F in the winter to above 100°F in the summer. In the winter WH&B, typically forage on residual grasses that are available on windswept ridges or


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