Manage, don’t kill, Nevada’s wild horses

Jane Schmidt, Pahrump

Sunday, July 20, 2008 | 2:02 a.m.

With the wild horse population growing in our state, I realize the Bureau of Land Management has a serious problem in how to deal with the expanding herds. The adopt-a-horse program is wonderful, but many horses are corralled and waiting for adoption, with few takers.

Transporting them to other areas is just moving the problem somewhere else. Yet we can’t let them just starve to death, and euthanasia has been mentioned, riling many Nevadans. Wild horses are the very symbol of Nevada, and to kill them would be a travesty.

If the BLM truly wants to manage the herd, the most humane thing to do would be to castrate most of the stallions and return them to the herd. I believe it would be less costly than slaughtering many of them and rendering the remains.

You will have to round them up anyway, so why not castrate and leave one stallion in each of the herds. At least try it — to me this is management. Killing would be a last resort — the very last resort.