Courtesy Nenah Demunster
Wild horses frolic on the range near Washoe Lake, north of Carson City, in August. A fertility control program operated by wild horse advocates in agreement with the Nevada Department of Agriculture on the Virginia Range in Northern Nevada has reduced foal births by 61% since its inception in 2020, leading to healthier, smaller herds.
Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023 | 2 a.m.
A population control program for the wild horses of the Virginia Range in western Nevada has reduced foal births by 61% over the last two years, bringing herd sizes down to more sustainable levels without requiring the disruptive removal of a single animal, wild horse advocates said Wednesday.
These early outcomes are “extraordinary” and could affect future state and federal policies on wild equine management, said Suzanne Roy during an online press briefing hosted by the American Wild Horse Campaign and also attended by representatives from the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, the Reno City Council and the nonprofit Wild Horse Connection. Roy is executive director of the American Wild Horse Campaign, a nationwide nonprofit mustang advocacy group that oversees the public-private collaboration to manage the Virginia Range horses.
Free-roaming mustangs live nationwide and are especially common in Nevada, where much of the landscape remains government-owned, and thus, largely undeveloped, outside of the Reno and Las Vegas city cores.
Volunteers with the American Wild Horse Campaign seek out wild horse mares to inject with birth control via tipped darts fired from air rifles.
But the horses of the Virginia Range live primarily on private and state-owned land, excluding them from the federal protections afforded to feral horses and burros for more than 50 years.
Private groups are likewise expanding the body of research and methods of control.
The fertility control program is operated in agreement with the Nevada Department of Agriculture, with input from private landowners and the city of Reno — located to the west of range, which is mostly in Storey County.
But nonprofit agencies do the heavy lifting with grants, donations and the administration of the birth control medication.
Since 2019, volunteers have injected mares with birth control via tipped darts fired from air rifles, and they maintain detailed, illustrated databases on the horses of the range so they know which animals have been treated.
Tracy Wilson, Nevada state director for the American Wild Horse Campaign, said about 1,870 mares have been darted. Since 2020, the first full year of the program, foal births in this study area have dropped from 522 to 205. This has led to the overall population naturally dropping to 3,189 in the same time frame.
The American Wild Horse Campaign’ database, which includes photographs and notes of scars and coat patterns on the horses, tracks vaccination schedules and also follows the animals from birth to death, providing a fuller context of the population.
“Horses are living creatures and they age out, just like any population,” Wilson said.
Roy said fertility control stabilizes and gradually decreases the population humanely, allowing smaller but healthier herds to live on shrinking habitat without roundups. It also benefits humans by reducing animal-human conflict such as road collisions that are stressful and sometimes fatal for humans and animals.
The horses share the 300,000-acre Virginia Range with mule deer, bighorn sheep, pronghorns, mountain lions, bears and bobcats — and humans. Residential development in Reno has brought the city’s edge closer to the range. Key landowners farther out on the range are blockchains and the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, or TRIC, a sprawling industrial park that counts Tesla among its high-profile, high-tech tenants.
Kris Thompson, TRIC’s project manager, said that before the fertility control agreement launched in 2019, the wild horse population around the industrial “city” was growing unsustainably.
Horses competing for limited food were scrawny and foals were being orphaned. The horses of today are striking, apparently healthy and hale, he said, and their iconic silhouette is great for the economy — the tech companies are big fans.
Executives considering setting up shop at TRIC love seeing the animals “majestic on the ridge overlooking the place where they’re going to be building their data center or factory,” Thompson said.
Tesla chief Elon Musk has posted videos of the horses he had seen after visiting the Tesla Giga Nevada factory that manufactures battery packs for the company’s electric vehicles.
The horses, Thompson said, are the perfect emblem for the American West, and so invaluable marketing for TRIC.
“They’re rugged, they’re independent, they’re self-reliant, they’re free.”
CORRECTION: Number of horses darted corrected 1,870 from 3,100 | (February 3, 2023)
