Wild Horses: Ranchers struggle against variety of forces

JIGGS --

J.J. Goicoechea jumps down from his truck to greet a couple of ranch visitors. "The cows crashed the fence," he explains. "I've been running around like a moron trying to catch 'em."

On foot.

He's finally given up, figuring he'll get his horse and try again later.

Goicoechea has been moving a herd to fresh pasture, rotating the cattle off to rest one part of the sparse range. A handful of stubborn cows had tried to return, finding or making a hole in the fence.

It's the rancher's life, moving animals from summer to winter ranges, from one piece of grazing land to another, and using miles of fence and cattle guards to keep them in the right places.

Then there are the wild horses. Heads high, at a walk or a run, they go wherever they want.

And they can't be moved by anyone but the Bureau of Land Management, which is charged with managing and protecting them.

So three dozen mustangs, including one band of nine, are hanging around one of Goicoechea's water sources on the pasture he just cleared. The spring is fed through a pipe system he put in to manage the flow of water on his grazing parcels. If he wanted to, he could cut it off.

"They're on water of ours, but I'm not going to chuck the horses off and let 'em die," he says, noting the animals could dehydrate quickly in the heat of day. "The bigger problem is the pipeline. They paw and paw and break the pipe. They love a mud bath."

The ranchers' main complaint about the wild horses is simple: They tear up the public land and ruin it for everybody else -- the cattle, wildlife and plant life, and people who want to hunt and play there.

Goicoechea had called the BLM to pick up the mustangs, but they're small pickings compared to a major roundup the agency conducted on public land around his northeastern Nevada ranch this past summer.

Between 200 and 300 wild horses were watering on Huntington Creek in the Bald Mountain area, where the Goicoechea family has grazing rights on about 250,000 acres of public land, northwest of Ely in White Pine County. Before the BLM pulled the mustangs off, they were crossing roads, eating and drinking their fill, and pretty much making themselves at home on the Goicoechea allotment.

"They're not 'wild' wild," he says. "They'll turn right around and look at you. They would be literally standing like the cows were on the side of the road. They will not move. They are not afraid of you."

Maybe they should be.

'FRIENDLY LAWSUIT' AGAINST BLM

As president of the Nevada Cattlemen's Association, Goicoechea is working with the Nevada Association of Counties, hunters groups, the Sierra Club and others to put together a "friendly lawsuit" against the BLM. The coalition wants to force the agency to remove more mustangs from the range to save it from overgrazing.

And some group members, led by NAC, also want the federal agency to use its authority to sell excess wild horses with "no limitation" -- even if it means sending unwanted mustangs to slaughter.

Wyoming sued the BLM in 2003 to force the agency to remove more wild horses, Goicoechea says, but Nevada leaders aren't willing to do that. Wyoming and the BLM entered a decree that required the latter to remove thousands more wild horses.

"I don't want to get rid of all the horses," Goicoechea says. "They're not cutting into my profits. They're ruining the range. … We don't want it cows versus the horses. We co-exist."

Don't tell that to wild horse advocates. They believe ranchers, with the BLM's help, have long been winning the public land war.

Ranchers enjoy cheap grazing rights, which include about 45 million acres of public land in Nevada. They pay $1.35 per head each month, the minimum under federal law. That's a fraction of what it would cost to graze on private land, an average of $15 to $20 per head.

Meanwhile, the public land set aside for wild horses has been shrinking with dozens of Herd Management Areas removed in the past few years as no longer suitable for the mustangs.

In Nevada, the BLM had operated 102 Horse Management Areas on nearly 16 million acres. Now, the BLM has designated 84 HMAs on 14.7 million acres after combining some areas and removing land where horses were in danger of dying of starvation and thirst, particularly around the Mojave Desert.

Most reductions came in the Ely district near Goicoechea's place.

Wild Horse advocates such as Laura Leigh say the HMA reduction is just another example of the BLM managing the program to suit the ranchers.

"The horses are not getting their fair share," says Leigh, echoing a complaint that has dogged BLM from the start. "This land doesn't belong to guys like Goicoechea. This land belongs to the American people and public. And Goicoechea is here by their grace, operating his business on a subsidized fashion off the American taxpayer."

GRAZING ALLOTMENTS DECLINE

Those are fighting words to Goicoechea, a fourth-generation rancher whose family has been in Nevada for a century.

They have prospered and failed, he says, at one point having to give up their original home ranch because of hard times. The family resumed commercial ranching in the 1970s and expanded in the 1990s.

"My great-grandfather was here before the BLM was in existence, before the federal government came in and said, 'Hey, we're going to manage the stuff,' " Goicoechea says. "We didn't get anything handed to us. We take care of the land. The wild horses are ruining the range."

The number of cattle, too, has decreased in Nevada by more than half, he says, with ranchers now running about 450,000 head. The BLM says livestock grazing allotments have decreased by one-third since 1971.

"There's a misperception that ranchers hate wild horses," Goicoechea says. "I don't believe the BLM is the enemy either. It's not about greed or getting rich. We want to not endanger the resources."

Nevadans don't understand how much work goes into running ranches and farms as the agricultural industry comes under increasing pressure to give up land for mustangs, wildlife, recreational uses and environmentalists, he says:

"So much of our population has shifted toward urban centers. They've lost touch with agriculture and where their food comes from."

Goicoechea still remembers the hiss of the kerosene lamp he used to read by as a boy when he spent summers working out of the family's old ranch house that had no electricity.

Now 37, he's a veterinarian who provides care for his and neighbors' livestock. He's also a volunteer firefighter in Eureka, where he lives with his wife and daughter. Another child is on the way.

The Nevada ranching life also becomes more difficult, he says, as mining companies buy up places for the water rights and because of the need to protect endangered species and the delicate environment.

"Now, they're talking about taking allotments away and making them exclusively for horses," Goicoechea says. "And it's scary."

'WILD HORSE ANNIE ACT'

Pioneering ranchers feel their way of life is being slowly squeezed out after settling Nevada's vast heartland, a rugged, inhospitable place full of prickly sagebrush and parched earth. With each generation came more laws and rules to live by.

In 1911, when Goicoechea's great-grandfather, Pete, arrived from the old Basque Country of Spain, sheep and cattle ranchers let their herds roam at will, competing for the best water sources and grass.

That was before the Taylor Grazing Act of 1935, followed in 1946 by the merger of the Grazing Service and the General Land Office to form the Bureau of Land Management.

And that was before Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 to balance all public land uses, including ranchers battling protected wild horses for precious turf.

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency "is going to try and regulate dust," Goicoechea says, raising his hands in exasperation as swirling dust devils race along the valley floor. "Every time you turn around it's something. And the wild horse controversy is always there."

His family has been on the front lines of the wild horse war from day one, even going up against Wild Horse Annie, the Reno secretary whose public campaign led to the passage of a 1971 act to protect wild horses and burros.

Annie's real name was Velma Johnston and her first victory came with the 1959 passage of the "Wild Horse Annie Act." It prohibited the use of motorized vehicles to hunt wild horses and burros on public lands, the first step toward gaining full protection for mustangs a decade later.

Her real goal was to halt the slaughter of tens of thousands of wild horses by mustangers who used inhumane methods to capture the animals. Flying in fixed-wing planes, pilots shot mustangs from the air or chased them until they were so tired they became easy marks for wranglers in trucks on the ground. From the back of a truck, cowboys would throw a rope around the necks of the horses and tie large tires or other heavy weights to the end, dragging the animals down.

NO NATURAL PREDATORS

The 1959 law was near impossible to enforce, however, since it still allowed ranchers to use planes and trucks to round up their own horses -- even if more than a few wild horses were caught, too.

The law's biggest test came in 1967 when the federal government indicted three mustangers, including a pilot, his helper and the man who hired them: Julian Goicoechea, J.J.'s grandfather and namesake.

The case involved the capture of five horses, including only one with a brand, according to Polaroid pictures taken by authorities. At trial, however, Goicoechea's defense presented new photos showing all the horses had been branded after all. The defense contended the markings were found after sheering the horses' thick winter coats, and a jury acquitted the men after a few hours of deliberation.

Assemblyman Pete Goicoechea -- Julian's son and J.J.'s father -- says that ranchers for decades have kept the wild horse population in check because the animals have no natural predators left. Selling the mustangs also provided money when ranching didn't pay the bills.

"When the horses got thick enough, they would get harvested," Pete Goicoechea recalls.

He argues that excess horses would have died anyway if the range had become too thin: "If the forage isn't there for the horses, they're in trouble. You have to manage them."

During the last legislative session, the assemblyman introduced a bill that would have prevented wild horses being defined as "wildlife" and thus entitled to water rights. He said the BLM held 28 water right permits for wild horses on public land in Nevada, although federal law doesn't categorize them as wildlife.

The bill passed the Assembly, but failed to make it out of a Senate committee. Pete Goicoechea says that he wasn't trying to cut mustangs off from their historic watering holes, but wanted to make sure the water rights weren't locked up for them as "wildlife."

J.J. Goicoechea says that the bill caused quite a bit of controversy.

"If you want to fill a room, talk about water rights and wild horses."