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Wild horses might be killed in the West

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Federal officials are considering euthanizing wild horses to deal with the growing population on the range and in holding pens, authorities said.

Wild horses have overpopulated public lands and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management can’t afford to care for the mustangs that have been rounded up, said Henri Bisson, the agency’s deputy director, in a news conference in Reno, Nev., according to the Associated Press.

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Also, fewer people are adopting the horses, Bisson added. The agency is also considering whether to stop roundups to save money.

There are an estimated 33,000 wild horses on the range in 10 Western states, Bisson said, and 27,000 is the maximum the agency can handle. An additional 30,000 are in holding facilities.

Last month, Deanne Stillman wrote in the Times’ Opinion section that wild horses, better known as mustangs, are a staple of America’s cultural heritage but that federal laws in effect since the early 1970s aren’t doing enough to keep the animals from being shipped off by cattle ranchers to the slaughterhouse.

Stillman’s new book, ‘Mustang: A history of the horse in the North America,’ describes how wild horses became a dramatic fixture on the continent.

Pam Houston, writing this week in The Times’ Book Review, sums up some of Stillman’s research:

From the jungles of Central America, horses moved north, carrying Catholic priests and tribal scouts across the Rio Grande and into the wild country of the great Southwest, all the way from Texas into California. Horses broke away from war parties and missions, turned wild, formed bands and flourished in this unfenced, endless land. There were so many horses in the early 1700s that the maps drawn of Texas at the time marked the territory between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River not as a place but as ‘Vast Herds of Wild Horses,’ or simply ‘Wild Horses.’ By the 1840s, Texas ranger John C. Duval reported seeing ‘a drove of mustangs so large that it took us fully an hour to pass it, although they were traveling at a rapid rate in a direction nearly opposite to ours.’

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--Francisco Vara-Orta

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