About 800 wild horses have been captured and hauled away from public land near Meeker this month, part of a $900,000 federal plan to thin mustang herds in Colorado this year.
A livestock wrangling outfit from Utah has a $679,249 contract with the federal Bureau of Land Management to round up about 1,000 horses in northwestern Colorado, a helicopter-drive operation that began Aug. 1.
Another contractor, also a wrangler from Utah, has a $222,590 contract to capture 200-300 mustangs from the Sand Wash Basin, farther north and near the Wyoming border, according to federal documents. That roundup is scheduled to begin Sept. 10.
Six horses have died so far during the helicopter roundup in the Piceance-East Douglas and West Douglas herd management areas, where drought and wildfires have depleted the supply of water and foliage.
One of those mustangs “died during transport, cause unknown,” while another, a colt, was found dead in a temporary holding area. The other four were euthanized because of preexisting conditions, BLM spokesperson Steven Hall said. Those included a limb deformity, club foot, swollen and enlarged knees, and blindness, he said.
Federal land managers want to decrease the number of mustangs in the Piceance Basin, which is nearly 200,000 acres shared by oil and gas operators and ranchers to graze cattle, from 1,145 to no more than 235 horses.
The contract for the ongoing roundup is one of $2 million in federal contracts awarded to C.D. Warner Livestock, in Spanish Fork, Utah, this year for roundups in Colorado and Nevada.
The Sand Wash Basin contractor, Cattoor Livestock Roundup, based in Nephi, Utah, also has more than $2 million in federal contracts this year for horse roundup operations. The efforts are part of the BLM’s overall plan, beginning in 2020, to ramp up mustang removals from public lands.
This summer, the goal is to shrink the wild horse population in Colorado to about 600 horses from the current 1,727. The state has four herd management areas — Piceance-East Douglas, Sand Wash Basin, Little Book Cliffs and Spring Creek Basin.
The aggressive removal schedule across the Western states has agitated mustang advocates, who instead want more federal funding to go toward fertility control and are concerned that the increase in removals has resulted in more wild horses ending up at slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada.