During hot and dry summers like this one, the water sources that Utah’s wild horses frequent and depend on can dry up. That’s what happened at a pond near Muddy Creek in central Utah last week.
Incidents like these frustrate horse advocates, who say they’re not allowed to bring the horses water when they’re dehydrated. They told the Bureau of Land Management about a mare and her foal who were suffering. Upon investigation, the horses were found trapped in the mud left behind as ponds dry. It was too late to save them, and the BLM had to put both horses down.
There have been problems in the past with the public bringing water to wild horses. BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program Manager Gus Warr said a few years ago there were people who “felt BLM was not doing enough, and they went out and started watering horses and burros themselves.”
Warr said they “explained to the individuals why we did not want them to water. They persisted, and they persisted. They went in the middle of the night and were delivering water troughs and it got to the point that individuals had to be issued a citation and taken to court over the thing.”
Arrests are very rare, he said, and a worst-case scenario.
The BLM discourages the public from bringing horses water because doing so “may disrupt their natural habits and migration routes.” Warr said that horses have a “natural cycle of moving from one water to the next,” and if people disrupt that, they won’t be able to survive on their own, and they won’t continue to be wild.
Ponds like the one near Muddy Creek dry up almost every year, he said. “It's not that we don't care about the animals. We have a passion and desire to provide these horses the best care, but they are wild animals.”
This year, Muddy Creek horses have since moved away from the dry pond to other nearby water sources.
Wild horse advocates don’t dispute the drying of the ponds in the area, but they point to cattle grazing as another reason water is strained. Linda Wallace of the Oregon Wild Horse Organization argues that water is “naturally going to dry up a heck of a lot faster if you had livestock on it.”
She worries the horses are being overtaken by the cattle who “come in the spring” and “drain off all the vegetation and all the water” until they get moved to their pastures. The other problem is the additional water that ranchers bring in for their cattle. The horses drink that as well and when the cattle move on, that water goes with them.
While the BLM wants to treat the horses as wild animals and has discouraged human intervention, Wallace argues people are already involved because of how the land is used.
“The BLM is supposed to protect them, and that doesn't mean setting up water stations year-round, but that means in situations that are man-caused, because of livestock and because of climate, that's not the horses [alone].”
There is no grazing currently in the area where the pond is.
