DENVER — Colorado could take a more proactive and permanent role in managing the wild horse herds that roam the Western Slope under a bill in the state legislature.

Advocates hope House Bill 1283 will make the state a model for cooperative management of the charismatic and controversial species. It would permanently give the Colorado Department of Agriculture more responsibility over the herds — which are formally managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management — and implement recommendations from the Wild Horse Working Group created in 2023.

The department would have more authority to implement fertility control measures used to constrain the wild horse population, which federal authorities say is larger than the landscape can support.

The bill is the culmination of years of work to address the complex challenge posed by the species, said House Majority Leader Monica Duran, a Jefferson County Democrat sponsoring the bill.

“(Wild horses) embody the very essence of Colorado — the freedom, energy and spirit that defines not just our landscape but our cultural identity,” she said Thursday while presenting the bill to the House Agriculture, Water and Natural Resources Committee. The bill passed unanimously out of the committee.

About 1,400 wild horses roam Colorado, though the BLM estimates a sustainable population should number about 800. Wild horses, often called mustangs, are not native to the West and are generally descendants of horses that were released by or escaped from Spanish explorers, ranchers, Native Americans and others.

Decisions about how to manage wild horse herds for decades have pitted public land managers, ranchers and animal advocates against each other. The Wild Horse Working Group was created by lawmakers in part due to frustrations with the BLM’s periodic use of helicopters to round up wild horses to take them off the landscape.

Doug Vilsack, the Colorado state director for the BLM, said during the hearing Thursday that other states were asking about Colorado’s working group model, which has forged better partnerships here.

Passing HB-1283 would formalize the Colorado Wild Horse Working Group’s success at moving beyond those historic divisions to find middle-ground solutions, said Sandra Hagen Solin, of the American Wild Horse Campaign.

“What we created through the working group process does transcend that adversarial framework that has really defined wild horse management for decades, particularly at the national level,” said Hagen Solin, who sits on the working group. “What emerged is an understanding that that traditional approach isn’t serving anyone well — not the horses, not the rangelands, not the taxpayers and not the diverse stakeholders who care deeply about these issues.”

Use of fertility control drugs

The BLM manages three wild horse Herd Management Areas — Sand Wash Basin in Moffat County, Piceance-East Douglas in Rio Blanco County and Spring Creek Basin in Dolores County — and one wild horse range, Little Book Cliffs in Mesa County. Combined, the areas cover 400,000 acres across the Western Slope.

The bill would give the state’s Department of Agriculture the authority to use state employees to administer fertility control drugs to wild horses. The drugs prevent fertilization in female horses and can be administered to horses on the range using a dart gun.

Fertility treatment works, said Stella Trueblood, president of the Sand Wash Advocate Team, a nonprofit volunteer group that helps dart horses with fertility treatment. The group has administered 1,565 treatments to wild horses in the Sand Wash over the last decade, reducing the annual population growth in the herds to 7% last year from more than 33% before the program began.

“For fertility treatment to be more successful, we need more boots on the ground,” she said. “The work cannot solely be done by volunteers who, in our case, live hours and several hundred miles from the wild horse range.”

The fertility treatments are an important part of wild horse management, Vilsack said. It keeps herd numbers down and reduces the need to round up horses to remove them from the range.

Helicopter roundups cause stress

The BLM uses helicopters and riders to gather wild horses in areas it has deemed overpopulated. The roundups are controversial because horses can die or become injured in the stressful process, which wild horse advocates say is inhumane.

Horses that are collected are then either auctioned off to the public or moved to permanent pastures paid for by taxpayers. In 2023, the BLM paid $109 million to house 62,000 wild horses collected from the range.

“We are spending all these resources feeding the horses and finding the pastures for them and we don’t have the resources from Congress for the supplies to break that cycle,” Vilsack said.

The bill does not call for any more money for the wild horse program and, if passed, will roll over $555,000 left from the working group’s original $1.5 million allocation.

“We’ll have to figure out how to proceed from there with gifts, grants or donations,” Duran said.

The working group would become the Wild Horse Advisory Committee and would provide feedback and direction to state officials.

“The Department of Agriculture has both the knowledge and personnel to best lead the management strategies this bill would rightly allow,” said J Burow, associate director of government relations for the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union.

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