the battle for devil’s garden

the latest casualty of greed unfolds as the wild horses of Devil’s Garden face extinction at the hands of powerful cattle interests.

Part 1

Mary Koncel | October 28, 2024

For decades, the largest wild horse herd in California resided in the lava-strewn plateau of the Devil’s Garden Plateau Wild Horse Territory (DGPWHT) on the Modoc National Forest (MNF). Over the years, however, ranchers who also graze their livestock on the 258,000 acres of federally protected wild horse habitat for pennies have been waging a war against them, claiming that the wild horses are destroying the ecosystem and causing economic ruin for Modoc County. Their solution – elimination of the herd.

This fall, the Devil’s Garden wild horses could be facing a final blow. Beginning on October 28th, 500 horses will be targeted for removal by helicopters and bait-trapping, which could reduce the herd’s numbers from an estimated 723 horses to just over 200 horses, an unsustainable population. If that’s not enough, a proposed territory management plan that includes more roundups and a fertility control vaccination known to cause sterility in mares will ensure that the DGPWHT becomes void of wild horses but an endless buffet for thousands of cattle and sheep.

While climate change is undoubtedly impacting wild habitats and wildlife across the western states, the struggle of the Devil’s Garden wild horses to survive is not so much about shrinking forage and water sources or harsher winters. It’s more about the greed and exploitation of public lands by a handful of ranchers who arrogantly lay claim to the DGPWHT because they believe their livestock has precedence over the wild horses - and the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) continuing complicity.

SOME BACKGROUND

Under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 (WHBA), the USFS and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are responsible for protecting and managing our nation’s wild horses and burros on public ranges in the West. Although most of these animals are under BLM jurisdiction – 73,520 as of spring 2024, the USFS is in charge of about 7,100 wild horses and 900 wild burros on 53 Wild Horse and Burro Territories comprising 2.5 million acres of National Forest System lands in nine western states.

One of these territories is the DGPWHT that was established in 1975. According to the USFS, wild horses have lived in this area since the arrival of the pioneers although other sources would push that date back much further.

While wild horses and other wildlife, including Rocky Mountain Elk, Mule Deer, and Pronghorn Antelope grazed the DGPWHT, so did thousands and thousands of privately owned cattle and sheep – the cause of a decades-long war that continues to threaten the very existence of the Devil’s Garden wild horses.

Like the BLM, although more humane and cost-effective management tools are available, the USFS depends on brutal and expensive roundups by helicopters to remove wild horses and burros to maintain Appropriate Management Levels (AML).

About AML: Appropriate Management Level

According to the WHBA, it’s the optimal number of wild horses or burros that an area of land can support while sustaining a thriving natural ecological balance and protecting range health. These agencies are supposed to employ current science and data to determine these AMLs. Further, the BLM and USFS are guided by a “multiple-use” mandate – which means that public lands should be managed for use by other wildlife besides wild horses and burros, private livestock, wilderness, and recreation.

But here’s the problem. While the BLM and USFS set ridiculously low AMLs for wild horses and burros - 16,000 - 27,000 animals on 27 million acres of public lands for the former and 2,400 animals on 2.5 million acres of public lands for the latter, the number of private livestock allowed to graze on those same public lands is, by some estimates, over 1.5 million.

Given the cozy relationships between ranchers and the BLM and USFS as well as strong lobbying on the part of the livestock industry, decade after decade, private livestock grazing has taken precedence over federally protected wild herds despite legitimate claims that AMLs were not based on real science or transparent to the American public. Although both agencies are constantly developing new plans to reach AML and “manage” the wild herds and the public lands where they reside, the outcome is always the same: removals that end up in violent deaths and injuries and long-term imprisonment at federal holding corrals for most of the horses and burros. For example, between 2021 and 2023, the BLM removed 39,194 animals from across the West. On the DGPWHT, 3,072 wild horses have lost their home since 2018.

Meanwhile, cattle and sheep are left unscathed – living large on public lands and costing ranchers, many of whom are large corporations, only $1.35 per month per animal, thanks to subsidies provided by American taxpayers.

EARLY ROUNDUPS AND RANCHER GREED

The removal of wild horses from the Devil’s Garden area has a lengthy and brutal history, and it was – and still – is the main management tool for eradicating them. According to USFS’s accounts, the first roundups by ranchers began in the late 1800s with the intention of eliminating “the poorest class of estray and unbranded horses.”

Over the ensuing years, the effort was ongoing and widely successful.

In the 1920s, an estimated 1,200 horses were removed and sold most likely for horse meat, resulting in the near demise of the herd.

Although it would be reasonable to think that the WHBA provided the Devil’s Garden wild horses with some protection, this was not necessarily true. In 1975, the USFS developed and approved the first Devil’s Garden Plateau Wild Horse Territory Management Plan that allowed for the management of just 300 wild horses – the same number left in 1943. Subsequently, other management plans were developed – all favoring livestock interests over the wild horses. In 1991, a new management plan officially established an AML of between 275-335 wild horses while allocating only 4,400 Animal Unit Months (AUM), which is the amount of forage needed for an animal for one month, for their use.

To put that 275-335 AML and 4,400 AUMs for wild horses into a broader context, consider that domestic livestock were allotted 26,880 AUMS within the DGPWHT; this would be the average annual equivalent of 2,240 cow/calf pairs or 11,200 sheep.

Quite simply, history repeated itself – ranchers colluding with the USFS to maintain the absurdly low number of 275-335 horses on the DGPWHT and preserve their self-appointed right to graze on that quarter of a million acres of public land.

Here are some other numbers to ponder. Between 2003 and 2012, the USFS conducted 10 roundups and removed 898 horses, leaving 1,224 horses.

Wild horses removed from DGPWHT between 2003 and 2012

While this number was higher than the set AML, a plan was brewing to ensure that the horses would no longer be competition for valuable forage and water.

The Modoc Mafia, the UC/Davis,
and the Modoc National Forest

In 2013, the USFS released an updated Wild Horse Territory Management Plan for the DGPWHT. Although the WHTMP is supposed to be based on hard science and data, as with other management plans prepared by both the BLM and USFS, this was not the case for the Devil’s Garden herd.

Despite being a management plan for federally protected wild horses on federally designated wild horse habitat, the MNF “partnered” with the Modoc County Farm Bureau (MCFB), Modoc County, the Modoc County Cattlemen Association, and local ranchers with grazing permits on the DGPWHT – collectively known as the Modoc Mafia by some – to develop it.

According to Sean Curtis, MCFB board member and the Modoc County Natural Resource Analyst, because the MNF lacked the funds and resources to carry out a management program for wild horses, the local community needed to step up to provide both.

So how exactly did the local community step up? Largely through the MCFB’s Retired Workers Program that hired retired state and federal employees to create a new management plan. Not surprisingly, these employees were not wild horse friendly, and the result was a 2013 Environmental Assessment (EA) for the Devil’s Garden Plateau Territory Management Plan that favored the continuation of vast private livestock grazing while charting a course for the elimination or near elimination of the wild horses, by, for example, setting the arbitrarily and ridiculously low AML of 206-402 horses and not permitting the use of fertility control until that AML has been reached.

Ironically, although the MNF did not have dedicated funding from the USFS for the EA, support for the Retired Workers Program can be traced to Resource Advisory Committee (RAC) money secured through the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act. This is a federal program that compensates rural counties for declining payments due to reduced logging on USFS lands. And, not to put too fine a point on the corruption, Modoc County, the Modoc County Cattlemen Association, and local ranchers also chipped in.

Here's a sampling of that funding:

In June 2011, Mr. Curtis successfully lobbied the Modoc County Board of Supervisors to approve $50,000 in RAC money to 1) begin a Retired Workers Program Pilot Project that would employ retired state and federal workers to start data collection and environmental documentation for the wild horse roundup and removal ($10,000) and 2) contract for a wild horse and burro specialist to develop the 2013 EA and conduct an aerial census of wild horses inside and outside the DGPWHT ($40,000).
At the same time, the Modoc County Cattlemen Association also contributed $10,000 for the wild horse and burro specialist and other expenses. That specialist was Susan Stokke, Mr. Curtis’ wife at the time. Ms. Stokke is a former BLM employee who was the subject of several investigations for her abysmal record, including low adoption and high removal rates of wild horses, as Nevada’s Wild Horse & Burro Lead.
Between 2012 and 2016, 990s filed by the MCFB show that it distributed $368,631 to hire federal retired employees and employees “to go into the field with GPS cameras to record data on wild horses and the impacts they are making on allotments.” Some of this money came from the RAC funding, but the other source – or sources – is not clear. What is clear, however, is that the bulk of MCFB’s revenue during this time was dedicated to scapegoating the Devil’s Garden wild horses in line with its mission to “promote and protect agricultural interests in Modoc County, California.”

Besides working with the MNF, the Modoc Mafia had another and somewhat unexpected “partner” to assist in developing the 2013 EA and enshrining private livestock grazing on the DGPWHT – the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE).

Volume 6, Issue 4 of the UCCE’s Modoc Ranch Roundup, published in 2012, states:

The field monitoring crew funded through a partnership with the Modoc Forest, Modoc County, Modoc County Farm Bureau and Cattlemen’s Association and the University of California Cooperative Extension have completed hundreds of monitoring forms and taken thousands of photographs documenting on-the-ground conditions. All the data gathered will be analyzed in an evaluation report which will be prepared during November 2012.

Livestock operators who have collected information about wild horse use and impacts on their grazing allotments and wish to have that information considered during the evaluation process should provide the information to the Farm Advisor’s Office by November 1, 2012.

The obvious question is why the MNF, which is “owned” by the American people and managed by the USFS, was using data directly from “partners” whose primary interest is keeping livestock on the DGPWHT and money in their pockets at the expense of the wild horses and their habitat.

Isn’t this a blatant conflict of interest? And, given that part of the UCCE’s mission is funding “unbiased, science-based solutions” why would the university be participating in this biased, unscientific, and entirely bogus project?

But there’s more. In 2015, Laura Snell, a UCCE Agent and County Director, came on the scene. According to her, she was immediately approached by local ranchers, begging her for help in solving the wild horse issue. Her answer was to conduct research that would “provide visuals to show people the horses and what the landscape looks like due to unmanaged grazing by the wild horses.”

Now remember – UCCE’s mission includes funding “unbiased, science-based solutions.” But this was not the case with Ms. Snell’s study which was driven by her personal agenda to assist Modoc County ranchers in removing wild horses from the DGPWHT. Focused exclusively on the negative impacts of wild horses, it totally ignored the thousands of cattle and sheep who graze on the DGPWHT.

Yet Ms. Snell doesn’t stop there. She goes on to use her research as a platform to not only advocate for the removal of the Devil’s Garden horses but also to support the sale of them for slaughter – a plan that the USFS was pursuing:

I really think the sale of horses should be allowed. I think if there are groups that want to buy those horses and keep them, that should be fine. If there’s a group that would like to eat those horses, I think that’s fine.

Important to note is that Ms. Snell made these remarks as an employee of the State of California that banned horse slaughter decades ago.

No matter that the DHPWTH is the largest Territory managed by the USFS in terms of both acreage and number of horses, the playing field was never level for California’s iconic wild horse herd. And the consequences are dire. As the helicopters and wranglers prepare to start the roundup, we’ll provide more details and background on this developing assault on the Devil's Garden horses.

Sources:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd1031857.pdf, pg. 29

https://cemodoc.ucanr.edu/newsletters/Modoc_Ranch_Roundup45627.pdf

Modoc County Farm Bureau - Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica

https://www.8newsnow.com/news/i-team-no-straight-answers-from-nevadas-top-wild-horse-official/

https://escholarship.org/content/qt7bf313kq/qt7bf313kq_noSplash_8889e01368dfdc86eb541ef6b516a92a.pdf?t=op2qzi

https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/water/community/2017/09/07/wild-horses-adored-by-the-public-but-destroying-water-resources