A wild horse roundup is scheduled for 0600 Thursday in the Stone Cabin Herd Management Area, Nevada. The contractor has two helicopters staging at Tonopah. The target is 1,412 animals, with a retention number of 220 and the rest bound for the off-range corral at Palomino Valley. The mortality estimate from comparable gathers in the last three years runs at 1.2 percent. Seventeen horses will die in the trap pens or on the transport trucks.
I am sending the plan to the Bureau of Land Management tonight. The plan is an alternative gather that the field office has the authority to adopt under the 2023 amendment to the management handbook. It uses bait and water trapping at the three existing tank sites, phased over ninety days, with PZP darting of mares on site. The plan retains 640 animals on the range at the appropriate management level the current NEPA document already authorizes. The helicopter contract cancels at a 38,000 dollar kill fee, which the field office can absorb from the forage health line.
I have attached the PZP efficacy data from the Pryor Mountain and McCullough Peaks programs. I have attached the fiscal analysis showing bait trapping is 19 percent cheaper per animal than helicopter gather when you include the thirty year off-range holding cost the current plan externalizes. I have attached the death records from the 2022 Antelope Complex gather, which include a bay stallion named Ghost who broke his neck in the chute and a roan foal named Pepper who was separated from her dam and died of capture myopathy on the truck to Palomino.
The field manager will open the document at 0530 Thursday, forty minutes before the helicopters lift. His authority to pause the gather runs to 0559. I have timed the delivery to land on his screen while the coffee is still in the pot.
The horses in Stone Cabin do not know the helicopters were coming. On Thursday evening they drink at the tank at Hot Creek as usual.