Twin Peaks Wild Horse Round-Up

Twin Peaks Wild Horse Round-Up

BLM Eagle Lake Field Office

October 3, 2024

This video shows the day's first groups of wild horses being pulled off their home range of the Twin Peaks HMA in California.

One helicopter, a private contractor paid with US Federal Tax dollars, made repeated trips over the mountains and across vast landscapes of public lands forcing 170 exhausted and terrified wild horses into a trap.

Observers have no way to document or know how far and for how long the horses are chased. Once the buzz of the helicopter begins to be heard, it can take many more moments until it actually comes into view. At first sight of the horses, they are often already in a full sweat. The helicopter chases one family band to another until he has a large herd to push toward the trap. The pilot uses the horses' natural instincts against them, and focuses on the lead stallions knowing the rest will follow.

In order to be a Public Observer one must sign up in advance, and is responsible for their own transportation. Observers are escorted by BLM personnel, told where to stand, and not allowed to leave the site until released at the end of daily operations. On this day there were three members of the public observing.

Once trapped, panicked horses are funneled onto stock trailers and transported a short distance to temporary holding corral to make room for additional captures. Families are separated by sex, foals weened from mothers, (in the wild they often nurse up to two years) any horse determined "unfit" including any injured in the round-up, or who came in with pre-existing conditions including blindness and who managed to survive in the wild, were "euthanized" (ie shot) onsite.

From the Temporary Holding Corral, wild horses are shipped to Long Term Holding Corrals.

Here they are further sorted and stallions gelded. The few mares to be released back on the HMA are treated with birth control which is increasingly non-reversible. Big pharma has a growing, lucrative market of "wildlife" birth control drugs... again paid for with our taxes.

Some Long Term Holding Facilities are Public, like the Litchfield Corrals where the Twin Peaks horses were sent. Others are Private, Off Range Facilities... owned and operated by wealthy ranchers with large properties where horses are inaccessible to public viewing. These private ranchers are paid with Federal Tax dollars to hold the captured wild horses indefinitely...

There are now more wild horses being held and paid for with American tax dollars in off-range facilities than living free and at no cost to American tax payers in the wild on Public Land.

This is the same public land where thousands of private livestock including cattle and sheep trample fragile riparian areas and graze down native vegetation, reseeded with non-native grasses livestock prefer. Livestock grazing increases the spread of invasive and fire prone grasses which the BLM treats with chemicals. Livestock fencing on public land degrades ecosystems by restricting natural migration of large mammals including megaherbivore forage patterns.

The cost for a private rancher to graze a cow/calf pair on US public land is $1.35/ month. Cattle grazing on public land accounts for less than 2% of beef consumed by Americans. The BLM's own data show that private livestock grazing is the major cause of public land degradation. The BLM offers no science on the effect of wild horses vs livestock, yet they invariably cite range degradation as a reason for costly and inhumane wild horse and burro round-ups.

Project 2025 includes a clause that the management agencies be permitted means to humanely destroy excess horses. So all the money spent to date in round ups and holdings could end up for naught if in the end all those poor horses are just killed.

The agencies entrusted with managing HMA's principally for wild horses & burros at viable populations are zeroing them out. They ignore updated science and indigenous belief that our wild horses evolved in North America, reduce wild fire fuels, and promote biodiversity.

The dollar cost to the American public of round-ups including payment of private helicopter contractors, transportation, and public and private holding facilities is in the millions. The intrinsic cost of destroying the freedom and longevity of intact American mustang herds is immeasurable.

There is nothing that more represents the ideology on which our country was founded than wild horses. They are of blended ancestry motivated by freedom, family and working together to survive.

Please contact your Representative in Congress and demand a stop to wild horse round-ups and unnecessary birth control. Also demand wild horses in holding facilities be returned to their home ranges to live out their lives in freedom. Fulfill our American legacy.

This round up began on October 2, 2024 and concluded on October 11, 2024. Total number of horses gathered were 960. Total treated with fertility control were 38. Total released were 100