News

ERA REtuRns, soRt of

The Nevada Senate Legislative Operations and Elections Committee this week held a hearing on a measure that, if enacted, would have no legal effect.

The resolution purports to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, which was sent to the states by Congress in 1972 and was defeated after it failed to win the required 38 state ratifications by the 1982 deadline. In Nevada, it was voted on in the legislature three times, failing each time. It was approved in both the Assembly and Senate, but in different legislative sessions. In 1977, following the three legislative votes, the legislature placed the issue on the public ballot where, in 1978, it was defeated 67 to 33 percent. Nevadans cast 185,720 votes on the advisory question.

However, the victory of opponents of the amendment was short-lived. The courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have effectively made the ERA law in the United States with a series of gender equality decisions that rely on the 14th and 5th Amendments.

That message has not gotten to some officials, like U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who has introduced a new Equal Rights Amendment in Congress. Nor is it understood by some activists, who have pressured state legislators around the country to “ratify” the expired amendment. Besides Nevada, Utah and Virginia have such measures before them and legislators in other states are considering doing the same.

The measure in Nevada, Senate Joint Resolution 2, refers to “the Equal Rights Amendment” although the measure sent to the states by Congress did not include that verbiage. It is the informal name by which the amendment was known. The ERA was written in 1923 by National Women’s Party head Alice Paul and journalist Crystal Eastman.

—Dennis Myers

tRoublEd wAtERs

Donald Trump issued a disaster declaration for Nevada on Feb. 17. Gov. Brian Sandoval made the request on Feb. 9 in response to damages caused by flooding in Northern Nevada in the first two weeks of January.

In his letter to the president, Sandoval noted that storms between Jan. 5 and Jan. 14 left “the eastern front of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Lake Tahoe” with “358 inches of snow when the average January snowfall is 74 inches.”

The official damage assessment from the governor’s office is $14.82 million. This accounts only for the Jan. 5 to Jan. 14 time frame and applies only to Carson City, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, and four Nevada counties—Washoe, Douglas, Lyon and Storey.

In the interim between Sandoval’s Feb. 9 request and the president’s disaster declaration, Elko—on the east side of the state—was hit with serious flooding. The governor declared a state of emergency for Elko County on Feb. 10.

And the wild weather continues across the state. Even as the paper was prepared for press on Feb. 21, new flood warnings were in effect for Elko and Eureka counties and isolated flooding led to school delays and trapped motorists in the Truckee Meadows.

To give some perspective to the amount of precipitation this winter has brought to Northern Nevada, consider this: The National Weather Service reported that a record amount of rain—just over one inch—fell at the Reno Tahoe International Airport on Feb. 20. This amount broke the previous record of 0.67 inches, set in 1922. —Jeri ChaDwell-singley

No home on the range

Future of the West’s mustangs remains unsettled

there are an estimated 100,000 wild horses in the Western United States, but only a little more than half of them actually live in the wild of the vast range lands. The rest are kept in corrals and long-term pastures run by the Bureau of Land Management—whose job it has been to manage wild horses since 1971.

These numbers represent a real and growing problem.

In 2015, the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program spent nearly two-thirds of its roughly $72 million annual budget on housing the horses it has taken out of the wild. And, as of August 2016, the agency estimated its holding facilities were nearly 80 percent full. What’s more, according to its figures, the number of horses left on the range is fully two times what’s ideal.

The BLM’s estimate of how many horses the range can sustain “in balance with other public land resources and uses” is 26,715. The number of horses in Nevada alone exceeds this total by nearly 20 percent. In fact, Nevada has the most wild horses of any state by far—almost 32,000. The next highest number is 6,500 in Wyoming.

Last September, the Wild Horse and Burro Program’s nine-person advisory board recommended the BLM euthanize or sell to slaughter the more than 40,000 horses currently in captivity. The recommendation made headlines across the country, and the agency responded quickly—issuing an online statement avowing it “does not and will not euthanize healthy animals.”

That was almost six months ago.

In an email interview, BLM spokespersons Jenny Lesieutre and Jason Lutterman provided an update on what’s happened in the interim, noting that “the BLM has acquired more offrange pastures to reduce the number of horses in higher-cost corrals.”

An October article in South Dakota’s Butte County Post about one of these pasture acquisitions, reported a Powerball jackpot winner had agreed to let the BLM pasture a herd of 917 horses on roughly 50 square mile of privately owned grassland 75 miles north of Rapid City, South Dakota— for a price of $2 per horse, per day.

The BLM also puts some wild horses up for adoption and sale. According to Lesieutre and Lutterman, until the BLM has “better tools to manage wild horses on the range,” the agency has capped the number of horses that can be removed each year at 3,500, “about the same number that leave the system through adoption, sales and natural mortality.”

In 2015, the BLM reported the roundup of 3,093 horses—nearly half from Nevada. The same year, 2,331 were sold or adopted.

Roundups have long been controversial—garnering both media attention and outcry from advocates, who allege mistreatment of the animals and a lack of transparency on the BLM’s part. Author and wild horse advocate Terri Farley has witnessed several roundups and is among those who believe the BLM misrepresents the facts of them. She’s particularly concerned by how the BLM classifies horse deaths. There are two categories under which a death might be filed—“acute” and “chronic.” Acute injuries are those directly related to a roundup—broken necks, trampling, etc. Chronic deaths include horses that are euthanized because of things like blindness and poor body condition.

Farley believes the BLM downplays the overall number of deaths by dividing them into these categories and that the reasons for euthanasia are often trumped up. A look at reports from several individual roundups in the last two years shows the number of horses killed varied from less than one percent to closer to five. On its “Myths and Facts” web page, the BLM cites cumulative 2014 statistics, which show 17 out of a little more than 1,700 horses—or slightly less than one percent—died that year. But information from an advocacy group, Wild Horse Preservation, suggests additional horses died in 2014 after being rounded up. Records obtained by the group under the Freedom of Information Act indicate 75 horses captured during the Checkerboard roundup in Wyoming died in captivity in the months to follow.

To be clear, roundups are not the preferred method of population control—for anyone. As the spokespeople mentioned, the BLM is exploring what it considers “better tools.” This includes “evaluating the safety, feasibility

A wild mustang moved behind his band across the desert south of Chimney Reservoir in Humboldt County in September 2016.

PHOTO/JERI CHADWELL-SINGLEY

and effectiveness of spaying and neutering on-range wild horses” and the development of “longer-lasting fertility control vaccines.”

There are already a few vaccines available. Porcine zona pellucida (PZP) is made from a protein found in pig ovaries. It’s administered through a dart and, according to several scientific studies, can be up to 90 percent effective. The BLM’s search for alternatives is driven by the logistics of administering the vaccine, which—according to Lesieutre and Lutterman—a 2013 National Academy of Sciences study found was not “highly effective, easily delivered, and affordable.”

An independent group near Gardnerville disagrees. Pine Nut Wild Horse Advocates—a non-profit—began darting mares with PZP in 2012. In 2014, a pilot program to control the population of wild horses near the Pine Nut Mountains was officially established with the blessing of the Wild Horse and Burro Program’s Nevada office.

The program was established at no cost to BLM. The Pine Nut group’s members use donated funds to pay for PZP training and certification from another nonprofit, the Science and Conservation Center in Billings, Montana. They also use fundraising to pay for the vaccines, which according to Deb Walker, the group’s president, cost about $25 per dose. A mare needs two doses in the first year, and one every year thereafter.

But it has been almost a year since the group’s members have darted a mare. Their carbon dioxide powered dart guns—some on loan from the BLM—have sat unused, save for target practice, since another advocacy group threatened the BLM with a lawsuit. Friends of Animals cited concerns over alleged side effects of the treatment and a belief that the program violated a judge’s court order forbidding the roundup of horses from the area east of Gardnerville.

Now, members of the Pine Nut group worry the PZP they’ve administered to 36 different mares from four bands is wearing off. But they may soon get the green light to pick up where they left off. According to John Axtell, a wild horse and burro specialist with the BLM’s Nevada office, the agency is working on a new environmental assessment that could clear the way for darting to resume as early as this spring.

In the meantime, some are wondering how a new secretary of the interior will factor into things. In 2009, as a Montana state legislator, Ryan Zinke co-sponsored a bill that ultimately cleared the way for construction of slaughterhouses for privately owned horses and made any person who unsuccessfully files an action against the operation of one liable for financial losses resulting from any injunction that halts its operations. The BLM’s spokespeople said until Zinke—now a U.S. House member—is confirmed as interior secretary, “it is too soon to foresee what changes may or may not be forthcoming.” Ω

Visit https://on.doi.gov/2k4wLyQ to see details from recent and current roundups.

Sing out

Reed High students Natalie Gonzalez and Adam Walmsley are pretty brave. Not only are they singing here the unsingable national anthem, but they are doing it without music and in front of both their principal and the Washoe County School Board.