Earth Protect Blog

By Jack Dura

The Associated Press

BISMARCK, N.D.>> The beloved wild horses that roam freely in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park could be removed under a National Park Service proposal that worries advocates who say the horses are a cultural link to the past.

Visitors who drive the scenic park road can often see bands of horses, a symbol of the West and sight that delights tourists. Advocates want to see the horses continue to roam the Badlands, and disagree with park officials who have branded the horses as “livestock.”

The Park Service is revising its livestock plans and writing an environmental assessment to examine the impacts of taking no new action — or removing the horses altogether.

Removal would entail capturing horses and giving some of them first to tribes, and later auctioning the animals or giving them to other entities. Another approach would include techniques to prevent future reproduction and would allow those horses to live out the rest of their lives in the park.

The horses have allies in government leaders and advocacy groups. One advocate says the horses’ popularity won’t stop park officials from removing them from the landscape of North Dakota’s top tourist attraction.

“At the end of the day, that’s our national park paid for by our tax dollars, and those are our horses. We have a right to say what happens in our park and to the animals that live there,” Chasing Horses Wild Horse Advocates President Chris Kman told The Associated Press.

Last year, Park Superintendent Angie Richman told The Bismarck Tribune that the park has no law or requirement for the horses to be in the park. Regardless of what decision is ultimately made, the park will have to reduce its roughly 200 horses to 35-60 animals under a 1978 environmental assessment’s population objective, she previously said.

Ousting the horse population “would have a detrimental impact on the park as an ecosystem,” Kman said. The horses are a historical fixture, while the park reintroduced bison and elk, she said.

A couple bands of wild horses were accidentally fenced into the park after it was established in 1947, said Castle McLaughlin, who in the 1980s researched the history and origins of the horses while working as a graduate student for the Park Service in North Dakota. Park officials in the early years sought to eradicate the horses, shooting and hiring local cowboys to round them up and remove them, she said.

Around 1970, a new superintendent discovered Roosevelt had written about the presence of wild horses in the Badlands during his time there. Park officials decided to retain the horses as a historic demonstration herd to interpret the open-range ranching era. “However, the Park Service still wasn’t thrilled about them,” McLaughlin told the AP.

In the 1880s, Roosevelt hunted and ranched as a young man in the Badlands of what is now western North Dakota.

Republican Gov. Doug Burgum has offered for the state to collaborate with the Park Service to manage the horses. Earlier this year, North Dakota’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a resolution in support of preserving the horses.