Wild horses cost the federal government $23 million
Feeding horses is expensive. Ask anyone who owns one.
That includes the federal Bureau of Land Management, which is paying to feed tens of thousands of wild horses in pens across the country. The federal agency cited the expense as the reason it did not renew its contract with the Colorado Department of Corrections to care for and train wild horses and burros at a state prison complex in Cañon City.
The program, which has existed for 30 years and employed incarcerated men as stablehands and trainers, will end Nov. 30.
The BLM’s five-year contract with the state prisons department totaled $23 million, according to a copy of the contract provided to The Colorado Sun. That was up to $4.6 million per year or about $4.45 per horse, per day, from 2020 to 2025.
The contract was set to expire at the end of September, but federal and state officials extended it through November to allow time to transport about 2,000 horses in the prison corrals to holding pens in Wyoming and Utah. About 100 horses that were captured in Colorado will go to adoptive homes in this state, officials said.
The cost of the additional 60 days of keeping the horses is estimated at $582,777. The BLM is being charged $4.78 per horse, per day for October and November, according to the contract extension.
When the state and federal agencies announced the end of the program last month, they cited rising expenses but did not answer further questions about the costs. The BLM directed the budget question to the state Department of Corrections, while state officials told The Sun to ask the BLM. The Sun obtained the contract about two weeks later by filing a request under the Colorado Open Records Act.
The five-year contract signed in 2020 laid out a per-horse price that increased gradually every year and varied depending on how many horses were in the pens — the price per horse went down the more horses there were in captivity. The first year, the BLM paid $4.37 per horse if there were at least 1,775 horses. That rose to $4.45 this year.
The contract also requires that:
- Horses receive “good quality long-stemmed alfalfa” instead of grass hay, or at least an alfalfa-grass mix. Alfalfa is higher in nutrients and more expensive.
- They must get enough food to maintain at least 4 on the Henneke body condition scoring system, in which 1 is emaciated and 9 is obese.
- Horses and burros must have access to mineral and salt blocks in each pen.
- The Department of Corrections must notify the BLM within 24 hours of any request from the public, the media or horse welfare organizations to view the horses. The Colorado Sun visited the corrals in 2021. The corrals must be open to the public at least 12 days per year.
- The program must keep track of horses with a freeze mark or microchip and keep records of horses that die or are euthanized, including probable cause of death. In 2022, 145 mustangs at the prison complex died of equine flu.
- Corrals must be at least 6 feet high and constructed with wood, steel or pipe, not barbed wire, and wood must have a “non-chewable surface” so that horses and burros don’t eat it.
The horse pens at the south-central Colorado prison grounds encompass about 120 acres. The horse facility, deep inside the complex surrounded by razor wire, is not easily visible from the highway.
The pens have held horses from the Sand Wash Basin near the Wyoming border, as well as herds from West Douglas and the Piceance-East Douglas near Meeker. About 30 people incarcerated in the prison work in the pens, feeding, watering and shoeing the horses, and to break and train the horses so they are ready for adoption.
There are more than 53,000 wild horses and 19,000 burros living on public lands across the West, compared with about 61,000 wild horses and 3,100 burros in government holding pens, according to BLM data.
The federal agency spent $101 million on wild horse and burro holding facilities last year.