The equine influenza virus may have caused the mysterious respiratory disease that killed at least 95 wild horses and forced a federal farm in Colorado to go into quarantine, the Land Management Bureau said Thursday.
Tests have shown that a strain of the virus known as H3N8 is likely to be the cause of the epidemic and related horse deaths, the bureau said in a press release, adding that the virus was “not uncommon” among horses.
The strain identified is not linked to this year’s bird flu epidemic in the United States, officials said.
The nation’s wild horse bureau announced the outbreak on Monday, saying at least 57 horses had died over the weekend in Canyon City, Colorado, more than 100 miles south of Denver. The death toll reached 95 by Thursday.
This is the second time in recent weeks that the bureau has had to close a facility due to widespread disease among horses. At the end of March, a facility in Wyoming was closed and the event for the adoption of wild horses was postponed as some animals developed Streptococcus equi, a bacterial infection similar to strep throat.
The recent deaths are part of a larger struggle for the sustainable management of wild horses and sharps in the West. There are about 86,000 animals roaming public lands, more than three times as many as the bureau says it can support.
In an effort to keep populations under control, the bureau collects thousands of horses each year and offers them for adoption. But the number of people willing to adopt an untrained mustang has almost never been equal to the number of animals the government removes, so there is a surplus each year in a collection of corals and pastures that the bureau calls a “keeping system.”
The system now keeps more than 60,000 animals at a cost of about $ 72 million a year.
The breeding system includes long-term farms on the high grass prairie, where unwanted horses can spend decades, as well as short-term storages, where crowded corals temporarily keep horses fresh out of range.
The short-term facility in Canyon City is located next to a state prison in Colorado, where prisoners train horses. It acts as an intermediate station, where animals from different herds, which roam more than 33 million acres of open space in the West, are housed in enclosures that cover only about 50 acres, making it a potential breeding ground for disease. It is intended as a temporary stop, but due to the overcrowding of the restraint system, horses often stay for many months.
The bureau said Monday that there were 2,550 horses in the dusty maze of corals in Canyon City – just a few hundred shy of a maximum of 3,000.
Stephen Hall, a spokesman for the bureau, said on Thursday that the facility would remain quarantined “as long as necessary” to prevent the virus from spreading.
Most of the horses affected by the disease were removed last year from a strip of sage in northwestern Colorado, known as the West Douglas herd area, officials said. This study was done to protect the health of horses, pastures and public lands from overuse of surplus horses, the bureau said. At the time, part of the herd was being tested for a potentially fatal virus called equine infectious anemia, which can be spread by fly bites. Although all tests were negative, West Douglas horses were temporarily kept separate from other horses, according to the bureau.
“This is the first time I know that so many horses have died so quickly and so suddenly,” said Scott Becksted, director of campaigns at the Center for Human Economy, an animal welfare organization, on Wednesday.
Mr Becksted said he thought the outbreak was an indication that conditions in the detention facilities were too crowded and dirty. “We saw pictures of the horses in Canyon City,” he said. “It’s narrow. The horses are standing close to each other. It’s just an ideal environment for the spread of the disease. “
Susanne Roy, executive director of the American Wild Horse Campaign, said in a statement Wednesday that the bureau was putting animals at risk. “These are not cattle,” she said. “They are an iconic and federally protected species of wildlife.” Ms. Roy also called for a full investigation into the wild horse keeping system out of the bureau’s reach.
The Bureau of Land Management controls about 245 million acres of public land, mostly in the West, and has monitored wild horses and storms since they were protected by federal law in 1971.
The bureau has been under pressure for decades from both horse protection groups and lawmakers to reduce the size of the restraint system. This has led to recurring scandals in which thousands of protected wild horses have been adopted by the system only to end up in slaughterhouses.
In 2019, the bureau began paying adoptive parents $ 1,000 per head to take the animals out of his hands. Adoptions have tripled since the program began, but an investigation by The New York Times found that a large number of these horses were sold to slaughter buyers almost as soon as the checks were cleared.
Despite the increased adoptions, the number of horses stored in the housing system is only increasing, increasing by about 10,000 by 2020, partly due to increased collection.
The bureau proposed doubling the number of animals it rounds each year to about 20,000 in an attempt to limit the area’s populations, but that move would dramatically increase the number of horses in the system.
“The United States government is campaigning to eliminate a large number of these federally protected animals for the benefit of the private livestock industry,” Mr Becksted said. He advised that in the short term, the bureau should suspend mass rallies until healthy and safe conditions are guaranteed.
“The federal government will cost the American taxpayer tens of millions of dollars to raise tens of thousands of wild horses,” he said. “This is a financial fraud, because the cost of caring for these animals will be astronomical, and it would be far cheaper to leave them in their designated habitat and manage them there, in the area.”
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