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An equine flu virus has caused the mysterious respiratory illness that has killed at least 95 wild horses and forced a federal holding facility in Colorado to quarantine, the Bureau of Land Management said on Thursday.
Testing showed that one strain of the virus known as H3N8 was the most likely cause of the epidemic and related equine deaths. the bureau said in a newsletterHe added that the virus is not “rare” among horses.
Identified strain not relevant bird flu epidemic Officials said it was in the US this year.
The bureau responsible for the care of the country’s wild horses, announced the outbreak on Monday He said at least 57 horses have died since the weekend in Cañon City, Colo., 100 miles south of Denver. The death toll reached 95 on Thursday.
The bureau had to close a facility for the second time in recent weeks due to a widespread illness among the horses. A facility in Wyoming in late March it is closed and an adoption event for wild horses was delayed because some animals developed Streptococcus equi, a bacterial infection similar to sore throat.
The latest deaths are part of a larger struggle to sustainably manage wild horses and burros in the West. There are about 86,000 animals roaming public lands, more than three times what the bureau says the lands can support.
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 equaled the number of animals the government has removed, so a year-over-year surplus has built up in a barn and pasture collection that the bureau calls the “holding system.”
The system currently houses more than 60,000 animals at a cost of approximately $72 million per year.
The containment system includes long-term farms in long meadows where unwanted horses can spend decades, as well as short-term fattening areas where crowded pens temporarily keep horses out of range.
The short-term facility in Cañon City is located next to the Colorado state penitentiary. where prisoners train horses. It acts as a way station where animals from different herds roaming 33 million acres of open space in the West are brought together in pens that cover just 50 acres, making it a potential breeding ground for disease. This is a temporary stopover, but due to overcrowding in the holding system, horses often stay for months.
The bureau said on Monday there were 2,550 horses on the dusty grounds of Cañon City. the corral maze – just a few hundred shy of the 3,000 maximum.
The bureau’s spokesman, Steven Hall, said on Thursday that the facility will remain under quarantine “for as long as necessary” to prevent the spread of the virus.
Most of the horses affected by the disease were removed from the sage-dotted mesas known as the West Douglas Herd Field in northwest Colorado last year, officials said. The bureau said this collection was done to protect the health of horses, pastures and public lands from overuse by horses. At the time, part of the herd was being tested for a potentially deadly virus called equine infectious anemia, which can be spread through fly bites. Although all tests were negative, West Douglas horses were temporarily segregated from other horses. by office.
“This is the first time I’ve noticed so many horses die so quickly and suddenly,” Scott Beckstead, campaign director for the Center for a Humane Economy, a nonprofit animal welfare organization, said Wednesday.
Mr Beckstead said he thought the outbreak was an indication that conditions in the holding facilities were too crowded and filthy. “We’ve seen photos of the horses in Cañon City,” he said. “It’s cramped. The horses stay close together. It’s the perfect environment for disease to spread.”
Suzanne Roy, executive director of the American Wild Horse Campaign, said on Wednesday that the bureau puts animals at risk. “These are not animals,” she said. “They are an iconic and federally protected wildlife species.” Ms. Roy also called for a full investigation into the bureau’s off-road wild horse keeping system.
Bureau of Land Management supervises about 245 million acres they are mostly part of public lands in the West and have been overseen since they are guarded by wild horses and burros. federal law in 1971.
The bureau has been under pressure for decades by both horse advocacy groups and lawmakers to reduce the size of the holding system. This led to repeated scandals, in which thousands of protected wild horses were removed from the system and only immediately sent to slaughterhouses.
In 2019, the bureau began paying adopters $1,000 to take away the animals. Adoptions have nearly tripled since the program began, but Investigation from The New York Times It showed that the bulk of these horses were sold to slaughter buyers as soon as the checks passed.
Despite increased adoptions, the number of horses stored in the holding system has only increased by nearly 10,000 since 2020, in part due to an increase in collections.
The Bureau has proposed doubling the number of animals it collects each year. up to about 20,000in an attempt to limit populations in range, but the move will greatly increase the number of horses in the system.
“The United States government is running a campaign to eliminate these large numbers of federally protected animals to benefit the private livestock industry,” said Mr Beckstead. He recommended that in the short term the bureau should cease mass gatherings until healthy and safe conditions are guaranteed.
“The federal government will cost the American taxpayer tens of millions of dollars to collect tens of thousands of wild horses,” he said. “It’s a financial boon, because the cost of caring for these animals will be astronomical, and it will be much cheaper to leave them in their designated habitats and manage them there at range.”
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