Interview: Southwestern Wilds works to safeguard wild horses
The Pahrump Valley Times caught up to Victoria Balint and Venessa Fernandez with Southwestern Wilds for a chat about what’s new in trying to save the wild horses.
Southwestern Wilds works to save wild horses from euthanasia and permanent incarceration by sponsoring petitions and lobbying to ensure the roundups are more humane.
Their organization will be featured in a short film called, “Mojave Desert Rescue: The Documentary,” premiering at the Pahrump Valley Film Festival, running the last week of April.
Eric: What’s new with Southwestern Wilds?
Victoria: We are working on a rewilding program, which is where mustangs come off BLM land, where many of them have been held for most of their lives, and get returned to the wild.
Eric: Are any solutions being entertained to stop the roundups?
Venessa: Well, there’s horse sterilization. They’re really pushing for the mares, the females, to have sterilization done. What that is doing is, you have the whole biological system; the mare goes into heat, they put off a scent and the stallions want to come mate. After sterilization that completely stops. And sterilization only works for a short time. So you’re putting these horses through all this trauma of the sterilization process. They’re bringing these herds down next to nothing. Sometimes they’re rounding up over 900 horses and leaving seven in the wild. Now we’re looking at genetics, we’re inbreeding. Now we’re creating diseases.
Victoria: Extinction, basic extinction is what will be happening.
Eric: How are wild horses useful?
Victoria: One of the big ones is using mustangs in the wild as a fire deterrent. Taking horses out of holding areas, which I consider dog pens, and moving herds into areas dense in vegetation can lessen the impact of wildfires. Move them into Oregon, California. The vegetation they would have eaten would have had a major impact on the most recent fires in Southern California.
Eric: Have there been any court decisions in favor or against the horses and BLM?
Venessa: A couple of days ago the courts overruled BLM.
Victoria: The incentive program with that BLM got overturned. People were being given cash to adopt wild horses. I thought it was a very good program when somebody came up with it. However, all you have to do is follow the money. There’s always gonna be those people out there that will abuse the system. And that’s exactly what happened. It was overturned, and the evidence is black and white, because horses were being sent to slaughter. The incentive was $1,000. They get their incentive money. Where’s those horses? There wasn’t follow-up and it was a rotten vetting process.
Eric: Is there some litigation with the use of helicopters?
Victoria: Yes. In Nye County we did a petition and we have the commissioners on board. We will absolutely not have any more helicopter roundups in Nye County.
Eric: Do you see any way of stopping or even temporarily halting the roundups?
Victoria: I think the public outrage has just begun. I think there’s a level of education and intelligence about this issue now, not only within our small community here, but other communities across the nation. It’s beginning to change.
Eric: What about the beauty of mustangs in the wild that our children need to be able to see for themselves?
Victoria: The mustangs are majestic icons. They are us. They built this country. America would not be where America is today without the mustang. I mean, there’s even a fight, a battle between if they’re native or not. Some people say they’re not native, but there’s evidence that says their bloodlines go back to the equinus. Remember in elementary school learning about dinosaurs and the baby horse, the tiny horse? Their bloodlines go back to that. So while they may have come from Spain and elsewhere, ultimately, weren’t we all connected? We have to ask ourselves, is what we are doing the right thing? Are we being humane? Where is the voice for the voiceless?
Eric: Horses aren’t voiceless, they go neeeeeigh!
Victoria &Venessa: Ha ha
Eric: Where can people find more information about Southwestern Wilds?
Venessa: You can find us at southwesternwild.org, also on Facebook, instagram and Tiktok at Southwestern Wilds.
Eric Coleman is a free-lance reporter living in Pahrump whose political cartoons appear weekly in the Pahrump and Tonopah newspapers. Contact him at ericjamescoleman@gmail.com.
