The mustangs that roam the fields at the Bureau of Land Management holding facility in Palomino Valley are caught in a conflict between supply and demand.

The Palomino Valley facility, located about 20 miles north of the Sparks/Reno area, is the largest mustang holding facility in the western United States with the capacity to support 1,800 horses. Between 100 and 150 horses per year, on average, are adopted from the facility. Horses can be purchased for $125. The BLM removed a total of 7,726 wild horses and burros from bureau rangelands in 2007.

The BLM is considering several approaches to dealing with a rising number of wild horses at area holding facilities and a shrinking demand for their adoption, including broad-based euthanasia.

“This has been coming towards us for a number of years,” BLM spokeswoman JoLynn Worley said. “We have many more horses (that we have to pay to support) in long and short-term holding than are being adopted.”

The bureau is also considering abolishing the “without limitation” clause on the form that wild horse buyers must sign before leaving with their mustangs. The clause essentially ensures that the buyer will not take the horses to a wholesale slaughter house after purchase.

“We have people sign documents saying that they will not take them and slaughter them,” Worley said. “That is another option we are looking at, that is to offer animals for sale without limitations.”

The BLM is soliciting public input on its Web site, www.blm.gov/nv/st/en.html, as well as though a call line, 1-800-710-7957. Officials hope to reach a decision on reducing the mustang holding numbers by October, Worley said.

In the meantime, the state agency in charge of wild horse management has declared its intention to sue the BLM, which is a federal agency, for allegedly not maintaining appropriate levels of mustangs in the wild.

The grant-funded Nevada Commission for the Preservation of Wild Horses referred all questions and comments on the issue to local BLM agencies or federal representatives in Washington, D.C.

The group said that its goal is to act as an advocate for wild horses through participation with federal agencies to ensure that sufficient habitat is available for wild horse populations.

According to the BLM’s Web site, wild horses and burros in the west have virtually no natural predators and their herd sizes can double about every four years. As a result, the agency must remove thousands of animals from BLM rangelands each year to ensure that herd sizes are consistent with the land’s capacity to support them.

The BLM maintains a numerical range of how many horses can be in a specific area without doing damage to the environment. Once the population reaches the high end of that range, the excess horses are rounded up and taken to holding facilities.

Supporting the horses is an expensive endeavor, according to John Neill, facility manager for the Palomino Valley location. BLM budgets predict that during this fiscal year national holding costs will exceed $26 million - more than three-fourths of the BLM’s federal funding of about $37 million for the entire wild horse containment program.

From the time that a mustang is brought to the Palomino Valley facility, it starts to accumulate a price tag. New horses are examined by a veterinarian and vaccinated. Nationally, those vaccines cost about $500,000 per year, according to Neill.

The facility also purchases about 5,000 tons of hay per year. Neill’s most recent hay purchase came from the Yerington area and cost about $248 per ton.