CARSON CITY – On a snowy Saturday afternoon in Carson City, more than 100 protestors demonstrated in front of the Nevada Capitol to call for an end to the roundup and removal of thousands of mustangs from the Nevada desert.

Shirley Allen is with Least Resistance Training Concepts, a wild horse and burro rescue group. She said the Bureau of Land Management is taking so many mustangs off the range that there won’t be any left.

“It’s not a good plan as far as we’re concerned, for the horse’s sake and for the states in the West,” Allen said. “We have a pretty decent following of folks that come here to Nevada for ecotourism, to see the wild horses. We’ve had folks come from Germany, Sweden, England – just all over the world, to come and see the Nevada wild horses.”

According to the BLM, there are nearly 37,000 wild horses and burros on public lands in the West and about half of those are in Nevada. Officials say the range can only support about 27,000.

Alan Shepard is the Nevada wild horse program lead for BLM. He said the mustang population has to be kept to manageable numbers because otherwise there will be too many for the land to support.

“They have the ability to reproduce at a fairly good rate, anywhere from 15 to 25 percent,” Shepard said. “With no serious threat of predation, they survive and they’re a long-lived species and they don’t regulate themselves so they can just continue on.”

Shepard said the Calico Mountains can only support 500 horses, but critics say the area covers 50,000 acres, move than enough room for that allotment.

The BLM has been using helicopters to herd the mustangs into temporary holding pens where they are loaded onto trucks for the four-hour trip to more permanent facilities outside of Fallon.

Move than 1,900 wild horses were gathered in the Calico Mountains. The roundup resulted in 39 deaths and 30 miscarriages, drawing criticism for animal rights groups that say using helicopters is too expensive and that it traumatizes the mustangs. But Shepard says using helicopters is more humane than other methods and that the deaths are mostly because the horses are in poor condition.

At the same time as the protest downtown, the BLM held an adoption clinic, hoping to find homes for six yearlings and two burros. In the recession, it’s getting harder to find people willing to adopt the animals, so the BLM is offering incentives such as instant adoption and free delivery within 400 miles.

Carol Valis has had more than 30 adopted horses at one time. She was waiting to adopt any of these mustangs that don’t find a home with someone else. Most of her friends are at the protest, but she says she would rather be here, adopting a horse.

“I feel sorry for them,” Valis said. “They all need to get homes. They all need help and I’m happy with any of them. And I can gentle them and partially train them, do the groundwork and eventually find them another permanent home.”

If six of these mustangs got adopted, there are 37,000 more wild horses in holding facilities nationwide. Valis said the Calico roundups were unnecessary and that they were really aimed at increasing forage areas for cattle and for other special interests.

But according to the BLM, the number of cattle grazing on public lands has seen a steady decrease. The roundups have received unexpected support from environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, which has teamed up with other environmental and sportsman groups to endorse them.

Tin Nappe co-chairs the wildlife committee of the Sierra Club’s Toiyabe Chapter. She said mustangs are a real threat to the range because they graze continually and will eventually eat themselves into starvation at the expense of other wildlife.

“The public lands in Nevada, the Great Basin and its native ecosystem is extremely delicate,” Nappe said. “It is a desert. Plants only grow part of the year, but animals have to eat all year so if you’re looking at rodents and reptiles and rabbits, all of those animals also have to depend on plants to survive. Do we really want the Great Basin to become the Sahara Desert?”

The Sierra Club endorsement has infuriated many of its members and horse advocates including Willis Lamm, who helped organize the protest in Carson City.

Lamm said the roundups are expensive, hard on the horses and hard on the American taxpayer. He says the BLM needs to work more with horse ground to find alternatives.

“These are America’s wild horses,” Lamm said. “They belong to all of us. They’re also funded by all of us. So the agency that manages them has a responsibility to be as responsible and responsive as it can be and unfortunately that’s not happening now.”

The Calico roundup is part of an overall plan to remove 25,000 wild horses from public lands in the West and ship them to leased pastures in Kansas and Ohio.