Commentary: Our Disappearing Mustangs | Westword

As I am writing this,122 terrorized wild horses in northwest Colorado known as the West Douglas herd are being chased by helicopters, funneled into corrals and removed from the land on which they have lived for decades.

The federal agency zeroing out this herd is the Bureau of Land Management, the same agency that killed 39 horses in Nevada weeks ago during a similar “capture” and allowed 145 horses kept in crowded conditions in a Cañon City holding facility to die of equine fever, a preventable disease had they been vaccinated as they were supposed to be. This is just a fragment of a litany of violations by the Bureau in its never-ending removal of wild horses from Western states.

The horses are captured by means of a helicopter, which locates and then chases the horses, often for…