Billionaire's wife drafts rescue plan for horses

WASHINGTON — Madeleine Pickens, the wife of billionaire T. Boone Pickens who has offered to rescue more than 30,000 wild horses kept in federal holding pens, said Tuesday she wants to create a permanent retirement ranch for the horses and burros that could be open to the public.

A key to her plan, she said, is federal tax credits to help attract financial donors. Pickens said she met last week with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to discuss the proposal, which animal-rights advocates have long advocated as an incentive for encouraging private citizens to adopt wild horses.

"It's going to save tax dollars in the end quite a bit," she said. "It has become so expensive to take care of these horses in these holding areas."

Half of the nation's wild-horse population is in Nevada, and Pickens said Reid told her he has been concerned about the issue for 25 years. Reid's spokesman, Jon Summers, said Reid was intrigued by the proposal but did not commit on it.

Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officials said this week that Pickens had come to them with a plan to relieve a growing agency headache: the care of wild horses and burros that were removed from federal lands and placed in holding pens to await adoption. The government periodically gathers horses from the range to prevent overpopulation and damage to the grasslands. It typically rounds up about 10,000 horses in a year.

Horse adoptions slowed significantly in the past five years and the cost of feeding and caring for the animals has grown sharply, eating up the bureau's budget and creating what the Government Accountability Office (GAO) termed a "crisis." For example, the price tag to federal taxpayers for maintaining the horses tripled from $7 million in 2000 to $21 million in 2007. The government is caring for about as many horses in holding facilities as the 33,000 that still roam wild on federal lands.

Bureau officials reluctantly began to consider exercising a legal but controversial option: euthanasia. Their focus was on about 2,000 unwanted horses that had not been adopted after several tries.

A racehorse breeder and lifelong animal lover, Pickens said she was horrified when she learned about the problem. She said she approached officials at the Bureau of Land Management, who embraced her idea. "I was just so thrilled; at all the areas I expected a 'no' from, I just got a smile and 'Yes, we love it,' " she said.

Pickens is negotiating to win control of more than 1 million acres of grassland in the West where she could create a horse ranch. She intends to acquire part of that land through private sale and part through a lease with the federal government. She is considering several pieces of land, ranging in cost from $10 million to $50 million.

She would not say where the land is.

Pickens wants to adopt all the wild horses and burros now in federal pens, sterilize them and let them loose on her "retirement ranch." As the government rounds up additional horses each year, she said she could absorb them, too, because they would replace horses on the ranch that die from natural causes.

"I see it as an eco-vacation spot," Pickens said. "Could you imagine taking your kids there, staying on the range in log cabins or tepees? I love the idea of sharing it with the American people."

Jeff Malcolm, assistant director at the GAO who studied the wild-horse program at the request of Congress, said Pickens' idea could be a workable solution but the government still would need to control the population of wild horses roaming the range.

"You have to look at the entire pipeline of the process," he said. "You need a strategy of population control."

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.