~Continuing From Page 1~ "The Pryor Mustangs From The Pryor Mountains Of Montana" The battle over the Pryor Mountain herd moved to the national level on July 11, 1968, when ABC broadcast a special on the horses on the evening news. The public reacted with outrage,[13] and the BLM responded that "no decision had yet been made regarding the horses."[14] However, by the end of August, a trap to collect the horses had been completed. At the same time, the BLM was unresponsive to efforts by members of the public, senators and officials from the Humane Society of the United States to ascertain final plans regarding the horses. Because of this, court proceedings were begun, and on August 27, 1968, a US District Court judge made a decision that had the result of barring the BLM from removing the horses from the range.[15] On September 9, 1968, the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart L. Udall, declared the area inhabited by the Pryor Mountain Mustangs as the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Refuge (PMWHR),[7] in a decision later noted in the Congressional Record.[16] After the creation of the refuge the BLM appointed a committee to study the area and make recommendations regarding appropriate herd numbers. The committee, which met in late 1968 and early 1969, was made up of range and wildlife experts, local citizens interested in the herds and representatives from several federal, state and private organizations.[17] A boundary adjustment was made to the refuge, adding some land in Wyoming.[7] The final report of the committee, submitted in June 1969, was that the horses were not in danger of starvation, that overgrazing was likely due to domestic sheep who utilized the land decades earlier, and that horses were the most likely of any species to be able to survive and thrive in the Pryor Mountain environment.[18] On December 18, 1971, the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 (WFRHBA) was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon. The Act made it a crime for anyone to harass or kill feral horses or burros on federal land, required the departments of the Interior and Agriculture to protect the animals, required studies of the animals' habits and habitats, and permitted public land to be set aside for their use.[19][20] The Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service were jointly charged with responsibility for administrating the Act.[21] The National Park Service was also involved in the management of the land.[22] These federal agencies were limited to managing horses only on public lands where "wild horses were documented as being 'presently found' at the time of the passage of the Act in 1971."[23] Genetics: It was widely believed that the Pryor Mountains horses were direct descendants of the Barb horses brought to North America by Juan de Oñate's expedition to explore America north of the Rio Grande in the early 1600s.[8] Bloodlines may also include American Saddlebred, Canadian, Irish Hobby, and Tennessee Walking horses.[8] In the early 1900s, stallions of Thoroughbred and Arabian ancestry were also turned out onto the range.[7] However, the breeding of the Pryor Mountain herd was in dispute for many years. One horseman hired by the federal government during the 1920s to round up excess feral horses on the range stated, "The whole country around was overrun with thousands of homesteaders' horses ... but this little band ... were, and are, the genuine Spanish horses and there were about 70 head. I did not try to get them and hoped that no one else ever would."[24] Other people claimed that the horses were nothing more than local domestic horses which had escaped to the wild. In 1992, equine geneticist Dr. E. Gus Cothran conducted genetic studies on the herd, and concluded that their primary bloodlines did descend from Spanish Barbs.[4][6] Since no genetic variants were observed not also seen in domestic horse breeds, in 2010 Cothran also concluded the horses were not a unique species which had survived in North America from prehistoric times.[25] Rather, they were linear descendants of the Spanish Barb, with some evidence of genetic similarity to light racing and riding breeds.[26] The genetic tests also revealed that the Pryor Mountains horses carried a rare allele variant known as "Qac" that only Spanish horses brought to the Americas also carried.[27] Dr. D. Phillip Sponenberg of the Virginia–Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, an expert on horse breeds, observed that, physically, the horses conform to the Colonial Spanish Horse type.[4] Genetic studies have also revealed that the herd exhibits a high degree of genetic diversity,[6] and BLM has acknowledged the genetic uniqueness of the herd.[4] Because of the unique genetic makeup of the Pryor Mountains Mustang herd, Cothran concluded in 1992 that "the Pryor herd may be the most significant wild-horse herd remaining in the United States."[28] Sponenberg agreed, noting, "[These animals] don't exist anywhere else."[1] This herd was the subject of the 1995 documentary film Cloud: Wild Stallion of the Rockies and its sequel, the 2003 documentary film Cloud's Legacy: The Wild Stallion Returns.[29] Management of the Pryor Mountains horse herd has focused on fulfilling the Free-Roaming Wild Horse and Burro Act's requirement that BLM maintain a "thriving natural ecological balance". In general, BLM initially focused on how many horses the range could support and in maintaining conformity to the Pryor Mountains standard. However, with the development of DNA testing in the mid 1980s, the focus changed to include maintaining the herd's genetic viability. In 1988, researchers at Washington State University authored a paper which raised concern that the herd exhibited a lack of genetic diversity, and could be suffering from genetic drift and/or a population bottleneck.[30] BLM contracted with Cothran (then at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Kentucky, but now at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences) to take random genetic samples of the herd in 1994, 1997, and 2001.[26] Cothran's analysis found "no evidence of a bottleneck".[31] Genetic diversity was actually above the mean for feral horse herds in the United States, and just below the mean for domesticated breeds.[25] The BLM, however, interpreted these studies in 2009 to indicate that the genetic diversity of the Pryor Mountains herd is "well above" the mean for domestic breeds.[32] Cothran considered the herd to be in genetic equilibrium,[26] although he cautioned that a minimum of 120 breeding-age animals should be kept on the range to maintain the genetic health of the herd.[31] Research by biologists and veterinarians at Colorado State University, the University of Kentucky, and other colleges found that there is little inbreeding in bands, as the stallions tend to drive off colts when they are about two years old.[1][32] ~To Be Continued From Page 2~