AZTEC, N.M. — The land is parched, the fields are withering and thousands of the nation’s horses are being left to fend for themselves on the dried range, abandoned by people who can no longer afford to feed them.
They have been dropping dead in the Navajo reservation in the Southwest, where neighbors are battling neighbors and livestock for water, an inherently scant resource on tribal land. They have been found stumbling through state parks in Missouri, in backyards and along country roads in Illinois, and among ranch herds in Texas where they do not belong.
Some are taken to rescue farms or foster homes — lifelines that are also buckling under the pressure of the nation’s worst drought in half a century, which has pushed the price of grain and hay needed to feed the animals beyond the reach of many families already struggling in the tight economy.
And still the drought rages on. The most recent federal assessment is that parts of at least 33 states, mostly in the West and the Midwest, are experiencing drought conditions that are severe or worse. It is affecting 87 percent of the land dedicated to growing corn, 63 percent of the land for hay and 72 percent of the land used for cattle.
With water tables falling, fields are crusting and cracking, creeks are running dry. Water holes first shrink, then vanish. And dozens of wildfires are consuming forests and grassland across the West.
While precise figures are hard to come by, rough estimates from the Unwanted Horse Coalition, an alliance of equine organizations based in Washington, puts the number of unwanted horses — those given up on by their owners for whatever reasons — at 170,000 to 180,000 nationwide, said Ericka Caslin, the group’s director.
Many more could be out there, though. The Navajos, for instance, have no tally on the number of feral horses on their land; a $2 million effort to count and round them up was vetoed by the tribe’s president because of the cost.
In Aztec, a speck of a city in northern New Mexico, just outside Navajo territory, Debbie Coburn has been scrambling to enlist volunteers and raise money to feed, clean and care for three times as many abandoned horses as she had in her rescue farm, Four Corners Equine Rescue, through all of last year.
She gets up almost every day to find messages in her computer from people whose horses are in desperate need of help. One recent morning, a woman writing on behalf of her elderly parents who live just east of Albuquerque said, “They have scraped by every week to purchase a bale of hay for their horse, but they just can’t do it anymore.”
At $8 to $12 for a bale of roughly 60 pounds, enough to feed a riding horse for maybe three days, hay costs five times what it did 10 years ago, Coburn said. This summer’s anemic harvest has spurred competition for a limited supply among ranchers big and small, from nearby cities and also from out of state. And as a rule, the price of hay goes up in the cold months; it doubled last winter, when the drought’s devastating effects first began to sprout.
“This winter, to be quite blunt, scares the hell out of me,” Coburn said as she walked across the corrals where the horses are kept, some of them in improvised pens enclosed not by steel barriers, but by electric fence. (The horses have arrived faster than she has been able to make room for them.)
Tony Pecho, the president of Illinois Horse Rescue of Will County, some 50 miles south of Chicago, has been trying to get horses adopted straight from the homes of the people who call to say they can no longer keep them. There is no money to bring them all to his farm, he said. And while calls for abandoned horses were rare in years past, this year they are the most frequent, he said, sometimes coming from places as far as four hours away.
Pecho has been asking for donations, of money as well as hay, on Facebook. On Saturday, Connie Hendrix, the president of the Missouri Forget-Me-Not Horse Rescue and Sanctuary in Linn Creek, is hosting a fundraising ice cream social and pie auction at a church, and then a golf tournament and silent auction next month, just to feed the horses she already has.