Episode 15: Wild Horses and Water in California
“Getting local people out on the land with wild horse advocates and seeing the effects first hand…the lack of water in these springs, that was really important as a first step.”
Laura Snell
A conversation with University of California Cooperative Extension Advisor Laura Snell about her work studying the lives of wild horses and water in Modoc County, CA. Released April 9, 2021.
guests on the show
Laura Snell
Laura Snell is a University of California Cooperative Extension livestock and natural resources advisor who also serves as the County Director for Modoc County. She has expertise in animal management systems, watershed protection & management, and management of range resources. Laura specializes in navigating the public/private land interface by working collaboratively land managers, policy makers, and the public on issues such as wild horse management, post-fire grazing, water quality and quantity, and rural development. She has been involved in the Society for Range Management, Wildlife Society, Public Lands Council, and several local advisory groups. Laura enjoys helping clientele address local problems with on-the-ground solutions and mentoring the next generation of land managers. When she is not working, she is hiking with her dog Zuri and traveling the world. Learn more about Modoc County here and the Devil’s Garden Research and Education here.
TRANSCRIPT
Faith Kearns
Welcome to Water Talk! I'm really excited to share this interview that we did with our UC Cooperative Extension colleague, Laura Snell. Laura is a cooperative extension livestock and Natural Resources advisor, who is also the county director for Modoc County. Laura and I first met at an academic orientation event many years ago, and she had her amazing dog Zuri with her at the time, and that sparked an ongoing conversation that we've had for many years about her work, which has turned out to be much different than what she thought she was going to be doing when she started as an advisor in Modoc County. That has been basically working with wild horses, which became a real issue during California's last big drought. Laura will talk a lot more about that and, she also will be talking quite a bit about where she lives, which is Modoc county, a part of California that a lot of people don't know a lot about the northeastern corner of the state that is vastly different from the sort of beaches and palm trees that people can often think about when it comes to California.
Sam Sandoval
What I like about this episode is that it brings in this perspective that not a lot of California knows about, which is having wild horses and all the issues related with wild horses. She really is able to bring together climate change, the drought, and having a lot of fuels and fires and having a lot of wild horses, and how that not only affected the natural landscape and the ecosystem, but also the community there. I really enjoyed how she's able to put a fine line to thread that line between all those topics. That again, us being in a drought year again, it brings back those memories of how to manage and what to expect.
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, I'm not somebody who knows a lot about horses. Just to hear about such a compelling environmental challenge, in a part of the state that I knew nothing about was pretty exciting and interesting. If anyone's curious, I did do some calculations, while we were talking and just curious about how much water do horses drink? Like, if we're thinking about like, what are the impacts of wild horses in a drought?
I think I think she covered several of the impacts with some of the impacts or what they actually do right to the systems that they're in and how they move around. But they also just drink a lot of water. We talked about just how their water needs are pretty significant. If a horse is drinking 25 gallons a day, and you have 3000 horses, that 75,000 gallons a day is what we're talking about just to meet the needs of these horses. So I think it's pretty interesting to just as a plant person who thinks a lot about, like how much water plants need in an agricultural science, it was interesting to think about horses as the system driver of water.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, the other thing that I find so interesting about Laura's work is it really speaks to what it means to be a scientist here in the 21st century. The kinds of skills that those of us practicing these days need, which are very, very different than how people might think about it. Generally, we think about the sort of technical expertise, but a lot of what Laura is dealing with has to do much more with sort of emotional intelligence, and learning to work with people in very high conflict, high stakes situations. So it's really compelling to just listen to her talk about what it means to be a cooperative extension advisor in 2021.
Sam Sandoval
I know that all the mentoring that she does with the staff and personnel and colleagues that she works, that goes beyond I mean, running the marathon of doing all the scientific work in that area. And then the extra mile making sure that that work is communicated, mentoring to another two more miles, mentoring people to do the communication and being able to build that trust. The third one is actually how she's able to build trust by bringing people outside, making them experience what she's talking about on our graph or on some numbers, what actually looks like in reality, and I really like that part.
The other part that I like, and again is this different perspective, and people may think of the north part of the state as water abundant, but the reality is that it is not. It is a place with water stress that is prone to fires, that is more resources like some of the springs there, they are very valuable and protected. A lot of the people that ranch community that are doing, keeping the ice and maintaining the landscape there, that are very important. I truly enjoyed this this episode.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, it was so interesting. I, Laura features in my book, and I gave a presentation about it last week to some undergrads at the University at UC Berkeley's journalism school. One of the students brought up that the idea of bringing people out to the field and seeing the impacts of the wild horses actually gave you the perspective of how frustrating it must be to actually be a horse looking for water in this very dry landscape. I thought that was such an interesting perspective that I would not have thought of on my own. But I was like, yeah, that's really true. You're sort of immersed in this environment where you realize, yeah, water is really scarce out here. What is the horse to do? So it was pretty fascinating.
Mallika Nocco
Water is scarce out here. What is a horse to do?
Faith Kearns
Water is a horse to do? I'm not a pun person, but that one was okay. So without further ado, we're going to let Laura talk about her extremely interesting job. Thank you so much for joining us today. Before we hear more about your work and your background, I'm wondering if you could paint a picture of Modoc County for listeners who may not be as familiar with the northeast corner of California.
Laura Snell
Hi, Faith thanks for inviting me to be on water talk today. Modoc County is truly the northeast corner of California, we border Oregon to the north and Nevada to the east. I'm closer to both of those states, than to campus, for example, that was only about 30 miles in each direction to get out of California. Modoc county is primarily a high plateau region, we are somewhere from 4500 to about 9000 feet in elevation.
We have a beautiful mountain range that we share with hardly anybody. We've got lots of wildlife, a small population, and part of that is because Modoc county is actually over 70% public land, primarily Forest Service land. Then we also have quite a bit of Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, and then a lot of state land as well. A lot of the work that I do in Modoc county is working on that balance of public and private land and partnerships. How do you have a thriving rural economy with so much federally owned land?
Faith Kearns
Thank you. So you were raised in the Midwest, and then I believe you spent some time in the south before settling here in California. So I'm wondering if you can just tell us a little bit more about your background and the work that led you here.
Laura Snell
Yeah, so I grew up in Iowa, my family, both my parents grew up on farms, and we still have a farm in North Central Iowa, primarily growing corn and soybeans and then also raising cattle. I went to school at the University of Nebraska and started in water resources. Actually, I have a hydrology degree. When I got done with that a job call from the University of Georgia came in and so I ended up going and working for a University of Georgia extension right out of college, doing environmental education. For the most part, we were teaching kids from the greater Atlanta area about the great outdoors, stream and Lake ecology, trees, variety of things like that.
After I got done with that I actually went back to the University of Nebraska to get my master's degree in grassland ecology and range management, which is more related to what I do now in livestock and natural resources. After that job, I worked on a ranch in North Central Nebraska with the Nature Conservancy, we had two bison herds we took care of and the year after I moved up, there was the biggest fire year that they'd ever had in that area of Nebraska. So I worked primarily on post fire grazing and restoration. We had the bison which was a great opportunity, but also the cattle grazing as well. I've had a pretty diverse background.
A friend that I went to college with her dad actually sent me the job for Modoc county and was like you've got to apply for this and California really wasn't on my radar and was a little further from home than I had thought about moving. But I applied for the job, I came out for my interview. I called my parents that night and I said, if they offer me this job, I'm staying like, it's great, you're gonna love it. I'm the only advisor that's actually located in Alturas. We only have about 10,000 people that live in Modoc county. I get to do a little bit of everything, livestock, natural resources, timber, water, grasslands. But I also help with master food preservers, and master gardeners, and our local food hub. I really enjoy the diversity of my position and all the cool things to do.
Faith Kearns
I appreciate that you have such a diverse portfolio of things that you work on and in the background that you have. In terms of the water related work, specifically that you do as an extension advisor, can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Laura Snell
I can, so- and it's changed over the years. So I'm in my sixth year here in Modoc County, seems like yesterday. We have a variety of things that we've worked here with water, we've got some endemic and endangered fish species and Modoc county. Modoc actually has one of the only fish species to be removed from the endangered species list. A group here known as the Goose Lake Fisheries Working Group came together, and I joined that group when I started here, working on fisheries resources. We have the Pitt river here, the Pitt River watershed is important water that goes all the way down into San Francisco. So important fisheries, and I have worked a fair amount with water levels, but also water quality on the Pitt River.
And then most recently, working on SGMA. Our California groundwater is really involved- especially with the Big Valley groundwater management plan. Big Valley is located in the southwest corner of Modoc County, and the valley actually is in Modoc and in Lassen counties. Working with a engineering company GEI consulting, to write that plan, and also do quite a bit of research around our recharge areas, what opportunities we have for winter flooding fields, what opportunities do we have for forest management and riparian restoration and how that could actually affect our groundwater resources as well.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, that's super interesting to hear. I feel like so much of what we're talking about when it comes to groundwater is more on the physical side and hearing about this sort of riparian piece is interesting. So one of the biggest issues that you didn't necessarily know you'd be working on when you started your position has to do with wild horses. I find that people are often not familiar with California's wild horse population. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit in general about the wild horses sort of their population status and their effects on the land.
Laura Snell
I'd love to. So, Modoc county actually is home to the largest wild horse herd in California, and the largest US Forest Service managed wild horse herd in the country. The Devil's garden wild horses live on the Devil's Garden plateau in Modoc County, primarily Forest Service owned and managed with a little bit of BLM land in there as well, the Bureau of Land Management. When I first took this position, they were seeing the most horses that they had really ever seen on that landscape.
Horses have been present in this area for about 120 years. Horses came to the United States with the Spanish explorers. Horses were used in this area for farming for transportation for moving timber. Then they were also used in the US Calvary, we had significant numbers of US Calvary, historically that were here in Modoc, Siskiyou and even into Oregon as well. Those horses were set to graze on the Devil's Garden when it was private land, and those horses were bred and were managed by the local people. When they needed horses, they would go to this area and they would gather up some horses and bring them home and then use them on their farms and ranches.
That changed in 1971 with the passage of the Wild Free Roaming Horse and Burro act, and that's a congressional law that protects those wild horses and burros on federal land as they existed in 1971. It's the Devil's Garden wild horse territory that existed in Modoc county in 2013. They did a management study and found that there should be between 204 and 406 wild horses In this area, but when I first started, we were almost at 4000 horses. A lot of horses. This last year, we've gotten down to about 2000 horses, it's huge to be able to tell you that I think we're down to half. But we still have a long way to go. Grazing animals, whether it be horses or cattle or elephants, when you exist at that level on a landscape, there's not enough food, there's not enough water. I started this position during this iconic California drought period that we just got through.
I'm up there with all these horses and limited water resources, very limited forage. Those horses have expanded from their territory, which is about 250,000 acres, to now over 600,000 acres. The horses have been getting on our highways and onto roads, they come into people's gardens, and they’re starting to be an issue in terms of safety. But then also from a standpoint of natural resources, as well. The first thing I did was start a research project using trail cameras to monitor how wildlife livestock and wild horses were using these high Alpine springs. These riparian and spring areas are few and far between. By the time you get further into the season, August September before the rains happened, there's not a lot of water out there. We were seeing a lot of competition.
Livestock are being removed from the Devil's Garden, and we still actually have some livestock producers that haven't been able to return to their grazing allotments. During this entire period, I've been working on this issue, the horses were and still are really playing a big role in this ecosystem. We see a change from the perennial grasses that we usually have to annual grasses, like cheatgrass and Medusa head, and annual invasive grasses, they play a big role in terms of fire frequency as well, annual grasses tend to dry up very quickly in the season, you then have that fine, really dry fuel out there, that's different than the perennial grasses that have grown and evolved in this area. You have the standpoint of just how the climate has been changing and going through that drought period. So you've got a lot of drought and a lot of fine fuels, and not a lot of water, and a lot of horses. Those are pretty much the big things that I've been working on and the situation.
Faith Kearns
Thank you so much, Laura, I'm just wondering for folks who don't have as much background, if you could talk a little bit about how the wild horse population grew so large to begin with.
Laura Snell
Up until 1971, the local community managed that herd, when the horse numbers got high, they went up there, they gathered a few horses, they brought them home, it was a really popular thing for cowboys to do in the winter, actually. So it's like you were out on the range all summer, you got back to Modoc County. There wasn't a lot to do here and so you went with your buddies and you got a couple horses from the Devil's Garden, and you brought them home and you trained them. Then you sold them to other ranches. You trained them as pack animals, whatever it might be. After that act was passed, then it became the sole responsibility of the federal agencies to manage those horses, and it actually became illegal for local people to go and gather those horses themselves.
For quite a while in there, from about 1971 to the early 2000s, the federal agencies were doing a pretty good job of managing horses. You can see this in the Bureau of Land Management as well. They were doing helicopter gathers, they were gathering horses with bait trapping and with water trapping. You set a hay bale in a big round pen. When the horses come in, you close the gate, and then you pick them up. But after that point, there was another big push from advocacy groups. There was a lot more litigation that happened and lawsuits and the amount of horses that were gathered really started to decrease. At the same time, there was a decrease in the amount of horses that people were adopting, as well. You saw some of the lowest numbers we've ever had. That corresponded with some economic downturn in our country. It corresponded with some times where we had some drought nationwide- people didn't have a lot of extra pasture to just have horses out.
All these things coming together at once the federal agencies had started putting horses in these long term holding facilities. So you effectively had horses in your dirt pasture, dirt corrals, a lot of times in the Midwest, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and they were paying taxpayer money to feed all these horses. They had maxed out these facilities. They're like, we don't have any room. We've got horses on the range, a lot of advocacy pressure to stop gathering. The numbers just started increasing. At the same time, the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service started really not getting along with each other as well. So the Forest Service used to be like, hey, BLM, can you come gather our horses? And that's how they made it all work. When they started not getting along, they're like, no, we're not taking your horses anymore. So you had a time period of about 10 to 15 years that you had no management of the horses.
The Devil's Garden wild horse herd, in general is a pretty healthy herd, the population grows at a rate of between 22 and 25% a year. So every four to five years, your population is doubling. So we were at the appropriate management level in the early 2000s. Then your 200 becomes 400, and 400 become 800, and 800 becomes 1600. All of a sudden, we're at 4000. It's sad that we had to get to 4000. But it was also 4000 horses during a major drought. People were really starting to realize what the impacts were. There wasn't any food out there. We have several mule deer that have collars on them. Our mule deer population travels back and forth across the Oregon border. All of a sudden, those mule deer stopped coming back into California. They just stayed up in Oregon, you had all these things that happened that you're like, wow, I think we've hit a point where we have way too many. We've got to do something now, or risk losing not only the wildlife, but the ecosystem as a whole.
Faith Kearns
Thank you for that background. You started to touch on it a little bit. But how do the wild horses affect life in Modoc County? And how does your work start to address what I guess I'd call some of the human dimensions of the wild horse issue?
Laura Snell
Yeah, so the first research we did was seeing how the horses were affecting the wildlife and the livestock. But then a couple years down the road, it was like, what are we missing in this conversation? What are we missing being able to tell people about the situation here, and we decided that an economic study was one of the biggest things that we could do at that point. I partnered with CSU Chico, and Rural Economic Development. We did an economic study on the Devil's Garden, we surveyed all of the livestock producers that are on the Devil's Garden. We started asking them about different scenarios, because we had two permittees two livestock grazers on the garden that have been told that they had to remove all of their cattle to allow for these higher numbers of horses.
We were effectively asking people, if you were told that you had to reduce your grazing by 25%, what would you do? Okay, how about 50%, now 75%, those kinds of things. As you're talking to these ranchers, they're saying, okay, well, at first, I could buy some more hay, I might be able to find some more land, but then you got to that 50% and people are like, I would have to sell my ranch. I would have to leave Modoc county. But as you get further down the line, you pretty much are seeing this economic driver in our rural community, that those ranchers as a whole, they provide about $5 million to our local economy every year. That may not seem like a lot in a big place, but to Modoc County, that's pretty significant. It's significant in terms of that money going into the general fund that goes to support ambulances and the hospital and all these extra things you need in your community. But that's also families that have children in our schools. Those are, a lot of times, spouses that are working in our community as well.
If those families have to leave, then we're losing our economic standpoint, we're also losing the people, losing the knowledge that those people have in our community, as ranchers are told they have to leave the area, that's also the on the ground knowledge that we're losing as well. Because these are the people that were fixing the fences, that were making sure those water holes were clean, not only for their livestock, but also for the wildlife and the wild horses. Those are an extra set of eyes out on the land, which I think we all know that sometimes people do bad things on public land. So now all of a sudden, we don't have those extra people out there. The wild horse situation in Modoc County is not just about the horses, but really about the community as a whole. When you have a county that has so much public land, everything that happens on public land affects our community very directly.
Faith Kearns
And I know that that has led to some pretty strong feelings about the horses and some contentiousness amongst different groups, and that you have tried to sort of broker and facilitate some processes around that. Can you talk a little bit about how you've tried to navigate the conflicts involved?
Laura Snell
Yeah, we have had a series of tours out on the land, which I think is really helpful. You're getting local people in the same room and out on the same land as some of the Wild Horse advocates, who are typically people who don't live in our community. Seeing the effects firsthand, seeing the short stubble height, the increase in annual grasses, the lack of water in the springs, that was really important, as one of those first steps. Then the other thing was to start to get people feeling like there are solutions, and that if we all work together, there's different pieces that we can take from these conversations, that local people can actually be part of the solution and finding those common ground. There are, I think, people on either end of the spectrum, right. But a majority of people lie somewhere in the middle. The ranchers do really like the wild horses, they just want them managed, the advocates really liked the horses, but they also think that the ecosystem is important as well. Trying to find those lines where we can find commonalities. Wildlife is another one in the wild horse conversation, that can be a really important common ground between people of a variety of backgrounds.
Going out on the land has been really important. Then we also started a local, we just call it the Local Group. We had meetings in my office for about two years to just get local people who maybe weren't part of one of these large national advocacy groups, but were really concerned about the issues and wanted a place where they could talk about some things that they could do to help the situation. Out of that came a lot of locally driven solutions. We've got several Facebook groups that talk about the wild horses, and really how great these horses can be, but also about how important management is. We've got flyers, and we're talking about the history of the horses, and how the horses here were working horses, who- they were bred to work on these ranches and work in the Calvary and timber industry. They weren't meant to just be out there unmanaged. Trying to convince people that, hey, take these horses home and use them.
That all led me to that point in my career a couple years ago, that it was like, the science is great. I will tell you everyday that the science is great, but I felt like I needed to do more in terms of outreach more in terms of talking to people and getting them to the table. I had a couple of great interns that year. Out of this local working group, we decided to do what we call the Devil's Garden Colt Challenge. We have been putting foals from the devil's garden gathers with 4H and FFA kids, and they've been training these little horses. We had 20 kids last year in the program. We've got 32 kids that have applied this year. That may not seem like a lot. But you think about that's 10% of the horses that we have at the corrals and we found that for every kid that took a horse in this program home, one more horse also went home with a friend or family member. With those kinds of things I think there's really a role for that and Cooperative Extension as well, starting with the science, but then it's also how you work in your communities and help develop some of these solutions as well.
Faith Kearns
I think that's such an important point in your career- it sort of exemplifies this in so many ways that the sort of scientific and technical training and work is just one piece of a whole bunch of other things. I'm just wondering, particularly for early career folks, it might be useful to hear about some of the skills that you've had to take on that might be sort of unexpected in a scientific training process. So you can talk about maybe some of the things you've needed to learn and how you've been able to do that.
Laura Snell
Definitely, I think, from my standpoint, and learning those things, but also, as I've gotten a little bit further, in my career, I have found that having interns and seasonal employees, and bringing people and helping them train either right out of college, or while they're still in college for these types of careers, has been really important. It's the writing piece, and it's it's writing scientific journals, but it's more than that. It's learning how to write for popular press, and blogs, and, frankly, to participate in these conversations like we're having today. How important is it to pick up the phone and talk to people and be involved locally in the community. I think that's the other thing, too, is that when I moved to Modoc County, I was prepared to be a part of the community, to join a civic organization, to go to the cattlemen and cattle women's meetings, to meet people in those kinds of places.
I get that question a lot from really, young professionals that move to my county that are like, what now? And I think sometimes I'm like, oh, man, maybe my parents knew something about this. But that, like the rotaries and the Kiwanis, and those kinds of groups are serving a bigger purpose in our communities. Being involved in groups like that helps not only I think, us personally, but I have found that it helps a lot in my career as well. Those are some of the easiest people to first tell about some of the new research I'm doing. Because they know me. They can say, well, Laura, maybe you should think about it this way, or have you thought about this. I think it's important to do that with our colleagues at a university standpoint but it's also important to do it in our communities with your on the ground stakeholders. In my field, fewer and fewer people are living on farms, for example, and have farming in their direct background, like their parents work on farms. In order to tell people about what agriculture is like, we've got to meet more people who are like those people in our civic organizations and in our communities.
I've been having interns for a couple of years now. Some of the big things we do with our interns is that I make them spend days with a variety of different people in our community. So they'll go and spend a day with a forester from the Forest Service. Then they'll go and spend time with our partner biologists from US Fish and Wildlife. They'll spend a day doing this and that and meeting people. Because at the end of the day Cooperative Extension doesn’t hire a ton of people, and I know that, but I want to give them the best opportunity they can to get a job in whatever field and these networking, relationship building. Then also the piece that when they get home from these other work experience kind of things that we do, they get back to the office, and I have them write blogs. Sometimes at the beginning of the summer, it's like, gosh, not another school project. But then by the end of the summer, they're like, oh, I really enjoyed that. Because I wrote about my experiences. It's sometimes hard to get away from the like, well, my teacher told me to write two pages on this. I'm more saying there's no limit. I just need you to write down what you experienced today, what you'd like people to learn about this. I think that kind of writing can be really influential, whether you're talking to their peers at school, or we're talking to people in our community, or even talking to people outside of our community in blogs that could be now read by people all over the world. I think those are all all things that I've learned and that I've really enjoyed trying to teach some of our recent graduates as well.
Faith Kearns
So we always like to ask our guests if there's anything more that you would like people to know about your work, also just generally how we, meaning me and Sam and Mallika, but also everyone listening to this can support your efforts.
Laura Snell
I want to tell you about a West Wide Cooperative Extension project we just finished. It was on a nationwide survey of how people felt about wild horses, and what they knew about wild horses. We conducted this survey over the last six months. We pretty much found that most people in the country don't know that much about horses. People think that most of the horses live in places like Oklahoma, Kansas, tallgrass prairie, and the horses are out there, plenty of food and those kinds of things. I think, you know, for us, it's an eye opening experience to do these types of surveys. But it's also really important, because here we are in the West, and the West is primarily range land. I think even the concept of rangeland is lost on a lot of people.
Even in California, I don't know that people, go to the desert and then remember that like most of Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona - most of that is all that kind of ecosystem. Education to the public is definitely something that I need to continue working on and thinking about. But the other thing was that we asked people about how wild horses should be managed, and by and large, people do believe in management. People like horses, I like horses, you like horses, but that management part is key. I think that that's a thread that I can talk about in horses, but I can also talk about in terms of all of our water resources as well, that you don't necessarily want to take agriculture off the land. But we want to have some management, we want to have management of riparian areas and forest health and those kinds of things. It's not a black or white. It's that middle piece of management.
That is, I think, the most important role that we really play in Cooperative Extension, and trying to educate people about it, and then also finding what that best means.