U.S. Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada continued her advocacy for wild horses and burros by penning a letter to the director of the Bureau of Land Management urging the agency to reconsider the scale of its roundups this year.

Titus and fellow Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee also asked the BLM on Wednesday to press pause on the roundups until they justify this year’s roundup plan, including explaining costs and how to care for the tens of thousands of already captured animals that have not been adopted or sold.

According to the gather and fertility control schedule for fiscal year 2024, the BLM plans to gather as many as 20,942 animals — mostly horses — from ranges in the West. Some may be returned to the range, but the agency may permanently remove 19,870 of them. The fiscal year started in October.

The BLM is tasked with managing the feral horses and donkeys on the public land it also manages. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 guides the federal roundups.

This year’s removal schedule requires more than 30 gathering operations, mostly achieved with the assistance of low-flying helicopters and wranglers driving animals into traps.

A roundup currently underway in rural Northern Nevada — primarily within Pershing County — is planned to be what is likely the single largest gather conducted by the federal government. The East Pershing Complex gather is expected to capture as many as 2,875 mustangs. It started in late December and could run through February; as of Wednesday it had netted 1,749 horses, including 20 that were euthanized in the process, according to BLM reports.

Last year, the BLM only planned to gather 6,876 animals, and ended up gathering a little less than 6,000, data show.

“Tripling the number of animals gathered in the coming months is antithetical to BLM’s directive to ‘humanely capture’ wild free-roaming horses and burros and set them up for adoption,” Titus and Cohen wrote to BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning. “This is exacerbated by the use of helicopters that regularly create frightening and deadly situations for horses and burros.”

The letter says keeping animals in off-range corrals takes up 69% of the BLM’s herd management budget. An alternative control method — fertility-control vaccinations — make up only 1% of the agency’s budget.

Only about 1,300 animals are slated to be given a fertility-control vaccination and left on the range this year, according to the 2024 plan.

Meanwhile, more than 60,000 animals are in corrals awaiting adoption, the congressional representatives pointed out.

BLM data show that most of the horses the agency manages roam in Nevada.

The 2022 gather and fertility control plan called for up to 21,208 animals to be removed, although that aside, the total number of proposed removals has been on the rise, according to historical roundup plans.