Resolving the wild horse crisis

Earlier this month, a governmentsponsored wild horse and burro advisory board issued a recommendation that the Bureau of Land Management sell or euthanize tens of thousands of wild horses being held in government corrals. The idea of a mass killing of horses was quickly — and predictably — met with fierce public condemnation.

For now, BLM officials have rejected the recommendation.

Even so, the advisory board’s position seemingly adds credence to the idea that America is in the midst of a wild horse crisis. One does not have to look very hard these days for a news story suggesting that horses are overrunning and damaging fragile public lands in the western United States.

In actuality, at most approximately 55,000 wild horses remain free on Western public lands. These horses are spread out over more than 30 million acres in 10 states. Moreover, this is just more than two and a half times the number of horses that existed when Congress passed the FreeRoaming Wild Horses and Burros Act in 1971 as a means to protect them from extinction, and is a far cry from the millions of horses that roamed the West in 1900.

What has changed for wild horses, as well as for all Western wildlife, is that over the past half-century or more America has increasingly commercialized Western public lands. Today, upwards of 2 million cattle graze public lands, and the government has authorized thousands of oil, gas and mineral extraction projects on federally owned properties. The result truly is a crisis. These commercial activities have substantially fragmented and reduced the amount of habitat left for wild animals.

Today, the BLM regularly limits wild horse herds to fewer than 200 animals, and intensely manages them