Where the wild horses are

The wild horse symbolizes America’s pioneering spirit and the freedom of the Old West. Who doesn’t want to see wild horses running across the Western plains, free of human interference? Sadly, that picture has a downside. According to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), way too many horses live wild on federally owned lands.

Their numbers have grown for years, but 27-year BLM veteran Gus Warr said the horse problem has gotten worse: More than 67,000 wild horses now roam on federal land that can sustain only 25,000.

“We’re about 2.5 times where we should be on our numbers,” Warr said. How the population reached this point is a complicated story, but the result is simple: Too many horses compete with other animals—as well as human beings—for scarce resources.

To help reduce the number of horses, the BLM holds occasional roundups like one I witnessed in August near Milford, Utah, population 1,400. Milford is in that part of the country where open-range cattle wander across the road and signs warn travelers that the next service area is 78 miles away.

Wild horse enthusiast Brian Hunter and I drove for an hour higher into the arid mountains of the region known as the Blawn Wash Herd Area, a 28,000-acre wilderness. We grabbed backpacks, cameras, and lawn chairs. Then we hiked a quarter mile up the side of a large hill to a position facing east over a shallow valley. Below us was a corral set up to trap the horses. Twenty of us, ranging from documentarians to ranchers and horse lovers, waited on a hillside hidden behind juniper pines for the roundup to begin.

The BLM uses helicopters for these roundups, called “gathers.” The helicopters cover vast distances over rough terrain, and their engines chase the horses into hidden corrals. But they can’t fly in 20 mph winds, which we had that morning, so for a while we weren’t sure if the roundup was on. At 7 a.m., after an hourlong wait, we heard their distant sound.

Hunter volunteers as a horse scout for the BLM. Once or twice a month he goes out on the range to locate and watch herds of wild horses. What he sees disturbs him: “Far too many horses and no way to control the population growth.” He describes starving horses “stumbling and falling, but the BLM still cannot put them down because of the laws.”

The law is the federal Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. It protects wild horses from human harm on nearly 250 million acres of BLM-managed land. In the early 1970s people worried that the wild horse, seen as a symbol of the American West, was becoming endangered. This law, and a 2006 law that outlawed horse slaughterhouses in the United States, limits how the BLM can control the wild horse population. The most the agency can do is round up 10,000 horses each year (some will be adopted by private owners) and administer contraceptives to others.

Some of the loudest voices in favor of gathers: ranchers who don’t want the horses grazing on their land and competing with cattle for water and food. The August gather was part of a BLM agreement to remove horses that have wandered onto a rancher’s land. The BLM will remove the wild horses every two years.

The helicopter finally came into view with two horses running in front of it toward the corral. An hour later came another helicopter and seven more horses, flaxen manes and tails waving in the wind. By 12:30 the helicopters were done for the day, with 15 horses gathered. The BLM will continue the roundup for the next two or three days until it captures all 150 previously scouted horses.

Rounding up horses is expensive and time-consuming. Caring for the gathered animals costs more. “If we gathered a horse today and we put it into one of our short-term corral facilities … and it stays its lifetime in that corral, the average [cost] would be $50,000 dollars per animal,” the BLM’s Warr said. This year the BLM hopes to gather 10,000 horses, and private owners may adopt 2,500. The rest will join the 40,000 horses already in holding corrals.

The BLM is also pursuing strategies to limit horse births. A shot that makes horses infertile is both expensive and difficult to administer to wild populations. Spaying and neutering could work, Warr said. Government regulations and pushback from wild horse activist groups hinder these methods.

That leaves the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program trying to balance government regulations alongside the interests of people, wild horses, and wildlife. According to Warr, “We’re so far behind the curveball it’s gonna be years if not decades before we can get this program in balance, but we need to act now. … We can’t just give up.”