The Environment and Natural Resources: Wild Horses

Nearly 100,000 wild horses are roaming public lands across the West, and they provide a continuing lesson that sometimes even the best intentions can go badly awry.

Back in the 1960s, the wild horse population was actually vanishing, thanks to continual roundups that often sent mustangs to the slaughterhouse for pet food or fertilizer. But that began to change when the horrors of the trade were dramatized in the critically-acclaimed 1961 movie “The Misfits,” starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, and sparked an outrage from horse lovers and environmental activists.

By 1970, school children, prompted by activists, were flooding Congress, so the story goes, with letters calling for the wild horses to be protected.

Congress responded in 1971, passing a bill that made it a federal crime to kill a wild horse, and brought the commercial capture and slaughter to a halt.

But absent any predators, the wild horses began reproducing at an astonishing rate and soon dominated parts of the range, sparking a range war.

Ranchers who relied on that same range to feed their sheep and cattle, wanted the horses rounded up. Activists, appalled at the prospect of horses being rounded up and killed again, wanted the wild horses to remain free.

The Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency responsible for tending public ranges, compromised. It began culling the herds – up to some 7300 in 2019 – but housed them in corrals and holding pastures, and fed them on the government dole.

That created another problem, that pleased no one. The government is currently housing and feeding some 49,000 horses, at the cost of up to $50 million a year. That figure is threatening to bankrupt the entire program.

Meanwhile, the wild horses on the public lands continue to multiply.