Nevada’s wild horses represent a policy failure, just not the one you think

By Scott Beckstead
American Wild Horse Conservation

A recent opinion piece by McKenli Williams argues that Nevada’s wild horse population is the product of decades of failed federal policy. On that much, we agree.

The Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program is enormously expensive, increasingly dependent on mass removals and failing to produce a sustainable long-term solution for horses, taxpayers or public lands. Where we part company is over the diagnosis. Williams places the blame overwhelmingly on wild horses themselves while giving remarkably little attention to the commercial livestock occupying Nevada’s public lands, or the way BLM decides how much forage horses are permitted to use.

First, some context: BLM estimates the Nevada wild horse and burro population at roughly 45,000 animals. That’s about a tenth of the number of cattle.

Williams insists our wild equines should properly be called “feral” rather than “wild,” a tactic meant to diminish the overwhelming public support they enjoy. Congress, inconveniently, formally defined them as “wild free-roaming horses and burros” when it unanimously protected them in 1971, declaring them “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” We can spend another half-century debating adjectives versus pejoratives, or we can talk about how to manage them.

The more consequential problem is Williams’s treatment of BLM’s Appropriate Management Level, or AML, as though it represents the scientifically established number of horses the land can sustain. It does not. AML is a management allocation established by BLM. In its landmark 2013 review, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that BLM’s methods for establishing and adjusting AMLs were not transparent, scientifically supported or readily adaptable to changing conditions. Yet the agency has failed to reform the AML system. So when we say Nevada has three times as many wild horses and burros as its statewide AML, we are comparing the population against an administratively established number, not some immutable ecological carrying capacity handed down on stone tablets.

Nor do wild horses have Nevada’s public lands to themselves. Most Herd Management Areas are multiple-use landscapes where privately owned cattle and sheep consume the same vegetation and water. A 2024 analysis by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility using BLM’s own data found approximately 44 million acres of BLM grazing lands across the West failing minimum land-health standards with livestock identified as a primary cause, in whole or in part. More than two-thirds of the acreage failing those standards was attributed solely to livestock grazing; less than one percent was attributed solely to wild horses. Any serious discussion of rangeland health should acknowledge all the large herbivores using that landscape, including those grazing leased federal lands for private profit.

Williams is unquestionably correct that the federal Wild Horse and Burro Program has become staggeringly expensive. For decades, BLM’s dominant strategy has followed the same basic pattern: allow populations to grow, conduct expensive helicopter roundups, remove large numbers of horses, send them to government-funded holding and return several years later to do it again. Since 1971, BLM has removed nearly 136,500 wild horses and burros from Nevada alone. If removing that many animals from one state has neither solved the population problem nor improved overall rangeland health, perhaps the problem is not that we haven’t removed enough horses. Perhaps removal alone is not a population-management or land-health strategy.

The National Academy of Sciences warned in 2013 that repeated removals can contribute to high population growth rates by reducing competition for forage and keeping populations below levels where density-dependent pressures begin limiting reproduction. Yet BLM continues spending enormous sums treating population growth after it occurs while failing to invest adequately in preventing it. That is where fertility control comes in. Williams dismisses fertility control because it does not eliminate herds already above AML. Of course it doesn’t; that isn’t its purpose. Sustained fertility control slows population growth so managers are not perpetually chasing expanding populations with helicopters and holding pens, and, combined where necessary with targeted humane removals, can begin breaking that enormously expensive cycle.

There is also an animal-welfare obligation largely missing from Williams’s analysis. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act requires the agency to protect these animals and manage them humanely. Yet BLM continues to rely heavily on helicopter roundups in which horses are stampeded for miles across rugged terrain into traps, separated from their family bands and shipped to holding facilities. Asking whether we can do better in 2026 is not romanticism. It is responsible management.

Addressing Nevada’s wild horse population requires scientifically defensible population objectives, honest examination of livestock forage allocations, sustained fertility control, protection of genetically viable herds, and replacement of routine helicopter roundups with humane, on-range management strategies. It also requires acknowledging that equines, livestock and wildlife all affect the landscapes they share.

Williams is right about the central point: Nevada’s wild horse situation represents a profound policy failure. For more than half a century, BLM has removed horses by the tens of thousands, accumulated tens of thousands more in taxpayer-funded holding, underused fertility control and repeatedly returned to the range to repeat essentially the same strategy. The question is whether we will continue blaming wild horses for the failures of the system that manages them, or finally reform the system itself.

Scott Beckstead is Government Relations and Policy Director at American Wild Horse Conservation.