In the years after passage of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, horse populations rebounded. Valleys in Nevada where once it was rare to see a mustang soon had bands dotting the sage. In a place called the Stone Cabin Valley in Nevada, where once there had been only a scattering of horses, there were nine hundred. The bands grazed placidly around the valley’s springs and up in its hills, untroubled by mustangers or ranchers. Wild horses had been saved.
But the success of the law was also increasingly a problem. The Bureau of Land Management determined after the law was passed that there were likely far more than the seventeen thousand horses it had originally estimated. Maybe as many as twenty-five thousand. Freed from the pressures of mustangers, the herds were increasing by about 15 percent a year. They were coming out of the hills and canyons where they once hid and grazing on prime cattle land. Ranchers were calling the BLM to complain about horses eating grass that once fed their herds. BLM range specialists on the ground found that some ranchers were not able to graze at previous levels because horses had taken the forage, and that the problem would grow worse if left unchecked.
During the 1971 testimony in Washington, reproduction had gotten scant attention. Ranchers had warned of growing herds, but mustang advocates had generally either ignored the issue or dismissed it. Hope Ryden, the best-selling author of America’s Last Wild Horses and the most prominent voice for mustangs after Johnston, insisted that population growth was a myth ranchers fed to the “gullible public,” adding, “Left to their own devices, the wild horses do not seem to multiply until they eat themselves out of their habitat.”
She and many other horse advocates were sure the talk of multiplying horse herds was yet another ploy by the wild herds’ enemies to get them off the land. “Dire prophecies are made regarding an imminent wild horse population explosion by those who would have them removed,” she wrote in a revised edition of her book. “Because the horses are not ‘culled’ by hunters, the public is told it is only a matter of time before the herds will overpopulate and starve. In the case of the wild horse, an animal that is not being ‘managed’ for game, no such catastrophe has yet been recorded.”1
But on the land, that was proving to be false. In Nevada’s Stone Cabin Valley, BLM range scientists had estimated the land could sustain only about five hundred horses. With nine hundred now in the valley, they said the pasturage would soon collapse. To avoid that, the bureau said, the extras would have to be rounded up.
Velma Johnston visited the Stone Cabin Valley on a blistering day in July 1975. After touring the valley by Jeep and airplane with bureau staff, Johnston agreed to the roundup. The range was in rough shape. Some of the horses would have to go, she said, as long as some of the cattle came off, too.
On the first day of the roundup, Johnston liked what she saw. Wearing a snap-button denim shirt and a mustang belt buckle, and sucking ice cubes to keep cool, she looked out at a tall corral fence set up in a circle around a distant spring with a single gate that could swing shut once mustangs wandered in to drink. It was the same kind of water trap mustangers had used for centuries, but she saw it as a sign of progress.
Where once wild horses were run to death by trucks and planes, mutilated in the pursuit, hunted to the brink of extinction, and sent off to the cannery, now the Bureau of Land Management was protecting and removing the extras humanely. The man they contracted to run the trap—a fireman out of Las Vegas who had been a weekend mustanger before passage of the law—did not chase or abuse the animals. The captives were not sent to the slaughterhouse. Instead, the BLM had found plenty of volunteers it called “foster parents,” who planned to train the mustangs as riding horses and pets. To Johnston, it seemed like sensible, cost-effective management that honored both the horses and the land.
“I feel good about myself,” she told a reporter as she stood in the sun.
But that feeling wouldn’t last more than a few days.
Though Wild Horse Annie herself had given the thumbs-up for a roundup, other wild horse groups were opposed. The Washington-based American Horse Protection Association, once an ally of Johnston, filed suit in federal court to stop the roundup, claiming the BLM was misrepresenting the quality of the range and the number of horses in order to do the bidding of a few ranchers in the valley. Its director had once welcomed Johnston to Washington as a friend. Now they were no longer speaking.
The ranchers whose cattle shared Stone Cabin Valley were not thrilled with the new BLM roundup either. They disagreed not with the roundup plan but with the whole premise that the federal government had authority over stray horses on public lands. It went against every bit of local law since the days of the trappers. Wild animals belonged to the states, not the federal government, they said. They saw the roundup as a potential precedent-setting move that could cede local authority to the feds, and they were not fixing to let that happen. The afternoon when Johnston had stood with a mug of ice cubes, looking out at her achievement, the head of the Nevada Department of Agriculture showed up and told the BLM to stop the roundup. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was unconstitutional, he said. The feds were stealing horses that rightfully belonged to the state and local ranchers. He impounded the seventy-five horses that had been trapped and shut down the operation.
Being blasted simultaneously by ranchers and conservationists, facing court challenges on both sides while trying to keep order on the land, was a fitting start for the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program. Since that day at Stone Cabin Valley, the BLM’s main management tool—nearly the entire focus of the program—has been rounding up and removing horses. In the process, it has been buffeted constantly by lawsuits from both ranchers and horse advocates. Its budget has ballooned even as it has slipped farther from its goals. It quickly became clear that the roundup policy had serious flaws and was so dysfunctional that no matter who ran it, and how much money they received, it was continually ending up in the ditch. And yet it is still the approach used today.
In 1975, despite lawsuits from both sides, the BLM eventually completed the roundup in Stone Cabin Valley. A federal appeals judge dismissed the lawsuit by the American Horse Protection Association, saying the BLM had discretion to remove horses under the law. The Nevada Department of Agriculture backed off its assertion that states owned the horses, after the regional BLM manager threatened that if the agency wasn’t allowed to take horses, “we’re going to have to take a close look at the numbers of livestock on that range.” Eventually, about 460 wild horses were removed. But that was not the end of the story.
I went to visit Stone Cabin Valley on a sunny but frigid February morning almost forty years after Johnston looked out at the water trap. I wanted to see how the management of wild horses had evolved since the birth of the law.
When I visited the valley, there were about 750 horses. The BLM planned to remove about five hundred through daily helicopter roundups that would span most of the month. Some would be adopted on-site by locals, but the vast majority would go into the maze of feedlots and storage pastures that the BLM calls “the holding system.”
I called the local BLM office in the southern Nevada town of Tonopah (pop. 2,478), to ask whether I could observe for a few days. The staff told me to meet them before dawn at a spot on a lonely highway that shoots east of town, where a missile stands fixed to a pole by the roadside. The Stone Cabin Valley was miles away, but since there were no road signs, no manmade landmarks to go by, no buoy in the sea of sage to help navigate, the staff said the missile was a convenient landmark.
When I got there, early on a chilly but clear morning, the missile’s tip pointed up at an angle, as if soaring off the launch toward an unseen target. A sign underneath the missile read TONOPAH TEST RANGE, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY. It marked the northern edge of a vast section of southern Nevada cordoned off by the federal government in the 1950s. These hundreds of square miles were so rocky and hot and dry, so useless and deserted, that during the Cold War the federal government decided they were perfect for nuclear testing, missile experiments, and development of other classified weapons. Area 51, the desert valley where watchers theorize the government is hiding flying saucers, was just down the road. Naturally, a place so harsh, empty, and remote has plenty of wild horses.
The BLM regularly gets requests from the public to visit roundups. Usually the observers are a mix of horse advocates, wildlife photographers, and local reporters who write the same story over and over about how roundups are controversial but necessary. It was going on long before I got involved, and the BLM has developed a cordial but grudging approach to it—the way some people feel about entertaining their least-favorite in-laws. But with the advent of social media, it has become more problematic for the bureau. One wild horse advocate standing in the sage can share what is happening to a worldwide audience of activists. A horse shot or whipped in the middle of nowhere can be seen by a hundred thousand eyes and spur outrage that could alert officials in the head office or members of Congress. Because of this, the BLM has become much more cautious. Public viewing areas are put farther from the trap. It was only after the rise of Facebook and Twitter that the agency began having armed guards at roundups and corralled viewers in small boxes marked off by pink plastic tape.
When the BLM’s pickups pulled up a few minutes after I arrived, only one employee got out, standing at the side of my car just long enough to say, “Are you all set? Then let’s go.” Our convoy headed east on a straight highway that followed the rhythm of all highways that cross the Great Basin—bowing up to a distant mountain range, then cresting through dark and jagged rocks and dropping to the next valley, where the road stretches out again for ten or twenty straight miles to another crest.
The land here is exceptionally empty. The town of Tonopah, too small to have even a traffic light, is crowded compared to the stretches of desert on either side. Going east, the next gas is in the tiny town of Rachel, 110 miles away. In between, there is basically nothing. Nye County, which holds Stone Cabin Valley, is bigger than Maryland but has only about forty thousand inhabitants, and all of them live far from Stone Cabin. No one lives in the four-hundred-thousand-acre basin—at least not anyone I could see.
I followed the BLM pickups up over a jagged strand of rocks called the Monitor Mountains, and down into Stone Cabin, where we turned north onto a dirt road, then northwest onto a smaller dirt road that wriggled up into the hills, then finally turned again onto a rutted track. We finally ended near a broad arroyo that the BLM had chosen as a good place for a horse trap.
Stone Cabin, like a lot of Wild Horse Country, has a history straight out of a Zane Grey paperback. The herds here are thought to be the legacy of a valley resident named Jack Longstreet, a moonshiner who was rumored to have had his ear cut off as punishment for stealing cattle as a boy in Texas. He had killed two men in Nevada and taken shots at a fair number of others. After ranging around several mining boomtowns in the region, he married a Paiute woman and moved to the valley in 1906. He set up a horse ranch, where he introduced Thoroughbred stallions into the native herds and sold his half-wild horses to the US Army. The horses in Stone Cabin have a distinctive gray coat said to be left over from a gray stallion Longstreet brought from Texas. How much is truth or legend is too blurry ever to sort out.
I came to the Stone Cabin Valley to observe not so much the horses as the roundups. Roundups are all you hear about in the world of wild horses. Advocates have been fighting them since the 1970s. They say they are brutal and cruel. Hope Ryden blasted them for needlessly spreading panic and dust-borne pneumonia in the herds. Some horse advocates talk about roundups in language from the Holocaust. The BLM, in contrast, portrays helicopter roundups as the safest, most humane way to control horse herds—a gentle gathering. I wanted to see for myself whether roundups were really that bad.
Opposition has hardly softened since Velma Johnston stood here in 1975. In the months leading up to the roundup, a Los Angeles–based wild horse group was lobbying to shut down the operation, and the Nevada legislature introduced a bill favored by ranchers to change local water law to specifically prohibit wild horses and burros from drinking. Both were eventually unsuccessful, but they have not discouraged similar efforts since then.
Other things have changed a lot. The BLM now uses helicopters instead of water traps. It also has a long, legally required planning-and-comment process for roundups. It no longer relies much on “foster parents” to take wild horses, and instead it has developed a vast system for storing them. A Supreme Court ruling put an end to states’ constitutional challenges of ownership.2 But the fundamental approach has not changed much. It still follows a template created by mustangers a century before: Round ’em up and move ’em out.
For more that forty years the BLM has used roundups as its main and often only management tool for wild horses. It has had one goal in mind: Limit wild horses and burros to twenty-seven thousand on the range. The agency calls this number the Appropriate Management Level, or AML. That golden number—twenty-seven thousand—is what BLM range ecologists say can be sustained on the available land. Plenty of wild horse advocates disagree with this number, saying it is kept artificially low to serve cattle interests, but the BLM has stuck with more or less the same number for thirty years. Agree with it or not, it has steered policy.
The agency has never actually reached that golden number, though. One program director after another has sought to do so. If they could reach AML, they reasoned, then the roundup strategy that has not really been working for forty years would start to work. That is because at AML, the number of extra horses that need to be removed each year could reasonably be adopted out. By adopting horses out instead of storing them, the agency would keep costs down. That number would also keep peace with cattle and wildlife interests on the land. From the agency’s perspective, all would be good.
The agency has been trying to reach AML since at least 1980, but never has. Every time it gets close to twenty-seven thousand, it is overwhelmed by the cost and controversy of the massive roundups needed to reach the number. Then it must give up, exhausted, and let the number of horses on the land begin to increase again. Nonetheless, that has not stopped the BLM from repeating the effort every decade or so.
In 2016, I toured one of the thirty ranches the agency rents to store wild horses it has gathered off the range. With me was the director of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program. By that point, attempts to reach AML already had failed three times, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite the efforts, the wild horse population in the West was almost triple AML. I asked the director what he thought the program should do. “I really feel,” he said, “if we could just get down to that number, reach AML, it would take care of a lot of our problems.”
Here is what keeps tripping up the agency: Roundups produce thousands of captive horses for which the BLM has to find a place. It has an adoption program that trucks wild horses all over the country in an attempt to find homes. Nearly anyone can adopt a mustang for $125. But the number of adopters has never equaled the number of horses the agency removes from the range. The unwanted horses build up in storage, and storing horses costs a lot of money.
When I arrived at the trap site, I expected to spend most of the day alone, except for the armed guard at the pink-tape public viewing area that has become standard at all roundups. But when the BLM public affairs officer led me to the taped-off rectangle on a hillside of rocks, someone else was there.
Sitting on a cold chunk of basalt was a middle-aged woman with long, reddish blonde hair, camouflage pants, and an oversize Carhartt jacket. In the jumble of boulders, she had managed to set up two tripods, each topped with a small video camera recording the scene. She held a cigarette in one hand and a camera with a long lens in the other. When I scrambled up onto the rocks, she tucked the cigarette between her lips, held out her hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Laura.”
Her full name was Laura Leigh—a name that invokes quick reaction in all corners of the wild horse world. To some advocates, she is a tireless hero, to others a grandstander or sellout. To ranchers, she is a persistent meddler, and to the BLM she is often seen as big trouble because lawsuits she files against the agency seem to arrive as dependably as summer and winter.
“I’m a pain in the ass, but that’s kinda the point,” she later told me. “I make them do their job.”
The day I met her, she described herself with a sly smile as a “wild horse groupie”—one who tours from herd area to herd area and roundup to roundup, recording everything with the zeal of the most dedicated Deadhead bootlegger. I later learned she is much more than that. She has a detailed understanding of the law and a passionate desire to see horses treated humanely, and, because of this, she has dedicated her life to making sure the spirit of the Wild Horse Annie Law is carried out.
Just down from our pink-tape public viewing area, she had a beat-up green Ford Explorer with a tire lashed to the roof. She had bought the used Explorer with a hundred thousand miles on it, and within a few years she had put on a hundred thousand more while driving to the different herd areas. The dashboard was piled with papers and coffee cups. The back was a heap of clothes, tarps, sleeping bags, filing boxes—everything she needed for life on the road. The passenger seat was occupied by an aging Bernese mountain dog. Somewhere in the mess was a 9mm pistol she kept in case of trouble. The tire on the roof was not a spare but a seat—a perch where she could get a good look at the roundups when the BLM’s pink-tape public viewing area was less than optimal.
“The road really has become my life,” she said. “I’ve sold everything I have of value. I have no more jewelry left. I have nothing left except that truck and what’s in it. It’s frankly freeing. Possessions never created something of meaning for me. Interaction, conversation, making a difference. That has real value.”
It was still cold in the early morning light. We could hear the whine and THWOP of a helicopter echoing off the distant hills, but we could not yet see it. Below us, about 150 meters away, was a big round corral with wings of canvas opening on one side like a broad beak.
With nothing to do yet but watch our breath condense in the crisp air, I started asking Leigh about where she came from and why she was here.
She had ended up in Wild Horse Country via a long and winding road. She had grown up a dozen miles west of Manhattan in Bloomfield, New Jersey, the daughter of a cop. She had lived a relatively footloose life as an adult—first in New York City, then Haiti, then Maine, then most recently in Puget Sound, where she bred dairy goats, made cheese, and rehabilitated orphaned wildlife.
Her love of animals led her to adopt an old, unwanted domestic horse bound for the slaughterhouse. That led her to learn about horse slaughter, which led her to learn about wild horses. After watching her first roundup, she was hooked. That and a failed marriage put her on the road in 2009. She has basically been there ever since, going from one roundup to another, trying to document the everyday operations of the BLM. She works alone, paid survival wages by a nonprofit she founded called Wild Horse Education, which relies on small donors, mostly other women who follow her journey on Facebook.
The wild-horse-advocate world does not have one unifying figure like Wild Horse Annie anymore, and hasn’t since she died. In 1971, when the law passed, there was a more or less united front under Velma Johnston, and the willingness to unite behind her vision had helped push laws through Congress. But even before Johnston died of cancer in 1977, the movement had started to splinter. At the Stone Cabin roundup in 1975, Johnston was supporting the roundup and her main ally in the East, Joan Blue of the American Horse Protection Association, opposed it. Blue thought Johnston had become a caricature of herself and was too cozy with the BLM. Johnston thought Blue, who lived in the suburbs of Washington, DC, was too eager to bad-mouth ranchers and too quick to turn to the courts instead of compromise. By 1975, Johnston thought Blue was trying to undercut her support.
“I wouldn’t slam an outhouse door the way Joan Blue slams me,” Johnston once said.
Since then, the movement has only grown more Balkanized. Small advocacy groups pick their prize issues, and though they generally are united in bad-mouthing the BLM, they have rarely been in agreement on long-term solutions or presented a united front in a push to guide reforms. There is no broad strategy on when and why groups should take the bureau to court. The worst of the advocates are little more than equine Internet tolls who never set foot in Wild Horse Country. The best of them are good-hearted, hardworking groups who spend time on the ground and have detailed knowledge of specific herds. Most of them have a genuine desire to find workable solutions. But there is no larger, long-term vision of where they want to go and how they will get there. Many are as suspicious of each other as they are of the BLM, and afraid of having donors wooed away by a grandstanding competitor.
I have only met a few who spend as much time on the ground as Laura Leigh. As the sun rose at Stone Cabin, we heard the helicopter coming up over the gray sage. Leigh crushed out her cigarette on the chunk of basalt and slipped the butt into her coat pocket. She lifted her long lens and swept the sage with a practiced glide, then settled on a spot between two low hills where a flash of sun showed the helicopter’s polished white flanks. Her shutter began to click. Just below, eight horses crashed through the sage. Some were mahogany, some light cream. Under the click of her camera, I could hear Leigh whispering, as if talking into a horse’s ear. “Hey pretty girl,” she said. “Hey pretty girl, I know you don’t like it. I don’t like it either.”
The helicopter pushed the horses down into a shallow draw where the trap waited.
“It’s OK, babies, it’s OK,” Leigh whispered. She kept her lens trained on the chase, clicking the shutter every few seconds as the horses were pushed into the trap.
We sat for hours, watching the helicopter bring in one band after another until that corner of the desert was almost swept clean.
In her lawsuits and in her documentation, Leigh has pushed for humane treatment. She is not against roundups per se, though she sees the BLM as biased toward cattle interests. But in her opinion, horses should not be run too long, too fast, or in weather that is too hot. Family bands should not be run when the mares are pregnant or the foals are too young. And horses should not be rounded up unless good science shows it’s really necessary.
“I don’t think that is too much to ask,” she told me. “And I’m going to keep asking until they actually do it.”
In 2009, when she watched her first roundup at the Calico Herd Management Area, just over the border in Oregon, she saw contractors using cattle prods and a helicopter chasing a foal over rough, rocky terrain for miles, until it was near exhaustion. She later tracked the foal to a BLM holding corral and saw that its hooves had detached during the long chase. For days after seeing the foal’s injuries, she kept asking BLM staff about its fate.
A HELICOPTER ROUNDS UP HORSES IN STONE CABIN VALLEY, NEVADA, 2011.
“They told me it was fine, that he had recovered. It was only when I kept digging that I found out they had put it down,” she told me. “To me, that story is everything that is wrong with this agency. It is this old boy buddy system that will lie to your face if you let it. And the horse is the last priority.”
She soon realized that photos and videos were the only way anyone would believe her, and she set about documenting every roundup abuse she saw. She posts the videos and photos to social media. At times, the BLM has tried to shut her out. In 2010, during a roundup of the Silver King Herd Management Area in Nevada, the agency put the pink-tape public viewing area fifteen miles from the trap site. Leigh left, figuring she could find the site on her own, and was stopped by a BLM law enforcement officer who told her the trap was on unmarked private land, and if she tried to approach it, she would be arrested.
Leigh sued, saying the bureau was infringing on her right to freely observe the government’s activities. A federal appeals court agreed. She has sued the agency several times since, always pushing for the humane treatment of animals and access for the public. In 2011, a judge shut down a roundup in Nevada after she filmed a helicopter hitting an exhausted mare with its skid.
“To me, the horses are not just a number,” she told me. “They are not an estimate or a spreadsheet, they are individuals. They live as part of a family. I push to make sure they are treated humanely. But I think the BLM guys just shake their heads and think we are a bunch of tree huggers.” She paused and smiled. “That’s fine, because we can take them to court.”
As we sat in the pink-tape public viewing area, a helicopter brought in six more horses. We watched contractors in big black cowboy hats wave horsewhips tipped with white plastic shopping bags to urge the mustangs out of the corral and into waiting gooseneck trailers. It was as practiced and smooth as the roundup I’d seen in Sand Springs Valley. And just like at Sand Springs, I was struck with how the valley, which the BLM said was over its carrying capacity, seemed so empty. I mentioned this to Leigh and she nodded.
“The BLM keeps talking about how wild horses are so overpopulated and are destroying the range, but how can it be the horse’s fault?” she said. “Horses are on 10 percent of the public land, cattle are on 65 percent. Cows outnumber horses out here by at least 100 to one.”
The 1971 law stipulates that horses are to be the primary management focus in areas where they are found, she told me. “That never happens. Instead, the BLM creates these arbitrarily low numbers of horses that can be on range, then says there is a crisis when there get to be too many and rounds them up.”
In the afternoon, after rounding up dozens of horses, the helicopter crew called it a day. Leigh and I followed trailers full of mustangs in a long banner of dust as they rumbled down the desert valley toward the highway. At the highway, our caravan stopped at an old gravel pit, where the contractors backed up the trailers until they clanged against large, square corrals. The doors opened and the horses surged out into the pens. Wide-eyed, they turned and ran, looking for an escape, but there was none, so they settled into slowly milling around the enclosure.
Men with horsewhips and electric prods separated the bands by sex: stallions in one corral, mares in another, colts in a third. Horses reared and shrieked, kicked and jostled, trying to figure out where they were and how to get out. The gravel pit echoed with the ring of hooves against the metal corrals.
The sorting went on for the rest of the day. Near sunset, a long semi-trailer arrived. Three dozen mares were loaded up the ramp. The men in the black cowboy hats closed the big metal doors, and with a sigh the semi took off, going east. Another load of horses for the holding system.
A STALLION TRIES TO ESCAPE WHILE BEING SORTED FOR THE HOLDING SYSTEM AFTER A ROUNDUP IN STONE CABIN VALLEY, NEVADA, 2011.
“I understand the need for roundups,” Leigh said as we stood on a mound of gravel and watched the semi disappear in the distance. “But the more I see it, the more I realize it’s a racket. Those horses don’t make anyone any money when they stay on the range. They begin to make money for someone as soon as they are taken off. Rounding up, processing, holding—it’s people’s livelihood and they will defend it. But who will defend the horses?”
During the weeks of the Stone Cabin Valley roundup, the BLM removed about five hundred horses. In the process, fourteen died. One broke its neck, one its leg, one old mare just gave out. The rest were shot because of deformities or because they looked too weak to survive the holding system. This is not unusual. Federal audits over the years have found that about 1.2 percent of wild horses rounded up are killed in the process—a number the BLM describes as acceptably low.
Are roundups so cruel and traumatic that we should end them, as many advocacy groups have argued? They clearly are not a threat to the survival of the wild herds. We’ve been using helicopters for decades, and there are more horses now on the land than at any point since the law protected them. Are the roundups traumatic and cruel for individual horses? No formal, independent scientific study of the effects of roundups has ever been done. But clearly, the practice frightens animals and severs long-held social bonds.
What is more worrisome than the impact on individual horses is the impact on the agency that oversees them. Roundups have become a crutch that has kept the BLM from finding a better way of doing things. But they’ve done more than that. They have encouraged waste that has bred resentment and begun to undermine what wild horses mean. In many places in Nevada, they are no longer symbols of individual freedom. They are symbols of federal mismanagement and waste.
After we watched the last of the horses drive away in a semi and I said good-bye to Laura Leigh, I drove back to Tonopah. I planned to sleep out in the desert, but I wanted to get a hot meal first, so I stopped at one of the few sit-down restaurants in town—a little, sun-bleached Mexican place. At the bar sat three men in big black cowboy hats, the felt brims covered in gray dust—the contractors from the roundups. They wore boots with spurs and weathered jeans covered in the same dust. And in front of each man was a tall, frosty-pink strawberry daiquiri in a fancy glass with a long green straw. A man with long silver hair and a droopy mustache passed by the backs of their stools, his belly preceding him. “You boys trying to round up all of Tonopah?” he said with a chuckle.
“No, rounding up wild horses for the BLM,” said one of the contractors.
“Wild horses? Good. Get every one of those sons of bitches,” the man growled.
After the first Stone Cabin Valley roundup in 1975, the BLM had the legal clearance to take the roundup policy to all of Wild Horse Country. The agency started by trying to chase mustangs the old-fashioned way, on horseback. That quickly proved to be impractical. “We spent hours on horseback, not only just walking along but when the chase was at close quarters, galloping through brush and over loose, jagged rocks the size of footballs,” an author named Alden Robertson wrote, describing one of these early attempts. “That sort of riding was very hard on the horses, and if one got too tired or lamed up, its rider walked. Often a cowboy had to switch to his spare horse partway through the day. And sometimes he wore that one out as well.” The group Robertson shadowed spent three days riding dawn to dusk and caught only ten horses.
The BLM quickly realized that if it wanted to round up horses efficiently, it needed to go back to its old ways. It began lobbying for a change to the law that would allow them to use aircraft. It got the approval in 1976, when Congress added a small amendment to the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, or FLPMA. The law, which nearly everyone calls “flipma,” is basically the Magna Carta of the BLM—a wide-ranging law that gave the agency a new mission to manage lands sustainably for multiple uses, including mining, grazing, recreation, and wildlife.
The introduction of helicopters started a pattern that has continued until the present. Every year, the agency spends millions sending contractors with helicopters and corrals on a tour of the West, gathering up thousands of horses that are almost all shipped to the holding system. Often the same pilots who had captured horses for dog food before FLPMA were the pilots hired after the law to round up horses for the BLM.
The BLM has received steady criticism from horse advocates for continuing the pattern, but in many ways it had no choice. Public-land law requires the bureau to manage for multiple uses, which means keeping wild horse populations under control to maintain what it calls, “a thriving ecological balance and multiple use relationship.” When herds got too big, ranchers sued, saying the excess horses were eating grass that under multiple-use doctrine had been allocated to cattle. The BLM’s only ready solution was roundups.
The agency began removing thousands of horses every year: about two thousand in 1978, four thousand in 1979, and six thousand in 1980. But managers soon realized that this wasn’t enough. The wild horse population in 1978 was at about sixty-two thousand. Just to break even, the agency would have to remove more than eighty-five hundred horses a year. To get to AML, they would have to remove far more, so BLM director Robert Burford decided in 1981 to double the roundups.
His staff came up with a plan. It was going to slowly chip its way down to twenty-seven thousand horses on the range. If the BLM could cut the wild herds to twenty-seven thousand, the remaining herds would only produce about forty-five hundred extra horses each year—a number the bureau thought it could realistically adopt out. Helicopters gathered 12,500 horses in 1981 and almost as many in 1982. But the huge removals had a quick and obvious consequence: Suddenly there were thousands of horses in BLM captivity. The bureau had never been able to find adopters for more than a few thousand horses a year. It suddenly had ten thousand horses on its hands and began paying to keep them in private feedlots. The bill in 1982 climbed to $4 million—more than the entire budget of the program.
Fiscally conservative Republicans who dominated the West were not pleased. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who had worked for the Department of the Interior before entering politics, proposed an amendment to give the BLM authority to sell horses in storage to slaughter buyers. But he quickly withdrew his amendment after Idaho Senator James McClure, a longtime ally of ranchers and an advocate of roundups, sent him a letter warning that it was politically impossible: “Those who would protect the wild horses are zealous to a fault in their protection.” McClure told Stevens that letting the BLM sell to slaughter buyers “is going to inflame their passions.”3
The Reagan administration then made its own move to head off costs. Secretary of the Interior James Watt approved a directive stating that adoptions must pay for themselves. To meet the goal, the BLM announced it would raise the adoption fee for mustangs from $25 to $200 and instituted a policy that horses that were not adopted in forty-five days would be destroyed. The 1971 Wild Horse Annie Law had not addressed overpopulation, but a 1978 amendment, requested by the BLM, gave the secretary the authority to euthanize “excess” horses humanely. Up to that point, no one had ever done it, but the agency began to draw up plans.
An internal memo estimated the BLM would have to kill about six thousand horses, probably by lethal injection, though some would be shot and their carcasses burned on the range. In July 1981, someone in the bureau leaked the memo to a reporter at the Philadelphia Bulletin, immediately sparking what a BLM spokesman at the time called “an emotional firestorm.”
Velma Johnston had died of cancer in 1977, but Joan Blue, president of the American Horse Protection Association, took over as the main voice for wild horses.
“The ranchers have always wanted to get rid of all those wild horses, and now they’ve got the right administration,” she said. “We’re appalled by this and we’re going to fight it.”4
Director Burford tried to reason with horse advocates, saying the BLM was in a bind and lacked the cash to keep rounding up horses, which he said was necessary to protect the range. “If horses and burros are allowed to destroy the range, they destroy it for all,” he told them in a meeting. “The wild horse and burro herds suffer, livestock suffers, as do bighorn sheep, antelope and the many other forms of wildlife that inhabit the public rangelands.”
The bureau and the advocates met several times but were not able to find a compromise. So, just as the killing got started, Blue and two other horse-advocacy groups filed suit in federal court, saying the roundups violated the 1971 law. In all, only about fifty animals were killed before the BLM director, in January 1982, placed a three-month moratorium on euthanizing horses. It was seen as a temporary stay until a judge could rule on the case. It has never been lifted.
When the BLM backed down from euthanizing horses, it was still left with a growing problem of how to manage horse herds—a problem that became worse the longer the agency waited. By 1984, the number of horses on the range had grown to about sixty thousand again, and the BLM was facing lawsuits from ranchers. Once again, the agency pitched a familiar plan: Round up until the wild herds are down to twenty-seven thousand so the program could sustain itself. This time, though, the bureau added another piece: To achieve its goal, it would need more money. Way more.
In 1985, Congress agreed to more than triple the program’s funding, raising the budget from $5 million to $17 million, with the understanding that the agency would round up twenty-seven thousand horses in twelve months. The bureau staged what was likely the largest roundup effort since the heyday of the Chappel Brothers canning plant. The helicopters launched all over the West. More than a thousand horses were removed from Stone Cabin Valley alone. In the end, the agency was only able to gather about eighteen thousand wild horses in 1985. It gathered ten thousand more in 1986 and eleven thousand in 1987. If the BLM had kept on that track, it eventually might have reached AML. But nearly every horse removed was a horse the agency had to house and feed. The agency tried adoptions, but many of the horses were what one BLM wild horse specialist once described to me as “too old, ugly, or ornery” for anyone to want. Instead, the agency was saddled with animals. By the end of 1985, it was spending $26,000 per day to feed and house them—more than $9 million annually. (Remember, in 1971 the BLM had said the whole program would cost about $3 million.)
What to do with all these extra horses? The obvious answer from a rancher’s perspective was to treat them like any other livestock and sell them to the slaughterhouse. A horse could bring $150 to $250 at auction. It didn’t make sense to house them, many ranchers argued, when you could recoup the taxpayers’ roundup costs at the market. Idaho Senator McClure, who four years earlier had warned not to introduce a slaughter bill that would “inflame the passions” of the wild horse groups, now introduced his own slaughter bill, which would allow any wild horse to go to slaughter buyers if it was not adopted in forty-five days. It didn’t go over well. Most of Congress had no reason to vote on a politically poisonous bill to kill wild horses. The bill died in committee.
That left the BLM on its own. Director Burford’s moratorium against killing was still in place. So the agency tried something slightly left of euthanasia to achieve its goals—something that hinted at the corrupting influence of the roundup program that in later years would grow worse. They would give horses to slaughter buyers. They just wouldn’t advertise that they were doing it. The agency created what it called the “fee waiver” adoption program. Anyone who agreed to adopt a hundred or more horses at a time could have them for free. Horse advocates said it was a fig leaf to hide the BLM’s real intent. After all, who buys a hundred untrained horses unless they plan to sell them to a slaughterhouse? Animal welfare groups immediately took the bureau to court, but while the case was pending, the program kicked into high gear.
Later government reports showed the agency gave away twenty thousand wild horses between 1985 and 1988, counting them as “adoptions” when in fact they were sending truckloads to “kill buyers”—the middlemen who deal in unwanted horses and deliver them to the slaughterhouses. During those years, fee-waiver horses accounted for two-thirds of all adoptions.
It was about as ugly a system as you could design. The mustangers of yore were still making money from sending wild horses to the dog-food factory, but they no longer had to go out and catch them. Under the new system, the bureau was doing all of the work—kill buyers just had to haul away the horses. At the time, a thousand-pound horse could fetch $250, so during the program BLM gave away about $5 million worth of horses.
Regulations designed to protect horses from cruelty only added to their suffering. Fee-waiver buyers had to keep horses for a year before gaining the titles that would legally allow them to sell the horses to slaughter. It was a safeguard the agency had created to take away any incentive to the slaughter buyers bent on a quick profit, because buyers would have to feed and house horses for twelve months. But an investigation released by the Government Accountability Office found that this requirement often led to horses being kept under near-starvation conditions during the waiting period by kill buyers who wanted to maximize profit.5
In a number of cases, the BLM, desperate to get rid of the surplus horses that were dragging the program down, was aware of problems with the bulk adoptions but did nothing. At one location in Nebraska, a BLM inspection discovered six hundred horses living in a small lot without enough food or water. Thirty had died in the two months after they arrived at the lot. A veterinarian hired by the BLM said the remaining horses were facing death, too, if they were not given food, but the bureau did nothing. “Less than 1 month later, 40 more horses were reported dead,” noted a later review by the Government Accountability Office. “But BLM took no action.” In all, 150 horses died before the BLM arrived to reclaim them.6
In Oklahoma and South Dakota, investigators found the agency had given nearly 1,100 horses to groups that had then sent 687 to slaughter. Investigators warned the BLM about what the buyers had done, but the BLM issued titles for the remaining 394. They were quickly slaughtered. One buyer of 140 horses, who was contacted by suspicious Department of the Interior officials, wrote a letter to assure them that he did “not intend to use or exploit said horses for commercial purposes.” Seven days after he gained title, he trucked his herd to slaughter. The BLM got a call from the local slaughterhouse, where the man’s horses were waiting to go down the chute. The factory owner was concerned about so many wild horses in his stockyard and wanted to make sure killing them was legal. The BLM told the slaughterhouse owner to go ahead and kill them. No charges were ever brought against the buyer.
Technically, horses were not supposed to go to fee-waiver adopters if the BLM thought they might end up in slaughter, but the agency was so desperate to get rid of horses that it was willing to look the other way. In the end, the investigators said, the program was a “prescription for commercial exploitation of wild horses.”7
In October 1988, after three years of legal battles, a federal judge sided with wild horse advocates, saying the fee-waiver program “renders the adoption process a farce” by failing to screen out kill buyers. The court barred the BLM from transferring title to anyone who planned to slaughter horses, and the agency officially ended the fee-waiver program a few weeks later.
The legal ordeal and public airing of its slaughter record that forced the BLM to cancel the fee-waiver program was not only an embarrassment, it also cut off the agency’s only effective way of getting rid of excess horses and left the BLM stuck back where it started. The BLM was still required by public lands laws to control horse numbers on the range, and since it still relied on helicopter gathers, it still needed to do something with the horses it gathered.
Knowing that the fee-waiver program would likely lose in court, Interior Secretary Donald Hodel in 1987 had put together a citizen advisory board made up overwhelmingly of ranchers. In a report issued that year, they recommended euthanasia, stating, “Some 13 million dogs and cats are destroyed annually by humane organizations in this country. It is reasonable for the federal government to implement the legal provision for humane destruction when faced with a surplus of wild horses and burros.”8
Robert Burford, still the director of the BLM after six years, considered lifting his five-year-old moratorium and instituting a policy that would allow unadopted horses to be euthanized. “When we’re cutting programs for the poor in this country, should we be feeding excess wild horses?” he asked, when questioned about the program that year. “Someone needs to bite the bullet.”9
There were about seven thousand horses in government holding pens in Nebraska, Nevada, and Texas in 1987. Caring for them cost $7 million annually. Burford was considering a plan to kill nearly all of them. He never got a chance. In the fall of 1988, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives inserted a rider into its annual appropriations bill barring the BLM from spending any money to destroy healthy horses. Even if the BLM wanted to euthanize horses, and could somehow convince the public that it was a good idea, it no longer was allowed to spend the money to do it.
Pressure on the BLM mounted. It was still being squeezed by ranchers demanding that it remove horses, but now it had fewer ways to relieve pressure by getting rid of them. Instead of taking a step back and asking whether it was time to fundamentally change the roundup approach, though, the agency kept the helicopters flying and kept selling the horses to slaughter buyers. It just became less open about it.
After the fee-waiver program ended, people could only adopt four horses at a time. The limit was an attempt to keep would-be commercial kill buyers from acquiring enough mustangs to make a profit. But kill buyers soon found a loophole—one the BLM seemed to hold wide open. Regulations allowed an adopter to sign a power of attorney to have a proxy buyer adopt a horse for them. It was intended as a way to allow people who lived far from an adoption site or were unfamiliar with the process to be able to have a mustang. Kill buyers began obtaining dozens and dozens of these forms, asking friends, relatives, and sometimes complete strangers to sign them. Then they had hundreds of horses shipped to one proxy buyer. Once the horses were adopted, the kill buyer would often—though not always—hold them for the required year to obtain titles, take ownership of the whole herd, and ship them to slaughter.
Not only did the BLM allow this to go on, but many of the people who participated in the scheme were BLM employees. James Galloway was one of the regular buyers. For more than a decade, he had worked for the BLM, helping with roundups and arranging what the BLM said were adoptions for more than nine thousand horses and burros. In 1992, a tipster told BLM law enforcement that Galloway was fattening up a herd of horses to send to slaughter on a friend’s ranch near Del Rio, Texas. These law enforcement agents were not part of the Wild Horse and Burro Program, and were not aware that this kind of scheme was tacitly allowed.
For the law enforcement agents, what at first seemed like a simple bust in Del Rio soon ballooned into an investigation that sprawled across the entire agency, drawing in the Department of Justice, a grand jury, and the interests of top officials in Washington. It shows the creeping corruption roundups have encouraged. People in wild horse circles familiar with the case still refer to it ominously as “Del Rio.”
Very quickly, the law enforcement agents learned that Galloway had been tipped off by his BLM supervisor that investigators were arriving. They also learned that his supervisor had illegally killed horses and falsified documents. Galloway was fired by the BLM, and began cooperating with investigators, insisting that his superiors were aware that horses were going to slaughter. “It doesn’t take a space scientist to realize that if a man adopts 100 head of horses, he’s not going to feed them for the next 30 years,” he later said.10
By the middle of 1993, investigators had uncovered what they said was widespread collusion among BLM employees, kill buyers, and middlemen. An internal memorandum by the agency’s chief of law enforcement that year noted that the BLM was “promoting and organizing group adoptions for the intended purpose of selling the wild horses to slaughter plants,” and that “the scope and complexity of the investigation also increased to include scores of individuals, including allegations against private citizens and middle and upper management of the B.L.M.”
When I first started traveling to see roundups, I thought horse-advocate warnings of a BLM cover-up sounded too much like a classic conspiracy theory to be true. But what happened with Del Rio will have nearly anyone reaching for a tinfoil hat. The corrosive effects of the cover-up reached the highest levels. Much of what is known about it comes from BLM investigators who became whistleblowers against their own agency, and from the reporting of Martha Mendoza, a dogged young Associated Press journalist, based at the time in Albuquerque, who later won a Pulitzer Prize. Here’s what unfolded.
As investigators realized that selling wild horses to slaughter went well beyond one rogue employee, they got in touch with the Department of Justice, which assigned the case to a young assistant US attorney named Alia Ludlum. Late in 1994, Ludlum convened a grand jury in Texas to look into widespread abuses that agents had found in the wild horse program.
But the BLM began trying to sabotage the investigation. In February 1995, BLM administrators ordered the seven law enforcement investigators who had been piecing together the case to stop working on it and not to assist the assistant US attorney. If they did help the attorney, they were told, they would be fired.
The lead investigator, Steve Sederwall, retired in frustration and became an outspoken critic of the bureau’s cover-up, guiding reporters to facts the agency was hoping to bury. “In 23 years as a cop, I’ve never seen anything like the depth of corruption I’ve seen in the BLM,” he later told a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor.11
Meanwhile, the assistant US attorney kept building a case for indictments. She showed the Del Rio grand jury evidence that BLM employees had placed more than five hundred horses with people, telling them they could sell them to slaughter after a year, and they tipped off people once the investigations started so they could get rid of evidence. BLM managers, she said, pressured employees not to talk to investigators and falsified adoption records to hide what had happened. The list of suspects grew steadily. The grand jury foreman believed there was probable cause for arrest, saying, “We want these charges filed.”
An internal Department of Justice memo reported that the BLM had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with wild horse adoptions. Employees, it said, “freely admit that everyone ‘knows’ as a general proposition that most of the horses adopted out go to slaughter eventually, [but] the agency tries to avoid finding out that this will happen in any given adoption.”12
Then Washington got involved and the case began to unravel. Some attorneys in the Department of Justice were old colleagues of a woman who had become chief of staff at the Department of the Interior, which oversees the BLM. The deputy US attorney pushing for prosecutions in Texas began to suspect top-level people in the Departments of the Interior and Justice were having meetings in Washington without her to quietly bury the case. Then the Department of Justice began interfering in her investigation. It sent another attorney to Del Rio, and he began his own investigation, directing the BLM to use only certain investigators.
The original attorney on the case, Alia Ludlum, subpoenaed records for the horses in BLM storage pastures, but the BLM refused to provide them. “Something smells fishy,” she wrote in a memo to her boss in 1995. The memo, along with a thousand other pages of documents from the grand jury, was later obtained by the Associated Press. “I am sure that ‘stuff’ is happening in Washington concerning my case that I surely don’t know and can never hope to know. I just don’t understand how 36 horses could cause such overwhelming governmental distress unless there are lots of problems and we are not supposed to find out what the problems are or to solve the problems. I don’t like what is happening.”13
In May 1996, officials from the Departments of Justice and Interior eventually pressured the attorney in Del Rio to drop the charges. The original suspect, Galloway, his supervisor, all the people who profited from illegally selling wild horses to slaughter, and the BLM employees who orchestrated the cover-up were never charged.
“I believe that my investigation was obstructed all along by persons within the BLM because they did not want to be embarrassed,” the attorney in Del Rio wrote in a memo around that time. “I think there is a terrible problem with the program and with government agents placing themselves above the law.”14
Not everyone was ready to give up. A month after the case was closed, Sederwall, the BLM law enforcement officer who had led the investigation, and five former colleagues sent a nine-page letter to then–US Attorney General Janet Reno, detailing “an ever-growing list of felony criminal violations committed by the Bureau of Land Management.” They detailed how BLM employees were selling wild horses to slaughterhouses and falsifying records to cover their tracks. And, they said, the BLM and the Department of Justice colluded to stop the grand jury investigation, writing that “investigations have come to a grinding halt under the pressure of the B.L.M. and the Department of Interior.”
Major newspapers ran stories on the letter, but officials did nothing. The story went away. Six months later, Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza ran a scathing series of articles about the cover-up, showing that scores of BLM employees had profited from slaughter schemes and that the cover-ups had gone all the way up to the Secretary of the Interior. Congress and the White House did not act. Mendoza asked Tom Pogacnik, the head of the Wild Horse and Burro Program at the time, if the program intended to protect a symbol of the Wild West had evolved into a supply system for horse meat? “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” he responded. “Recognizing that we can’t leave them out there, well, at some point the critters do have to come off the range.”
The anger over the slaughter and the cover-up stoked the rage of a number of activists. In the months that followed, members of the Animal Liberation Front began burning down BLM corrals. Their message was clear: If you try to destroy horses, we will destroy your program.
The public revelations of slaughter in the 1990s had the same effect as public revelations of slaughter in the 1980s: The BLM tightened adoption rules, making it harder to sell horses to slaughter, and vowed once again not to give horses to anyone who intended to sell them to slaughter. The agency also got all the slaughterhouses in the United States to agree to alert the government when wild horses showed up in their lots. But the BLM did not make any serious efforts to change the roundup strategy, which had been the driving factor in sending so many horses to the dog-food factory. The helicopters kept flying.
Instead of changing the policy, managers changed what they did with horses after they caught them. Since the beginning of the program in the 1970s, the BLM had temporarily kept horses in what it called “short-term holding”—a system of feedlots located on the edges of Wild Horse Country where contractors fed tons of hay to newly rounded-up herds until they could be adopted or “adopted.” Facing increased scrutiny over adoptions in the late 1990s, the BLM decided to turn to a second system, called “long-term holding.” The bureau would contract with ranchers in the Midwest to put horses out to pasture. The agency would save money by letting horses graze on grass rather than eat hay in feedlots. The lower cost would at least buy time while the agency figured out a new plan.
It was a temporary measure the agency turned to more than twenty years ago. The BLM has yet to figure out a new plan.
In 2000, there were an estimated forty-eight thousand wild horses roaming the West—far more than the twenty-seven thousand the agency thought the land could sustain. A new administration with fresh confidence decided that through bold action it could solve the wild horse problem once and for all. It called the strategy “Living Legends in Balance with the Land.” But the bold action was just the same plan from fifteen years earlier: Round up enough horses to get the population down to twenty-seven thousand, then sustain at that level through roundups. To get the plan done, the agency said it would just need one thing: a lot more money.
The Bush administration and Congress bought into the plan. The Department of the Interior increased the agency’s budget in 2001 from $20 million to $34.4 million, then kept funding near that level until 2005.
With more money, the BLM started rounding up more horses. Helicopters swept up on average more than eleven thousand per year between 2001 and 2005. The agency almost reached AML. But someone forgot to tell them what happened in the 1980s, and the program soon fell into the same trap. The number of horses in storage skyrocketed: fourteen thousand in 2003, twenty-two thousand in 2005, thirty thousand in 2007.
The BLM had long relied on adoptions to draw down the population in its storage system, but with more stringent slaughter protections, fewer people were buying. Adoptions decreased from an average of seventy-five hundred horses per year in the 1990s to closer to five thousand in the 2000s. The economic crash of 2008 pushed adoptions even lower. In recent years, they have dropped to an average of twenty-five hundred horses.
As the number of horses in storage increased, the agency started calling around to ranchers in the Midwest, looking for more big ranches that could hold impounded horses. The BLM had tried this once before, after the fee-waiver program collapsed in 1988. That year the agency signed an agreement with Dayton Hyde, an Oregon rancher-turned-naturalist with a sun-creased face who had written books about wildlife-friendly ranching. He said he’d take 1,650 horses if the BLM agreed to pay $1 per horse per day for four years as startup money, until his sanctuary could become self-sustaining. Things didn’t go as planned. Hyde kept needing more money, until the agency was paying him much more than the agreed amount. As the four-year deadline approached, the sanctuary was nowhere near self-sufficiency. In 1993, the BLM repossessed almost all the horses. It shipped them to a vast cattle ranch north of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where it created its first “long-term holding facility” on thirteen thousand acres owned by a family of longtime cattle ranchers named Hughes. The BLM planned to keep the horses on the Hughes Ranch until it could come up with a better plan. They are still there.15
I visited the Hughes Ranch in 2016. The owner, Robert Hughes, showed me around the gorgeous undulating grass hills of his mixed-grass prairie home, where more than four thousand horses grazed. He was welcoming and cheerful, and clearly proud of his meticulously cared-for land. As we rumbled up a road through the flinty hills in his pickup, a few hundred mares, tightly packed on the hilltop where they were socializing and swishing away flies on a sunny morning, perked up at our approach, then peeled off in a gallop down into the blond, knee-high grass.
“I just love to see them run,” said Hughes.
The government was paying him around $2 million a year, a fee that included no vet care. He just had to provide food and water to the horses, keep them separated by sex so they don’t breed, and haul away their carcasses to a pit when they finally died. Some horses had been on his ranch more than twenty years. I asked him what he thought of the policy of horses rounded up from the wild. His grin broadened and he put up his hands. “Hey, look, man, I’m a grass farmer. I don’t have a damn thing to do with policy,” he said. “If this deal ended, we’d go back into livestock in a big way.”
As the Hughes pastures filled up, the BLM began contracting for more ranches. There are now more than thirty ranches, mostly in Kansas and Oklahoma, in the long-term holding system. Many of these contractors are already wealthy, and the program is making them more so. One was a former CEO of Koch Industries, another is a banker and oilman with a business degree from Stanford, a third made millions leasing his land to his brother-in-law, the founder of Walmart. One of the newest contractors bought his ranch with the proceeds of a $232 million Powerball ticket. Some are being paid more than $3 million per year.
This unlikely setup has become the story of the modern mustang. Taxpayers shell out millions to remove wild horses from desolate land in the West, then millions more to put them on rich prairie grass in the Midwest. In the process, they make an icon of freedom into a ward of the state. However you feel about wild horses, it’s hard to be happy with what has developed.
In 2004, some in Congress tried to force the BLM to start selling excess horses to slaughter buyers, without success. That year, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana, a former cattle auctioneer, slipped an amendment into an omnibus budget bill that allowed the BLM to sell any horses to slaughter that were older than ten or had been offered unsuccessfully for adoption three times. He saw it as a fiscally responsible move to rid the program of its long-term holding costs. But the BLM never used its new power. Internal documents suggest managers feared that sending healthy horses to slaughter would stoke so much public anger that they would lose their jobs, and maybe face more firebombings.
The surge of roundups in the 2000s came close to achieving AML. In 2008, there were about twenty-eight thousand horses on the range. One more year would put the agency over the finish line. But right at the point when managers thought they would be in the clear, the roundup program started to collapse under its own weight. There were thirty-two thousand horses in the holding system. There was no fee-waiver program, as there was in the 1980s, to sneak horses out the back door to slaughter. Nor was there a “don’t ask, don’t tell” adoption program, as there was in the 1990s. The vast majority of the horses rounded up by the BLM stayed with the BLM, and by 2008 they were eating through two-thirds of the program’s budget.
That year, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing follow-up to its 1990 report. It warned that the cost of holding so many horses was not sustainable. “If not controlled,” it concluded, “off-the-range holding costs will continue to overwhelm the program.” The report urged the BLM to explore ways to limit horses in storage, including euthanasia. In a written statement, the BLM concurred, saying it was considering euthanizing about twenty-three hundred horses and developing other strategies to limit the growth. But ultimately the BLM once again backed away, saying in internal documents that agents feared violence from animal rights groups.16
A new administration took over that year. President Barack Obama named a new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, a Colorado rancher who promised more sensible, scientifically based, sustainable management. It never happened. Under Salazar, the BLM kept gathering and storing. Same with his successor, Sally Jewell, the former CEO of outdoor equipment retailer REI, who took over in 2013. By 2016, the BLM holding system had exploded in size to include sixty private ranches, corrals, and feedlots storing forty-six thousand wild horses at a cost of $49 million a year. So much money was going to ranchers that, after the bill was paid, little was left for anything else.
The scale of what the agency has done in a few decades is astounding. For generations, Nevada had the largest population of wild horses. But all of a sudden, the largest population was in the holding system. There is something ironic about turning over thousands and thousands of acres of lush mixed-grass prairie to a bunch of mustangs exiled from their home in the hardscrabble desert of Nevada. Who could imagine during the 1950s, when J. Frank Dobie published his great history of the life and lore of the vanishing mustang, or in the 1960s, when schoolkids mobilized to save the last remaining herds, that fifty thousand wild horses would return as exiles to the same prairies from which they were purged a century earlier?
These are the same golden swales where the painter George Catlin first spotted wild horses on his way up the Arkansas River in 1834. This is where he first heard around the campfire the tale of the White Stallion, which would be told and retold for a century. This is where endless acres of bluestem and Indian grass built the great Horse Nations of the southern plains that held back the American army in running battles that lasted longer than any of the country’s major wars. This is where, after the buffalo were gone, the hide hunters turned their big guns on horses. This is where armies of hired hands strung barbed wire along the land at right angles, fencing the last of the wild horses of the Great Plains into oblivion. Now they are back, refugees in their own land, growing fat and shiny on the good grass. It’s a present no one in the past could have ever foreseen.
Drive the dirt roads of this area of Oklahoma and Kansas and you can easily spot these big ranches. They are mostly in the Flint Hills, where plows never broke the rocky soil and vast swaths of prairie remain. In the golden grass along the fence lines, you can see scores of horses swishing their tails, their heads down, munching on the lush forage. When I went to visit the Hughes Ranch, it was late September, and the grass in places was up to my belt. With me was Dean Bolstad, head of the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program.
As we drove around the ranch on narrow dirt tracks that rose and fell through the hills, we talked about the long history of roundups, and the future the BLM faced. Bolstad had grown up in Montana, the son of a ranch hand, and had worked for the BLM since college. He was working in Burns, Oregon, when the Animal Liberation Front burned down the corrals. He was in Nevada in 2001, when the program made the big push to bring the herds down to AML. And he took over as head just as the cost of storing horses had paralyzed the program. Looking out at the hundreds of horses grazing on the ranch, he seemed happy to see that the creatures were healthy and well cared for, but he said the program was in crisis. The agency was spending about $49 million a year to warehouse horses, and looking at liabilities of more than $1 billion to care for the horses it had already gathered. There was no more money to gather more horses.
The holding system was, he said, “an absolute anchor around our neck.”
“We are spending nearly everything we can on holding,” he said. “We have almost no money for other programs.”
That means range improvements and development of springs and wells that might improve the carrying capacity of range in Wild Horse Country can’t be done. Building the adoption program to get more horses out of storage and into homes can’t really be done either. Developing new ideas that might eliminate or at least limit the need for roundups can’t be done. There is just no money.
By 2016, even roundups had basically ground to a halt. In 2013, the BLM cut its roundup numbers to only about twenty-five hundred animals a year—a third of its historic average. It rounded up only thirty-eight hundred animals in 2013, and twenty-four hundred in 2015. Basically, it now only rounds up horses on the range when horses in storage die or are adopted. There is no more room.
With roundups down, the population on the range has shot up. In 2016, it sat at seventy-seven thousand—about three times what the agency says the land can sustain. Just to keep the population at that level, the BLM would have to remove ten thousand horses per year. It can’t afford to come even close. The agency has 270 Herd Management Areas where wild horses roam. Almost all of them are now way over the target population.
You can argue about what the sustainable number of horses on the range is, and plenty of people do. Is it twenty-seven thousand, as the BLM says? Is it fifty thousand, as some advocates claim? Is it one hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? Whatever the correct number, horses will eventually exceed it. No matter the number, we need a better answer for what we should do when we reach it. Rounding up and storing horses has proved to be a failed approach. No one has been able to make a case to the public that slaughter is an acceptable fix—so, politically, that strategy is a nonstarter. But you also can’t just walk away from the problem. Horses on the land have shown in almost all cases that they will increase to destructive levels. If the herds are allowed to increase on the range long enough, all of Wild Horse Country suffers, not just ranchers and cattle, but also antelope, bighorn sheep, native plants, butterflies, toads and salamanders that live around springs, jackrabbits and kangaroo rats that depend on grass seeds. And the horses themselves. When the damage is done, it will take generations for the West’s dry and delicate land to recover. Something needs to be done, and quickly.
Mismanagement could also do lasting damage to the legend. When a bureaucracy is trying to preserve a symbol of freedom by spending more than a billion taxpayer dollars to keep it in captivity, while benefiting a few wealthy ranchers, the story of the wild horse starts to change. Animals that once were the embodiment of grit and self-reliance begin instead to symbolize waste, fecklessness, and inept bureaucracy. How long before this damage affects the legend? The White Stallion must always run free. He can’t exist in long-term holding. If the legend is undermined, how long before people question why the nation protected wild horses and burros in the first place?
Already mismanagement is shaping the wild horse’s image. You can see it in the way people now talk about wild horses. In 2009, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Republican Doc Hastings, called them “welfare” horses that were taking away resources from hardworking Americans. In 2015, a pair of biologists called wild horses a “scourge” that had no place on the land and didn’t deserve the protection afforded by their romantic past. No doubt, if the holding system gets bigger and more expensive, criticism will only grow louder.
Weeks before I met Bolstad in the fall of 2016, the BLM’s citizen advisory board—a nine-member volunteer group set up to have a balanced representation of horse advocates, the livestock industry, wildlife conservation, the scientific community, and other interests—voted eight-to-one to kill the forty-six thousand horses in the holding system. The BLM should either sell the animals to slaughter or humanely euthanize them, they said.
I spoke to a few of the board members. One of them, a cattle veterinarian, had been pushing for slaughter for some time. But the others had been against it until the cost of holding started to overwhelm all other functions of the program. Ben Masters was one of the youngest members of the board. An outdoor guide and filmmaker, a few years earlier he had adopted seven wild horses and made a movie called Unbranded, about riding them from Mexico to Canada. He told me it had been a hard decision, but something had to be done to protect the landscape. We talked on the phone while he was on a tour of a Nevada Herd Management Area he described as “severely overgrazed.” “It kills me,” he said. “I’d love for there to be another way out, but I just don’t see it.”
The BLM responded that it could not comply with the board’s recommendation to kill horses: A congressional rider still prevented the bureau from spending a nickel on killing horses. But its leaders did not put forth any alternatives. “We’re in a real pickle,” Dean Bolstad told me as we drove through the Hughes Ranch. “We have huge challenges ahead of us, and we don’t have the resources to respond.”
We stopped the truck and got out in a field on the ranch to look at the mustangs grazing in the setting sun. Beyond them on the grassy swells were more horses, scattered almost as far as the eye could see. For a few moments, it was easy to imagine I was crossing the prairies with the painter George Catlin 185 years ago, when everything from horizon to horizon was still wild and open and free, standing on a rise with a few Osage braves just before the chase.
The horses swished their tails and munched grass in apparent delight. But it was hard to feel excited about it. This was not the wild. In long-term holding, the horses are separated by sex. There are no more family bands, no more fights for dominance, no natural selection. The horses are by no means tame, but they are not really wild, either. It is a purgatory of sorts where animals wait, year after year, alive but not living, until they finally die. Watching darkness fall on the herds, I didn’t feel the excitement I had many times before encountering wild horses in the West. A crucial element was missing. Taking wild horses out of the West was like dipping a cup of water out of a river. The physical thing was still there, but its wildness was gone.