Current wild horse populations represent approximately 1 percent of 19th-century U.S. herds. According to J. Frank Dobie’s The Mustangs (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1952), more than two million wild horses roamed freely throughout the Great Plains during the 19th century.
By 1959, unlimited capture and slaughter had so decimated the number of wild horses that Congress passed the first federal legislation to protect them, called the Wild Horse Annie Act after the nickname of the woman who spearheaded the legislation, Velma B. Johnston. This law, however, offered no protection for the horses themselves but merely prohibited the use of aircraft or motorized vehicles in capture. It also banned pollution of any watering hole on any public land or range for the purpose of trapping, killing, wounding, or maiming wild horses.
The 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act granted protection to the wild horses themselves, as Congress declared them to be “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.”
Following passage of the 1971 Act, an estimated 303 herd areas were created. Wild horses have been removed from about one third of those original herd areas since then, and only an estimated 186 areas remain. Wild horses have been eliminated from roughly 12.5 million acres of the land originally set aside for them by law. Land area statistics vary considerably, however, depending on the source.
In 1974 a Bureau of Land Management census estimated that 45,207 wild horses and 14,656 wild burros lived on BLM and U.S. Forest Service lands. As of February 2005, that number had decreased to approximately 27,369 wild horses and 4,391 wild burros.
Under BLM’s Adopt-A-Horse Program, the public can adopt wild horses captured in roundups. They are freeze-branded on the neck area for identification. Even with court-ordered regulations in place to protect them, however, freeze-branded horses often end up at slaughterhouses, once title has passed from the BLM to the adopter.
In 2004 a stealth rider (now called the Burns Amendment) attached to an appropriations bill removed 34 years of federal protection of wild horses from slaughter. In addition to holding regular adoptions, the BLM can now sell any excess animal, or its remains, if the animal is older than ten years of age or fails three adoptions. These wild horses are made available for sale without limitation — meaning that they can be sold at auction for slaughter, without adoption.