Advocating for Wild Horses in a Time of Political Turbulence
by Christine Reed, PhD
Dr. Christine Reed is a PAN Works research fellow and serves on the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center advisory council. She is an emeritus professor in the School of Public Administration, University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she continues to teach in the areas of public law and administration, and publish about the public management of wild horses in the Western U.S. Her most recent publications are in the journals Environmental Values, Society &Animals, and Ethics & The Environment. She is an associate member of the American Bar Association and also an active member of the Equine History Collective.
As a professor of public administration whose research focuses on public law and management of wild horses in the U.S., I was inspired by Pablo Castello’s and Fran Santiago-Ávila’s recent paper in Cambridge University Press. They identified ethical failures in the large-scale removals and slaughter of thousands of wild horses living in Kosciuszko National Park, New South Wales, Australia, where the government considered them as introduced pests. In the U.S. context, federal law currently prohibits slaughter, and conflicts are more likely to involve cattle ranchers than conservationists who consider Australian brumbies to be a threat to native flora and fauna. Still, there are many large-scale removals and stockpiling of older, unadoptable horses in long-term pastures that also break up family bands and harm their opportunities to flourish as wild horses. I have previously addressed those concerns in my published research, but in this essay my focus is on weaknesses lurking beneath federal law that can stymie litigation by advocacy organizations, as well as on recommendations for readers who want to take action.
On December 17, 1971 President Richard Nixon signed into law the Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act. The bill was passed unanimously by Congress and was the first federal statute designed to protect wild horses in ten Western states from harassment and death at the hands of commercial “mustangers” who had captured and slaughtered them without suffering any criminal penalties. In his presidential signing statement, Nixon lamented that only 9,500 unbranded and unclaimed horses remained on public range lands.
The harsh political reality since then is that while the numbers of free-roaming horses have rebounded since 1971, Congress has now authorized the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to carry out removals when it determines that an overpopulation exists, and when wild horse numbers exceed appropriate management levels (AMLs) in herd management areas (HMAs). Moreover, the 2004 Burns Amendment permits the BLM to sell older unadoptable “excess” horses at local sale yards and livestock auctions— to an uncertain future. While annual appropriations language has since blocked that practice, recent Congressional concern about the costs of removing wild horses to privately-contracted long-term pastures could revive that Amendment.
Other problems have plagued the public management of wild horses. Federal protection established herd management areas (HMAs) where wild horses were found in 1971, but those areas overlapped with existing cattle grazing allotments — also administered by the BLM. As a result, ranchers often complain that wild horses are destroying cattle forage; however, advocates for wild horses argue that cattle, not horses, are responsible for deterioration of public range lands, and that wild horses are often at the losing end of conflicts over multiple uses. Helicopter roundups and confinement to short-term holding corrals cause injuries, and sometimes deaths, especially to young horses. Lawsuits by advocates to halt these practices often result in only temporary injunctions.
Litigation by wild horse advocacy organizations has run up against provisions in the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) related to the standard of judicial review. When, for example, the issue is how a BLM field office has calculated the AML as part of its herd management area plan, the plaintiff may argue that the population range set by the AML is too restrictive, and that it will result in unnecessarily large-scale removals. The problem for wild horse advocates is that when federal courts are reviewing scientific judgments and technical analyses within an agency’s expertise, judicial review has tended to be deferential when the court determines that the BLM relied on relevant data and articulated a satisfactory explanation for its decision. See American Wild Horse Campaign et al. v. Stone-Manning (1) for a recent case articulating this deferential standard of review. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2) reversed an agency’s interpretation of law in its authorizing statute, not whether its management decision was “arbitrary and capricious” because it failed to offer a satisfactory explanation for its action. It remains to be seen, however, whether the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will uphold this more deferential standard of review in future cases.
Major legislative reform is needed to address these problems. American Wild Horse Conservation (AWHC) is an advocacy organization which tracks legislation, monitors helicopter roundups, and advocates for more systematic use of fertility control; thus, fewer large-scale roundups are needed, which can break the vicious cycle of removals to costly long-term pastures. AWHC’s website is an excellent source of information about policy and legislation as well as science, research, and volunteer opportunities. Another resource for anyone who wants to learn more about these issues is Wild Horse Education (WHE).
Issues on a smaller scale may require different kinds of reform. In Lovell, Wyoming, there is a relationship spanning more than fifty years between local residents and wild horses on the nearby Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range. In the late 1960s, the Tillett family gave up their cattle grazing allotment on large sections of that land, and worked with advocates to seek federal protection. In 1968, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall established the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range by Executive Order, creating one of only two public wild horse-only ranges in the country. Lovell residents have a collective appreciation for the Pryor wild horses, because of their unique Colonial Spanish heritage and because they attract hundreds of annual visitors to Lovell from the U.S. and around the world.
There is also a long-term relationship between the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center (PMWMC) and the field office of the BLM, documented in a 2015 book by myself, Christine Reed, entitled Saving the Pryor Mountain Mustang: A Legacy of Local and Federal Cooperation. The mission of the PMWMC is to preserve the future of the Pryor herd by monitoring the herd; maintaining lineage charts including names for each horse; educating local school children about wild horse behavior during field trips to the lower elevations of the Range; and informing visitors about tours on the Range. The local newspaper, the Lovell Chronicle, and the Lovell Chamber of Commerce are long-time supporters of the Pryor wild horses.
Despite its history of cooperation with the BLM field office, in late 2024 the PMWMC filed a protest with the BLM national office against a field-office proposed amendment to its Resource Management Plan (RMP). The amendment would permit periodic measurements of genetic diversity using Observed Heterozygosity (Ho) in the herd, instead of the historic and more proactive approach of maintaining unique maternal bloodlines. The reason for this proposed change was that managing for bloodlines was too prescriptive, and that that the law required “minimum feasible management”. In its public protest, the PMWMC argued that during its fifty-year history of using lineage-based management to maintain genetic diversity, field office staff had never complained that it was “too prescriptive”. The motivation for the proposed amendment is unclear at this point.
In its protest, the PMWMC pointed out that lineage-based management does not interfere with the behavior patterns of wild horses, because it only identifies which horses should remain on the Range during gathers. Thus, it does not conflict with “minimum feasible management” any more than does removing horses randomly based on desired age class and sex ratios as the field office proposes to do in its forthcoming herd management area plan. The gist of the protest is that periodic monitoring of genetic diversity is too reactive, and that failure to maintain maternal bloodlines conflicts with an RMP goal to maintain unique characteristics of the Pryor herd, namely its Colonial Spanish heritage. At the time I wrote this essay, there was as yet no resolution of the protest.
At the national level, reforms of the wild horse program will require persistent efforts by citizens to convince their elected officials about the importance of supporting the wild horse program. That support needs to include an adequate BLM budget targeted at fertility control, annual appropriations language blocking the Burns Amendment, and opposition to proposals by the incoming administration and members of Congress to repeal major environmental statutes, especially the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ) rules under NEPA require the BLM to publish proposed herd management and removal plans, as well as respond to public comments. Rescission of CEQ rules — even repeal of NEPA —would likely result in the loss of public transparency. It is more important than ever to stay involved and to support wild horse advocacy organizations like AWHC, WHE, and the PMWMC.
Notes
(1) American Wild Horse Campaign et al. v. Stone-Manning, 2024 WL 3872558
(2) Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo 144 S. Ct. 2244 (2024)
Kim Hightower is the associate editor for PAN Works.
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