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By McKenli Williams
Nevada Policy
I grew up on a cattle ranch in northern Nevada. I’ve watched creeks dry up, springs trampled to mud, and native grasses replaced by invasive weeds. I know what an overgrazed rangeland looks like. I also know who wrote the rules that allowed this to happen and why those rules must change.
Let’s talk about the word “wild”. It does a lot of the heavy lifting in the media. The horses on Nevada’s public lands are not wild animals in any real sense. They are feral- descendants of domesticated horses that were released or escaped during the centuries of human settlement. Calling them wild is a political campaign, not a biological choice rooted in ecology. And it has shaped policy framework that prioritizes symbolism over land stewardship.
The framework is Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which declares that horses are “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the west” and tasked the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) with protecting the herds and maintaining a healthy rangeland. For over 50 years, BLM has been unable to manage either.
The results of such a policy are obvious across Nevada’s rangeland. The BLM manages 83 herds that cover around 15.6 million acres. The Appropriate Management Level (AML)– the number of animals the land can sustainably support- is 12,811 animals. As of March 2026, the estimated feral horse and burro population is over 42,500, or more than 3 times the threshold. Some individual herds are over 1,000% of their sustainable levels.
Part of what makes the damage to land so severe is how horses graze, which is fundamentally different from cattle, sheep, and goats- animals classified as ruminants. Ruminants have no upper front teeth. They use their tongues to wrap around grass and tear it off, limiting how close to the ground they can graze. Horses on the other hand have teeth on the top and bottom, often pulling grass out by its roots. The result is that when these animals graze, the destroy the grass entirely. On Nevada’s already fragile rangeland, this is catastrophic.
Horses also graze 10 to 14 hours per day with no rotation or recovery period, unlike permitted livestock, which operates under strict BLM grazing allocations, seasonal restrictions, and number limits.
The ecological record reflects this overgrazing. A United States Geological Survey in Nevada found that springs protected from horse grazing showed greater plant growth. Meadows excluded from horses showed vegetation nearly three times taller than the horse-grazed area. The Nevada Department of Wildlife’s 2024 report to the state board called the current situation “unsustainable for horses, rangeland ecosystems, wildlife and habitats.” Seven Nevada counties have passed emergency declarations citing feral horse damage to public lands.
The BLM’s solution has been to spend more money. The program budget has gone from less than $40 million annually in 2009 to $142 million in 2025, with $101 million going towards feed for horses held off the range. That is not management. It is an expensive holding pen, all while the land continues to degrade.
The 1971 Act’s requirement that feral horses are “an integral part of the natural system” has essentially paralyzed the BLM’s ability to conserve the land, compounded by litigation from horse advocacy groups. Proposed solutions have missed the mark. The Wild Horse and Burro Protection Act of 2025 would have restricted helicopter gathers without providing any replacement capable of rounding up horses. Fertility control is another solution mentioned for slowing growth, but does not address the existing herd which is already 30,000 animals beyond capacity.
What Nevada needs is a reformed framework that treats feral horses as the land management issue they are and not the cultural icons the 1971 Act made them out to be. That means honest conversations in policy: these are feral animals on multiple-use BLM land and every acre that is over-grazed wreaks damage to Nevada’s water tables, native wildlife, the ranching economy, and taxpayers.
I’m not against horses; I love them and grew up around them. But I also grew up understanding that land has its limits. Ignoring those limits has consequences that no budget, romanticized wording, or symbolic legislation can fix.
McKenli Williams is a Research Assistant at Nevada Policy, focused on land and water issues. Raised on a ranch outside Wells, she holds a degree in Agricultural Communications from Utah State University and has worked on Capitol Hill, on a U.S. Senate campaign, and as a writer for The College Fix.
The above Opinion is not fact.
Horses do not overgraze the land. Their numbers prove this, as do their teeth. Horses clip the materials, Cattle wrap tongues around stems and pull — roots and all. Cattle are Dust bowl makers and deficate in their water sources
Examining the article through the lens of ecological science, legal frameworks, and cultural heritage reveals several critical discrepancies, oversimplifications, and systemic gaps in how federal land policy treats equines:
1. The False Dichotomy of “Wild” vs. “Feral”
The Article’s Claim: The article argues that calling horses “wild” is a political campaign rather than a biological reality, labeling them strictly as “feral” descendants of domesticated escapees to justify prioritizing conventional land management over protection.
The Discrepancy & Ecological Reality: While technically true that North American horses descended from reintroduced domestic stock post-contact, labeling them merely as “nuisance exotics” ignores evolutionary history. North America is the evolutionary cradle of the equine genus (Equus), which roamed the continent for millions of years before going extinct locally around the end of the Pleistocene. Ecologically and behaviorally, modern equines function as native-adapted large herbivores. Dismissing them as mere “feral” animals serves primarily as a regulatory shortcut to bypass strict conservation obligations.
2. Flawed Comparisons Between Equines, Livestock, and Native Wildlife
The Article’s Claim: The article contrasts horses with ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats) that have no upper front teeth and use their tongues to tear grass, whereas horses use upper and lower incisors to crop grass to the root, allegedly destroying vegetation entirely. It also notes that horses graze 10 to 14 hours daily without rotational recovery.
The Discrepancy & Ecological Reality:
The Ruminant vs. Equine Myth: While horses do graze closer to the surface than cattle, ecological studies note that equines occupy a functional niche historically filled by native megafauna like Pleistocene horses and American camels. Furthermore, poorly managed cattle grazing under historical permits frequently inflicts severe riparian and vegetative damage due to cattle congregating in fragile stream beds for shade and water—impacts that are often legally subsidized compared to wild horse management.
Management Disparities: Livestock graze under explicit economic allocations with direct agency supervision, whereas wild horse populations are often artificially compressed into restricted, fenced, or fragmented habitats where natural migration corridors have been cut off by human development. When confined to restricted ranges, any herbivore will over-utilize local resources; the degradation is a symptom of restricted range and policy failure, not an inherent biological evil of the animal.
3. Systemic Flaws in Resource Management Plans (RMPs) and the Exclusion of Cultural-Historic Value
The Article’s Claim: The article criticizes the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 for treating horses as “cultural icons” and calls for stripping them of special protections to manage them purely as a land management problem.
The Discrepancy & Legal-Cultural Reality:
The Narrow Scope of RMPs: Federal Resource Management Plans (RMPs) and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) documents are legally structured through a strict binary: animals are categorized exclusively under natural resource laws (like the Endangered Species Act or wildlife codes), which pigeonhole them as biological units rather than cultural components.
Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Exclusion Under Historic Preservation Laws: Cultural resources are typically evaluated by archaeologists and historians under laws like Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). These professionals rarely have training or mandates to evaluate living creatures. As a result, heritage herds—such as the Spanish-descended Caballos d’Anza lineage or regional wild horse populations integrated deeply into centuries-old ranching and Native American traditions—are systematically excluded from being evaluated as living cultural and historic properties.
Cambridge University Press & Assessment
+ 1
The Policy Blind Spot: By refusing to recognize wild horses as living cultural resources, federal agencies fail to perform genuine Cultural Impact Assessments (CIAs). This creates a fatally flawed planning process that pits environmental preservation against human heritage, ignoring the reality that traditional communities, regional history, and these animals are inextricably linked parts of the western landscape.
Thank you for your comment. I’ve been arguing the same points about the BLM/USFS for years. I believe the 1971 Act would have worked, if Congress hadn’t made the poor decision to task the BLM to manage the horses on public lands. The agency didn’t do much managing. Public lands resources and the allotted uses, have always favored cattle grazing. I see that as a conflict of interest easily solved by funding an agency that will preserve and protect these animals on the millions of acres the BLM has re-allotted for cattle grazing over the last 20 years
It’s my belief that cattle don’t belong on public lands, especially if it displaces herds of free roaming horses.
Cattle inflict more damage to the range, the ratio being at 20-5o cattle to 1 horse., yet the range damage is attributed only to horses.
The data regarding cattle impact on public land has been historically excluded from the BLM’s information that guides policy. It’s been cattle over horses, even with the 1971 Act in place.
First, calling these animals “wild horses” is not merely a media campaign. Congress legally defined “wild free-roaming horses and burros” as unbranded and unclaimed horses and burros on public lands. Whatever biological label someone prefers, “wild free-roaming horse” is their federal legal classification. The law also declares them an integral part of the public-land system—not unwanted livestock waiting to be disposed of. [Read the 1971 Act](https://www.congress.gov/92/statute/STATUTE-85/STATUTE-85-Pg649.pdf).
Second, horses do not routinely “pull grass out by its roots.” Horses use their upper and lower incisors to cut vegetation close to the ground. Repeated heavy grazing can weaken plants and their roots, but that is different from claiming horses physically uproot and completely destroy grass whenever they graze. Cattle, likewise, generally grasp forage with their tongues and sever it; they do not routinely pull every plant out by its roots. Honest discussion should not replace one grazing myth with another. [Oregon State University’s forage information](https://forages.oregonstate.edu/) explains that horses can crop vegetation very close to the soil.
Third, permitted livestock are not ecologically harmless simply because grazing is authorized or seasonal. Cattle can concentrate around water, damage streambanks, compact wet soils, reduce riparian vegetation and spread invasive plants. A permit is a legal authorization—not proof that the permitted use caused no damage. The condition of a particular area must be evaluated using actual use, utilization, water, climate, livestock, wildlife, horses, fire and invasive-species data.
Fourth, AML is an administrative management target, not an independent scientific “threshold” proving that every animal above it is presently starving or destroying the range. BLM describes AML as the number intended to exist “in balance with other public land resources and uses.” Those other uses include livestock grazing. Therefore, any honest AML discussion must disclose how much forage was allocated to horses, livestock and wildlife, when the AML was established and whether the underlying range data remain current. [BLM’s own description of AML](https://www.blm.gov/programs/wild-horse-and-burro/about-the-program/program-data).
The 2026 BLM estimate of 42,572 horses and burros in Nevada and the statewide high AML of 12,811 are correctly quoted. But those are estimates spread across 83 separate HMAs and approximately 15.6 million acres not one herd occupying one uniform range. Conditions, water, forage, livestock use and population accuracy must be examined HMA by HMA. [BLM Nevada HMA information](https://www.blm.gov/programs/wild-horse-and-burro/herd-management/herd-management-areas/nevada).
Fifth, the 1971 Act has not “paralyzed” BLM. The law expressly authorizes the removal of excess animals, and BLM has removed tens of thousands during recent years. In FY2024 alone, BLM removed 16,140 horses and burros nationwide. If removal authority were paralyzed, those operations could not be occurring. The growing holding costs demonstrate the failure of a removal-dependent system—not proof that the horses’ legal protections caused every rangeland problem.
The NDOW report does present evidence of serious horse impacts in certain locations, and that evidence should not be dismissed. But it does not prove that horses are responsible for every degraded spring or overgrazed acre in Nevada. It also acknowledges that an average horse consumes about 1.25 times the forage of a cow-calf pair—not that a horse automatically causes greater damage everywhere. Impact depends on animal numbers, duration, concentration, season, water availability and site conditions. [Read the full NDOW report](https://www.ndow.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Wild-Horse-and-Burro-Report.pdf).
Finally, questioning helicopter roundups does not mean opposing all management. Bait and water trapping, fertility control, targeted removals, habitat restoration and adjustment of competing forage allocations are all management tools. Fertility control will not remove an existing horse, but it can reduce future births, repeated removals and long-term holding costs. Dismissing it because it does not solve the entire problem immediately is shortsighted.
Nevada needs responsible management based on complete, site-specific data. That means accounting for horses, livestock, wildlife, drought, fire, invasive grasses, mining, fencing and water development not assigning every acre of degradation to one federally protected animal while treating every other land use as blameless.
I support intervention during genuine emergencies. But management decisions must be transparent, humane and supported by complete evidence. Protecting the land and protecting wild horses are not opposing goals. The 1971 Act requires both.