More than 38,000 wild horses and burros roam Nevada's public lands. With larger herds than any other state in the nation and more than triple the state's sustainable population target, Nevada wildlife officials and the agency in charge of managing them, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), have had to round up the animals to avoid their mass starvation and dehydration, an increasingly frequent occurrence. Because the public lands inhabited by these wild equines are vastly overpopulated, BLM regularly gathers them from the range, prioritizing herds that exceed sustainable numbers or places threatened by drought or other dangerous conditions.

In 2018, nearly 200 wild horses died of dehydration on the Navajo Nation. Their desperate quest for water in the northern Arizona desert ended in the mud of a watering hole gone dry, as their emaciated bodies wasted away over days until they finally succumbed. Drought and extreme heat conditions increasingly plague the more than 73,000 wild horses and burros that roam roughly 27 million acres of public rangelands of the American West. 

Animals removed from the range will be added to the 60,000 once-wild horses and burros that currently inhabit BLM-administered corrals and pastures. The herds continue to grow in size each year, in the wild and inside fences of BLM facilities. The result is an underreported and devastating ecological crisis, one in which the horses may be the biggest victims.

In 1971, Congress acted to protect wild horses and burros, charging federal agencies to care for them. The protections helped wild horses rebound, and then some. 

In 2020, the on-range population of wild horses and burros peaked at 95,000 — more than triple the estimated sustainable threshold of roughly 27,000. Of 177 individual herds of wild horses, BLM deems 152 to be overpopulated. 

The equines generally inhabit rugged, remote, arid landscapes where they compete with mule deer, pronghorn, sage-grouse and other wildlife for water and forage. Outside of rare places where mountain lions prey on them, wild horses and burros have no natural predators. Left unchecked, their populations will continue to grow, posing greater risks to rangeland ecosystems, wildlife and the horses themselves. 

The fiscal consequences of rounding up and holding so many horses off-range is also unsustainable. The federal government spent $158 million managing wild horses last year — a staggering amount that is nearly triple the cost of routine maintenance at Yellowstone National Park each year. More than $100 million of that expense went toward the care of those animals that had been taken off-range and live in BLM corrals and pastures. 

One obvious solution is to incentivize adoptions of wild horses, taking them out of crowded federal facilities into stables at private ranches and homes around the country. Several years ago, as the BLM struggled to increase adoptions, it decided to transform its approach. Rather than simply charging adopters $125 per animal, it offered a $1,000 incentive payment for people who adopted an untrained wild horse or burro.

In the five years since that incentive program was implemented, average annual adoptions of wild horses and burros have more than doubled. Given that it costs somewhere between $1,300 and $1,800 annually to hold each animal, the program has helped the agency — and taxpayers — avoid significant costs. Newly released research from the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) estimates that the more than 15,000 adoptions facilitated by the program have already saved taxpayers approximately $66 million and will save approximately $400 million over the lifetime of those adopted wild horses and burros. More importantly, the program has proven to be a crucial tool in helping to tackle the ecological crisis caused by overpopulated wild equines.

To be sure, there are critics of rounding up wild horses and burros at all, let alone the adoption incentive program. Wild horse advocacy groups repeatedly sue the government over its roundups, some of them favoring fertility-control measures to decrease the need for removals. While those measures can certainly play a role in limiting populations, they’re expensive and need to be administered regularly since they’re most effective for only a few years. Wild horse advocates also point out that the roundups of wild horses sometimes result in abuse by contractors, which was recently caught on camera during a Nevada gathering operation and is deserving of disciplinary action. 

When it comes to the incentive program specifically, criticism has centered around concerns that animals will end up in supply chains to foreign slaughterhouses. (There are no USDA-certified horse slaughter plants in the United States.) Yet Congress has for decades prohibited use of BLM funds for sales of wild horses and burros that result in slaughter or processing into commercial products of any type. And all wild horse adopters, whether through the incentive program or otherwise, certify under penalty of prosecution that they will not sell animals for slaughter. In May, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) introduced a bill that would increase the punishment for violators, making it a felony offense. Her proposal would also shorten the waiting period for adopters to receive title from one year to six months. 

Moreover, the BLM has found no evidence of wild horses or burros being sent to slaughter. Still, in 2022 the agency revised several policies aimed at increasing oversight and reducing the potential for abuse of the program. Specifically, it now delays full payment of the incentive until an adopter receives title to a horse after a year and requires more stringent compliance sign-off by a vet or agency officer.

Given the management challenges they present, getting more horses adopted out into good homes is better for Western ecosystems, the agency’s fiscal picture and the equines themselves. The BLM estimates that adopting out one wild horse saves approximately $24,000 over its lifetime. With that sort of savings, it’s worth exploring whether a larger incentive payment or creative adoption campaigns could boost adoptions while continuing to enforce the protections of the program.

The adoption incentive program is on track to place more than 30,000 animals into private homes during its first decade and save taxpayers more than $800 million in lifetime costs. It will not solve the wild horse and burro crisis on its own. But it’s proving to be one of the most promising ways to give wild equines a new lease on life.

Tate Watkins is a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center and co-author of the report “From Range to Ranch: Assessing the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Adoption Incentive Program.”

The Nevada Independent welcomes informed, cogent rebuttals to opinion pieces such as this. Send them to [email protected].