From Roundups to Rewilding: A Better Plan for America’s Wild Horses

When the current administration left the prohibition on lethal management and commercial slaughter of wild horses and burros out of the President’s FY26 Budget Proposal, a collective sense of horror and dread ran across wild horse advocacy and animal welfare communities.

After more than 20 years of slaughter prohibitions, could the government again be seeking to authorize the mass execution of 62,000 wild horses and burros, enriching kills buyers in the US and abattoirs across the borders in Canada and Mexico, just to repeat the same flawed process of roundups and removals that has left taxpayers with a mindboggling $100 million-per-year off-range management bill.

Congress Must Act to Stop Wild Horse Slaughter

The short answer is yes, and it will come down to Congress and public pressure to bring common sense and humanity into a singularly economic calculation that flies in the face of scientifically proven conservation alternatives that would have prevented a burgeoning off-range crisis in the first place.  

Of course, we can’t turn back time, so the pivotal question we have to answer now is what should be done with 62,000 wild horses that have nowhere else to go…. Or, do they? 

Understanding the True Cost of Wild Horse Holding Facilities

First, let’s break those holding numbers down. 

There are 62,000 wild horses and burros held in long and short term facilities combined, but the bulk (70%) of the cost to taxpayers - in other words the real financial conundrum - sits with just 23,000 horses and burros in short term holding.

The most financially prudent way to stop adding to the cost of short term holding is to stop adding to the horses in short term holding.

‍Fertility Control and Land Restoration: A Humane Alternative

We already know it costs $48,000 every time a horse is removed from the wild and confined for life - versus eating for free in the wild - so let’s ditch the blind obsession with arbitrarily low ceilings on population numbers - known as Appropriate Management Levels or AMLs - introduce a congressional moratorium on helicopter roundups, and flip the model from removals to a science-based prevention policy built around birth control and habitat restoration.

That means making meaningful fertility control resources a genuine operational priority, and giving the nation’s wild horses back some of the land that has been taken from them over the last 50 years.

In 1971, wild horses and burros roamed free across 56 million acres of public lands. Today that number is close to half the 1971 number and is being reduced by another 2 million acres this summer, if the zeroing-out of the Wyoming Checkerboard goes ahead, as planned. 

Rewilding Wild Horses on America’s Public Lands

What if, rather than removing 3,000 more horses from Wyoming, significantly adding to off-range holding costs, we returned 2,000 horses to the wild over the next 2 years, rewilding 200,000 acres of the 26 million acres of unmanaged Herd Areas* to the free-roaming habitat they once were? (*Herd Area - as opposed to Herd Management Area - is a misleading federal term for an area of public land where wild horse herds were found in 1971, but which have subsequently been zeroed out). 

Improving Wild Horse Adoption Rates Through Better Promotion

Off-range, it’s clear that 6,000 adoptions a year isn’t coming anywhere close to matching the excessive supply being displaced into the US holding system. 

But it’s also feasible that the nation’s devotion to wild horses could lead to more responsible and sustainable adoptions with better marketing and promotion of the joy - as well as the risks - of having a mustang in your life or local sanctuary.  Drab catalogues of wild horses in wretched holding pens convey an appalling sadness that signals despair and does little to animate an interest in adopting a wild horse. 

Expanding responsible public interest in adoptions from 6000 per year to 7000 would help rehouse 14,000 horses from short term holding over the next two years, more than half the number standing in dirt today.

Non-lethal Paths to Reducing Numbers in Short-term Holding

As enormously grateful as we are for the humanity and generosity of the community of wild horse sanctuaries in the US, the reality is that it would take 86 sanctuaries like Skydog to rescue every wild horse or burro in short term holding. 

The Department of the Interior should incentivize public-private partnerships or ‘super sanctuaries’ that could rewild an additional 2,000 horses from holding and provide a sustainable release valve for future on-range population issues.

Long-term holding is four times cheaper per horse than short term, so incentivizing the expansion of off-range pastures is clearly in taxpayers’ best interests, a move that would dramatically reduce the greatest economic pain point in short term holding, and bring additional economic benefits to contracted ranchers in the Midwest. 

Added to the opportunities above, relocating 1,500 horses a year from short to long term holding pastures over the next two years would bring the short term holding total from 23,000 down to 2,000.

With an annual mortality rate of around 4%, nature would account for the remaining horses over the next two years, and bring the number in short term holding close to zero.

Clearly this is conservation theory at this stage, but that’s where new policy, best practice and, perhaps more importantly, congressional mindset, starts. 

Defeating the Slaughter Mindset With Smarter Policy

For those seriously contemplating the massacre of 62,000 wild horses and burros, arguments about cruelty and animal welfare alone will not be persuasive.

We have to thwart a growing slaughter mindset that would sweep 62,000 living animals under a blood-stained carpet and reboot a tried and failed process. 

With a mortality rate of 100% on the table right now, we must show congress that solving short term holding, while building a sustainable long term conservation plan, is the better alternative.