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English 101

7/8/19

Brian Martin

Wild Horses and their impact on the Great Basin Ecology

The wild horse that roams the Western regions of the United States is as synonymous of

an American Icon as the cheeseburger and John Wayne. The wild horse is a reminder of the

legacy of the untamed west and days of westward expansion. Even the quarter for the state of

Nevada depicts wild horses running free into the sunset, the iconography of their main flowing in

the wind as they roam free has become a species that as beautiful as they may seem are threating

the existence of our rangelands and identity in the Great Basin. The species that lived and thrived

for thousands of years on these shared lands are no getting pushed out of former territories and

further to the bring of extinction.

Nevada contains the largest amount of wild horse populations than any other state.

Nevada has “statewide, the appropriate management level is 12,800, but the current population is

estimated to be more than 34,000”1. With numbers of wild horses nearly three times as many as

what is manageable in just Nevada has demonstrated that the Bureau of Land Management has

done nothing to ‘manage’ the skyrocketing populations that seem to show no signs of demising.

The issues of what to do exactly with the horses is a debate that is just as divided as political

views are. The sheer number of “approximately 75,000 wild horses and burros”4, living wild in

the United States as of 2016 is a staggering number. Every person has an opinion on the subject
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of managing the populations and this has led to very little change occurring because of the

backlash.

In 1971 President Nixon signed the ‘Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burro Act’4. The bill

was intended to protect the species from disappearing because of its cultural value to the nation,

before the bill was passed wild horses were free for the taking and could be round up and used

for dog food and no laws were in place to protect them and therefore was completely legal. Like

the protection of the wolves in Yellowstone their populations were brought back up to carrying

capacity and now are not an endangered species anymore and this management should have been

done with the horses to ensure room and forage for all other forms of life. The horse populations

of such high numbers have led to overgrazing of the lands and destroyed forage for the mule

deer, sage grouse, pronghorn antelope, elk and all other creatures. Once the damage is done like

deep trails and eating the sagebrush and forage that takes years to replenish, it allows invasive

species like cheatgrass to grow and take over the landscape. “instead of fires occurring every

100-plus years, cheatgrass can increase the fire regime to every three to seven years, which

doesn’t allow enough time for many of the important brushy species to grow back”1 . This small

grass has infiltrated around 100 million acres and continues to increase every year after wild fires

burn the land and promotes more cheatgrass growth on new acreage.

As wildfires increase in size each year and the wild horse populations increase in size the

correlation between the two is becoming more and more evident. The never-ending cycle of fire

and exponential cheatgrass growth is going to become the normal if not addressed and will cause

determinantal effects to all other wild life. The protection of just one species that is consider to

be invasive sums up that the BLM cannot manage the lands properly and are concerned with the

politics and not helping to preserve the public lands. The opposition that the BLM faces claims
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that the wild horses were originally in North American but they went extinct “approximately

11,400 years ago”3, and they should be a part of the ecology but the blood lines of the horses are

all of European descent. “The vast majority of herds living on the BLM’s lands are basically

mongrels, mixed-breed horses that probably have not been living wild for many genereations”4.

Many of the horses were released during the turn of the twentieth century when the automobile

took over the horses that were transportation were released into the desert, this practice is still

done today and this makes up the majority of the gene pool in the not so wild horses. The horses

that are rounded up and taken to feed lots is a sad situation where they are kept until they die or

they are adopted.

The pronghorn antelope is an evolutionary miracle that leaves no impact on the desert

and cooperates with the mule deer and sage grouse and all other species that work together in a

balanced fragile ecosystem. What causes more damage to the land is ranching but it also brings

in revenue to the BLM for leasing permits for land us and can suggest why they want to remove

the horse so the cattle industry can come in use the forage for their cattle that the horses are

currently using. “Wild horses should not be used as scapegoats for range degradation that is in

fact primarily caused by private livestock”2. The Native American tribes have resented the

BLM’s uses of the land for mining, logging, and ranching to make a profit, and to not see or care

about the damages that they are causing has been an issue since the agency began. With this in

mind even the Pyramid Lake Native American tribe did a wild horse round up on their land a

couple of years back because they know the importance of the Great Basin biodiversity, and

thinking of the future of their lands. They received heavy criticism for the round up but they

basically said that’s too bad, its our land and we are going to do what is the best choice. This was
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one of the first large round ups that the BLM actually participated in and now those captured

horses are up for adoption.

The unfortunate fact that some of the horses are going to have to be euthanized is terrible

but with such high numbers it’s looking more evident. Programs for veterans to adopt the horses

and train them for therapy, and prisoners care for them to give them responsibility and something

to look forward to would be a perfect way to give the animals to good homes. The hobby of

riding horses has been declining ever since the invention of the automobile and finding homes is

becoming harder and harder. Bringing this issue into the main spot light like the commercials to

adopt dogs would be a powerful use of pathos to get people to adopt and love these majestic

creatures. Solutions are about as clear as mud, but sitting back and avoiding the issue is never the

answer. All this will cause is further depletion of natural resources for other wild (not

domesticated species like sheep and cattle that are at least regulated) species that are struggling

harder for water and food and being chased further back by fires and invasive species than any

other time in the west. The Great Basin region is a beautiful expanse of land that is rugged but

extremely fragile and will be facing the tipping point of no return if the wild horses continue to

faze out our public lands of their rich biodiversity that puts the wild in the wild west.
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Works cited:

1.) Ben Masters. “Wild Horses: The consequences of doing nothing”. National

Geographic. February 7, 2017. Accessed 7/8/19. <

<https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/features/environment/wild-horses-

part-two/>

2.) “Wild Horses and the ecosystem”. American Wild Horse Campaign. Accessed

7/8/19. < https://americanwildhorsecampaign.org/wild-horses-and-ecosystem>

3.) “Effects on Native Wildlife”. National Horse and Burro Rangeland Management

Coalition. March 2016. Accessed 7/8/19.

<http://www.wildhorserange.org/uploads/2/6/0/7/26070410/nhbrmc_factsheet4_nativ

ewildlife-may.16.pdf>

4.) Richard Horst. “Wild Horses, Wilder Controversy”. February 6, 2017. Accessed

7/8/19. <https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/features/environment/wild-

horses-part-one/>