In 1971, when Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the aim was to protect the animals from “capture, branding, harassment, or death.” The law hailed wild horses as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.”
The protections worked—a little too well. When mustangs began overtaking public pastures where cattle graze, the Bureau of Land Management responded by capturing and removing wild horses. Today, more than 43,600 are penned in a federal holding system, according to BLM figures. So much for the pioneer spirit.
Meanwhile, the cost of rounding up the herds—by spooking them with low-flying helicopter passes until they run into pens—and then feeding and housing them has risen over the years: In fiscal year 2016, the BLM’s wild-horse program budget was $80 million. Adding up the costs since 1971 is staggering: about a billion dollars since 1975, with another billion expected for caring for the horses now penned up. “How did we get to a place where we spend $2 billion to gather and store animals that everyone agrees should be wild and free?” asks David Philipps in the introduction to his book Wild Horse Country.
Philipps—a New York Times reporter who was awarded a Pulitzer in 2014 for his work at the Gazette in Colorado Springs on the mistreatment of wounded veterans—admits he is “not a horse person.” He is, though, a wilderness person, and “mustangs embody the West that I love.” His quest to understand their predicament has resulted in a wide-ranging, scrupulously reported investigation into the iconic role of wild horses in our American self-understanding and the failures of government policy to ensure their protection.
The first half of Philipps’s book zips through equine history, as he lets his earnest fascination with the West come through. His reporting is threaded throughout with wild-horse symbolism. The mustang, Philipps writes, “is superior to its domestic brethren because it has the one thing Americans say they yearn for most: freedom. It is the hoofed version of Jeffersonian democracy.” Poetic license, sure, but not simply wrong.
Philipps relishes the campfire legend of the White Stallion, which was said to evade man for decades and which inspired so many stories that Washington Irving noted them while embedded with an 1832 expedition troop. The White Stallion is a reminder that no matter what era, president, or policy, there is an American emotional link to horses. Even if you’re scared of them, loathe their smells, or resent Mine That Bird for spoiling your 2009 Kentucky Derby wager, it’s undeniable that we have a deep cultural affinity for horses.
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Philipps’s investigation takes him far into prehistory. On a visit to Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, he joins an expert from Johns Hopkins University in hunting for fossilized jaws of early horses. The question is: Can the horse be considered native to North America or is it an introduced species? The answer is complicated. Early horses did roam North America for about 55 million years, Philipps writes, but disappeared about 10,000 years ago. When Columbus arrived, there were no wild horses in North America.
The Spanish brought their horses—and also brought the word mesteña, which became “mustang” and is more a descriptor than a breed; Philipps uses the term to describe all wild-born horses. Native American tribes realized the animals’ use in warfare and hunting, giving rise to the Horse Nations era; the Comanche turned themselves into a cavalry powerhouse.
By the early 19th century, herds had multiplied so vastly that accounts suggest sights almost unimaginable today. In 1846, a young Ulysses S. Grant wrote: “There was no estimating the number of animals in it; I have no idea that they could all have been corralled in the State of Rhode Island, or Delaware at one time. If they had been, they would have been so thick that the pasturage would have given out the first day.” Historian J. Frank Dobie estimated that at their peak, there were up to a million mustangs in Texas and another million scattered in the West.
And then the horse became a pest. With few predators, the animals were eating the grass and drinking the water needed for cattle. The introduction of the automobile and the sudden drop in the need for horses for travel and burden exacerbated the problem.
Ranchers tried to control the situation by killing or taking horses for their own use. But that was chump change compared with the widespread slaughter as part of what historian Vernon Parrington called “the great barbecue,” a time of unscrupulous claiming or depleting natural resources of the West: Ranchers and cowboys began rounding up horses to sell in bulk. The buyers were newly established canneries, where horses were cheap raw material for dog food. Horsemeat for dogs was at the time a viable product, although even then it struck many Americans as morally wrong. Among them was Frank Litts, who in 1925 was arrested for trying to blow up the Chappel Brothers’ Illinois factory. He landed in an asylum—but escaped long enough to procure 150 pounds of dynamite for another pass at the factory.
The demise of these dog-food factories came soon anyway. By the 1930s, after decades of slaughter, overgrazing, and drought, the herds were dwindling. Slaughterhouses that had once prepared horsemeat often shifted over to beef. As of 2000, writes Philipps, there were still three horsemeat slaughterhouses in operation; even they shut down after Congress defunded horse-meat inspection programs in 2007. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in rising exports of horses to be slaughtered in other countries.
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Although mustang populations had greatly declined by the early 20th century, a countertrend made them increasingly a part of popular culture—and even part of the American mythos that would come to enchant the world. Writers like Zane Grey shored up the romance of the West. The Western film genre took hold. An early ad for the Ford Mustang featured the White Stallion off in the distance.
Another trend was simmering, too: Concern for natural resources led to the environmental and conservation movements. A leading voice for horse protections was Velma Bronn Johnston, a colorful secretary from Nevada known as “Wild Horse Annie.” Her efforts across two decades resulted in the 1971 law, which protected horses on federal land. Capture or harassment of the horses could result in fines or jail.
The unintended consequence, though, was wild population growth. In 1970, a year before the law’s passage, the BLM estimated the wild-horse population at about 10,000. By 1978, the population had reached 62,000—far smaller than the 19th-century peak, but much higher than the figure of 27,000 that the BLM had determined was, and still is, the optimal number of horses (the “Appropriate Management Level”) to allow for an ecological balance of the land and animals, both wild and commercial.
As the mustang population grew, the BLM began its roundups. In 1981, 12,500 horses were gathered and stored in off-range areas—locations that are now running out of space. “It quickly became clear that the roundup policy had serious flaws and was so dysfunctional that no matter who ran it, and how much money they received, it was continually ending up in the ditch,” writes Philipps. “And yet it is still the approach used today.”
What about culling? Here our affinity for horses has become part of the problem. Our reverence for horses’ physical beauty and loyalty makes them off-limits in ways that many other animals aren’t. Many Americans hunt deer and eat venison regularly, but unlike in some other countries, in the United States the idea of shooting a horse for meat is unacceptable. Americans today won’t even feed horsemeat to their dogs. It has so far been politically untouchable to slaughter animals under specific government protection, a point made by advocacy groups’ lawsuits. In 1982, the BLM placed a moratorium on euthanizing horses—originally intended for three months but still in place today. All this may be changing soon, however: President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal calls for the moratorium to be lifted and for funding cuts that would make the sale of horses for slaughter inevitable.
The BLM has an adoption program, though its lenient rules have allowed for bulk adoption, which at times has enabled individuals to buy and sell truckloads of horses for slaughter. A scandal in the early 1990s revealed BLM employees were cashing in on the system.
No side in this debate—from the horse advocates to the ranchers—is happy with the current state of affairs, and to fix it would require cutting across bureaucracies with bold leadership. Philipps’s preferred approach would replace the current roundup-based policy with a multifaceted strategy, one that would include birth control for mares and the reintroduction of the mountain lion, a natural predator.
Of course, mountain lions pose a threat to cattle. But Philipps is convincing on this point: He runs the numbers to show ranchers could receive credits—a system that has precedent in the reintroduction of wolves in recent decades. Besides, Philipps writes, there is something perverse about the costly horse roundups happening in the “same places where the federal government is spending piles of tax dollars to kill the lions that would likely eat them.”
The saddest part of it all lies in Philipps’s fear that the image of the wild horse will suffer most. “In many places in Nevada, they are no longer symbols of individual freedom,” he writes. Instead, they have become “symbols of federal mismanagement and waste.”
They’re on a long list.
Pia Catton is editor of Dance.com.
