William Perry Pendley, acting chief of the Bureau of Land Management, is warning of a fearsome herd. Wild horses and burros, he says, are an “existential threat,” and the “havoc and destruction” they wreak is the biggest problem facing federal public lands.

Curiously absent from Pendley’s apocalyptic vision is the fact that wild horses and burros don’t exist on 90% of BLM land. Yet public lands continue to deteriorate. His rant against wild equines seeks to deflect public attention from the real forces ravaging America’s lands: livestock overgrazing, intensive oil and gas drilling, mining, deforestation, and the rollback of federal protections for publicly owned lands. It also aims to build congressional support for funding the agency’s new, draconian management plan.