There are seventy-three thousand wild horses roaming the American West. Their federally designated territory, which is overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, extends across ten states, although most of it, nearly sixteen million acres, is concentrated in Nevada. No other state has such vast expanses of high, empty desert—the kind of landscape, sufficiently undeveloped and unpeopled, where wild horses can thrive. But, even there, they are threatened. For decades, cattle ranchers, ecologists, and, most significantly, the B.L.M. have noted that, because the horses reproduce easily and lack natural predators, their population overwhelms the space they occupy. There is not enough public land left, and the situation is worsening. Just last month, the Trump Administration shrunk the boundaries of two national monuments, removing protections on nearly two million acres; Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior, has recommended further reductions. As Andrew Ellis, the director of a new documentary called “Saving the Wild Horses of the American West,” put it to me recently, the animals “are able to survive because of this idea of public land. But there are all these competing interests that are threatening this public land and their livelihood.”
For more than forty years, the B.L.M.’s solution to the problem has been to remove the animals from the wild and put as many of them as it can up for adoption. Every few months, crews of cowboys, working with helicopters in the air and wranglers on the ground, round up hundreds of horses (or, in some areas, wild burros) and cart them off to government pens. Only a small number, about twenty-five hundred a year, are ultimately adopted. Because it is illegal to sell wild horses to so-called kill buyers, who would then sell the animals to slaughterhouses, the rest end up in a kind of equine purgatory. There are now nearly fifty thousand horses in indefinite government detention. In recent years, the B.L.M. has spent as much as fifty million dollars annually to tend to these homeless American beasts.
Last July, the House Appropriations Committee authorized an amendment to the Interior Department’s 2018 budget that would allow the B.L.M. to kill many of the animals in its care. At the time, the amendment’s author, a Utah Republican named Chris Stewart, wrote that the “alternative for these horses is starving in the wild.” Four months later, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a competing proposal that would give the B.L.M. additional funding to explore “a range of humane and politically viable options,” including contraception, to “drastically reduce” horse populations. President Trump’s proposed 2018 budget, meanwhile, calls for cuts to the B.L.M.’s existing program; it would allow the horses to be sold to any buyer, including those who would ship the animals to abattoirs in Mexico and Canada.
The earliest known ancestor to modern horses, Hyracotherium, emerged in North America some fifty million years ago. After the Conquistadors reintroduced the animals to the continent, in the sixteenth century, a cycle of booms and busts followed. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, millions of the Spanish mustangs’ descendants ran free from the Great Plains to the Pacific. As homesteaders settled the land and ranches grew, wild horses became a nuisance, a pest, and, for some, dinner. Mustangers shot them for sport or sold them to buyers who shipped them East, where they were put to work. As David Philipps, a national reporter for the Times, writes in his excellent recent book, “Wild Horse Country,” around the turn of the last century, one mustang named Hornet ended up as part of a theatre troupe, and another could be found “pulling a smoked-fish cart near Coney Island, in New York, where every summer afternoon he went swimming with his owner on the beach.” (Most captured mustangs didn’t land up so kindly.) In the ensuing decades, the spread of motorized vehicles and an increased demand for horse meat sent the animals into decline. By 1970, according to B.L.M. estimates, only ten thousand remained.
In December, 1971, at the peak of a wave of bipartisan environmental activism, President Richard Nixon signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. Describing the animals as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” that “enrich the lives of the American people,” the law stated that they should be left to live on the land where they were “presently found, as an integral part of the natural system of the public lands,” and “protected from capture, branding, harassment, or death.” Soon, though, the horses’ numbers were overwhelming. By 1975, the B.L.M. had started its roundups.
Since then, a host of activists have fought to keep the B.L.M.’s methods transparent and humane. One of them, Laura Leigh, has been living on the road for more than decade, mainly in Nevada, documenting the roundups and filing lawsuits. Last year, Ellis accompanied her to a herd-management area called Reveille, just up the road from Area 51. What he documented makes it easy to understand why Leigh and other activists have fought so hard, for so long, to protect these animals and the public lands they inhabit. To see a multigenerational herd gallop across the high-desert hinterland is to understand, in an instant, why all that open space exists.
