The Plight of the American Mustang
PART ONE: THE BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT
Currently over 75,000 American Mustang mares foals and stallions (now geldings) rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management sit in holding pens like the ones pictured below. Often these facilities are just around 100 acres and house 3,000-5,000 horses!! They are cramped, dirty, disease infested, lack any sort of shelter whatsoever, and many are also completely private with no public viewing allowed.
Around 20,000 additional mustangs are rounded up and added into the government run holding pens each year as well! This comes at an ASTRONOMICAL cost to taxpayers- as each horse living in holding costs $27,000 in care across their lifetime. That is a whopping TWO BILLION DOLLAR cost just for the 75,000 horses housed in BLM holding currently! That is not even including additional millions of dollars spent on rounding up these horses and transporting them to holding.
America’s wild mustangs deserve better than to be stored away in holding like outdated belongings the government feels obliged to hold on to (for now- mentions of mass euthanasia HAVE ALREADY been mentioned in legislature multiple times!). Only 5,000 (on average) mustangs per year are adopted out, and of those, many still end up dumped in auctions where they end up in the slaughter pipeline. Very few mustangs are lucky enough to be adopted into good homes and actually remain there for life. Lack of knowledge on how to handle or train a wild horse results in many of these animals being cast away and shuffled around after being adopted, increasing the risk that they end up in the slaughter pipeline. There are a whole segment of people that adopt horses from the BLM just to receive the Adoption Incentive Payment of $1,000 per horse from the BLM, just to dump the horses into a kill pen as soon as the horses are titled one year after their adoption and are no longer the government's legal property. Many people believe the BLM doesn't allow BLM mustangs to ship to slaughter- but this is fundamentally untrue since after the horse is titled it is no longer protected under the Wild Horse and Burro Act of 1971 and the adopter can do whatever they want with the horse at that point.
We are home to many BLM mustangs who we saved from kill pens just a few months after they were titled and their adopter received their payment, meaning their adopters were never intending to keep the horse but were just abusing the Adoption Incentive Program. As of Spring 2025, thankfully, the Adoption Incentive Program has been halted. We are unsure if the BLM will resume this program or if they are finally seeing that this program meant to increase adoptions only increases the amount of BLM mustangs going through kill pens and shipping to slaughter.
The other thousands of BLM Mustangs who aren't adopted are destined to live out their entire lives stuck in the small, cramped holding facilities where they don’t have room to run or live a normal social life with a diverse herd since they are stored with horses of the same sex and who are close in age. These non-ideal conditions cause both physical and psychological damage to the horses we all love so much.
Before the horses land in holding, they are brutally rounded up by helicopter, run over rough terrain for obscene amounts of miles, and into large traps. Broken legs, exhausted horses, and foals being left behind is commonplace during BLM round ups. Here is a brief view of just some of the tragedy that ensues:
PART TWO: THE US FOREST SERVICE
The US Forest Service Manages wild horses in National Forests. They too round up thousands of mustangs every year- and there is even LESS regulation on what happens to Forest Service horses after their removal than with the BLM.
Each local segment of the Forest Service is allowed to make their own policies in regards to the horses round up & what to do with them afterwards - some, like Devils Garden, CA- hold the horses like the BLM and try their best to vet adopters to ensure the horses go into good homes. Mesa Verde National Park works with a nonprofit organization for extremely humane bait & trap capture of their horses, and then the horses go to a program where children learn to train horses using gentle, horse centered positive reinforcement training.
Other segments of the Forest Service sectors like the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest where our herd of nearly 80 Alpine Wild Horses used to call home, give far less care to the futures of the horses removed. The Alpines went almost directly from capture into public auctions, where they become prime candidates for kill buyers to purchase. The contractor the Forest Service hired to remove and auction the horses, Rail Lazy H, even had a kill buyer as the man in charge of trapping the horses, and sold many of the captured Alpines to him in their own online auctions for merely $25 each!
PART THREE: TRIBAL ROUND UPS
Wild Horses abound on tribal land across the American West. Somehow, they manage to live in some of the worst desert conditions with so few resources! Each tribe is able to decide how to handle their wild horses.
Some tribes put lots of love and attention into their herds, such as the horses of the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon. Others believe the horses are a nuisance and even make posts in online groups advertising the horses as free and practically begging anyone to come round them up and take them away for free!
This situation is a lot more tricky than the BLM or US Forest Service round ups, who would not suffer if the horses were left free on the land. But, living in such remote regions with limited natural resources, we have witnessed firsthand how the horse herds do eat the grass of the cattle that some native families rely on as their only source of income. So, they trap the horses and sell them for under $100 each. It is not ideal- but like many situations in the US, there is not a clear answer that is a good solution for both the horses and the Native people. Whenever possible, we try to take in horses from the reservation directly from the person who rounded them up to keep them out of the slaughter pipeline altogether and immediately giving them life in sanctuary instead.
PART FOUR: BUT, WHY ARE THEY BEING REMOVED AT ALL?!
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is notoriously the most corrupt organization removing wild horses. They were actually founded long long ago as a grazing organization to manage cattlemen grazing their livestock on public lands! This lends itself to their inherent preference to cater to cattle ranchers over keeping the horses on the range.
Within many HMA's (Herd Management Areas)- which are the few select areas within BLM's land that horses are even allowed to be- the BLM's own records indicate ecosystem damage due to overgrazing. They happily remove the horses and blame them for the range degradation, when the fact is that in most HMA's, the number of cattle far outweigh the number of horses! In some cases, it's a 5 to 1 ratio of cows to horses.
Cows are hands down more destructive to the landscape, and especially to riparian areas, with their eating & drinking habits. This video describes in detail the differences between horses and cattle and their impacts on the land:
The worst part? Cattle Ranchers pay a mere $1.35 per cow/calf pair per month to graze their herds of cattle on public lands. The rest of the ACTUAL cost, which is around $8-$10, is subsidized by your tax dollars! These welfare ranchers are taking advantage of our public lands and a price that hasn't been updated in nearly a century. Just for comparison- the cost of feeding a cow per month on your own land or leased land is upwards of $25/month!
Wild horses are being used as the scapegoat to the damage these cattle cause to the fragile western landscapes, and so the BLM "justifies" their removal. BUT- the Wild Horse issue goes EVEN deeper than this, with most Wild Horse Advocates eyes being kept on the welfare ranchers, the REAL culprit of the wild horses removal can operate seamlessly with few people's awareness.
In the last 20 years, over 30 HMA's have been completely zeroed out, which means every single horse has been removed. The list of HMA's continues to shrink year after year! And, so does the number of horses left in the wild. Now, there are officially fewer wild horses in the wild than in captivity! Ironically- shortly after an HMA is zeroed out, it seems that some mining claim wins a contract to mine within that area, and moves right on in with no one to protest!
There are more than 800 mining operations taking place right now on BLM land, and whats worse than OUR public lands being completely destroyed and pillaged, many of these are owned by foreign companies! It is a betrayal on many levels, as the horses are removed to make way for mining operations that not only destroy the land, but also the lives of any locals in the area as mining for elements such as Uranium leaves behind large amounts of radioactive waste which will further pollute the land, water, and air for years and years to come.
The US Forest Service also has various reasons for removing horses- in most cases the horses are simply categorized as stray livestock, so that the Forest Service has no responsibility to protect the horses since stray livestock don't fall under the protection of the Wild Horse and Burro Act of 1971. For example, the Alpine Wild Horses had been documented in their area since the 1540's but even still the government labeled them stray livestock and removed all of them from their wild home.
In many cases the Forest Service is somewhat sneaky, and tries to say that the horses are endangering some species of animal of another. If you stick with the story long enough, you'll see the USFS reasoning for the horses removal change, then change again. Then, a mining or logging claim will move into the area and you'll see that all of their given reasons were bogus in the first place, as the harvesting of more resources from OUR public lands was again the real reason the horses were removed.
It is SO sad that our public lands are abused like this. Public lands that were set aside specifically for the PUBLIC to enjoy, lands that should be left wild and untamed for all future generations to be able to enjoy and cherish... are now lands that are altered, ravaged, mined, used up, torn apart, polluted, and even divided up and sold off for various developments. Most American's have no idea it's even happening.
PART FIVE: THE SLAUGHTER PIPELINE
As if all of that isn't horrible enough... we've got one more horrific aspect of the fate of our wild horses to discuss- the slaughter pipeline.
Many Americans are confused when they see that US horses are slaughtered, because horse slaughter is illegal within the US. But, the slaughter of equines is alive and well just across both our north and south borders, in Canada or Mexico. The USDA even tags horses for export, and is supposed to regulate the health of the horses being exported for slaughter, so the US is still extremely complicit in the slaughter of US horses.
Wild Mustangs absolutely get the worst end of the deal, since there are very few people who possess the knowledge, skills, or desire to work with a completely wild animal. Mustangs adopted from the BLM and rounded up from the Forest Service often end up in public auctions. Reservation mustangs often run through in groups of fifty or even MORE!
Since there are few people that want unhandled horses, the bulk of these mustangs are usually sold for a few hundred dollars to kill buyers, who simply run a huge group of wild horses onto their 18 wheelers, and head for the border.
Some kill buyers bring horses back to their properties where they offer the horses for sale to the public as a last ditch effort while they rack up enough horses for a full load, or wait for transport to take their horses to the slaughterhouse. These places are known as kill pens. Since so many horses from all different places pass through on a monthly basis, kill pens are known for being breeding grounds for terrible sicknesses and disease. Deaths in the kill pens are commonplace. We pulled a large portion of our herd from various kill pens in Texas, Colorado, and Oklahoma in 2024 and 2025.
BLM mustangs are lucky in a way, because they are clearly branded on their necks and recognizable as mustangs. USFS and Reservation Mustangs are not so lucky, and will pass through auctions or kill pens as random unhandled horses with little chance of any rescue saving them if whoever dropped them off doesn't expressly say that they are mustangs.
As of May 2025, we will be attending public auctions often to rescue as many mustangs as we possibly can, and we'd love your help saving Mustangs at the next one we attend! Saving Wild Horses at the auction level is the BEST ways to truly keep these American Icons of Freedom out of the slaughter pipeline in the first place, out of the hands of kill buyers, and out of those horrible kill pens!
If you made it this far- thank you so much for reading and for caring about the plight of America's Wild Horses. We hope that this helps paint a picture of what's happening to them, and how taking their futures into our own hands is truly the only hope for their continued existence and ability to thrive!