Wild Horse and Burro Statutes and Regulations
One of the founding tenets of this magazine is that the American people deserve accurate and comprehensive information regarding the wild horse and burro situation. To appreciate these incredible animals should be enough, since it was for every citizen that the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burro Act was unanimously passed by both chambers of Congress in 1971. But it is naive to presume that the ruthless and systematic annihilation of wild horses that precipitated legal protections would somehow and forever end with the enactment of a single law. As you know, the persecution continues. Now, it is cloaked in the pretense of concern for the horses’ and burros’ welfare and the health of rangelands, with talking points crafted by public relations firms for sophisticated industry lobbyists and a broad campaign of misinformation.
It can be daunting to square the preservation of wild horses with opposing perspectives of the horses’ and burros’ alleged role in the devastation of Western rangelands. This has been our challenge since we incorporated the Central Oregon Wild Horse Coalition in 2002. We hope to share our experiences and insight regarding laws and regulations governing wild horse and burro management through a continuing series of wild horse and burro law vignettes.
It seems appropriate to first view the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act in its entirety, while establishing the backdrop for the writing of the law. It was a dire, horrific war on wild horses, in the first half of the 20th century, and it is important to see the parallels as we approach the Act’s 50th anniversary, and the depths to which haters have descended in the spit-shined strategy to remove wild horses and burros from the coveted panorama of Western public lands.
The composition of indigenous and imported horses, once numbering in the millions, can never be fully known. What is recorded in several historical accounts, however, is that from 2-10 million wild horses successfully inhabited the plains, mountains, forests, and sagebrush steppes of Western North America. If we have 95,000 wild horses now, accused of being “the existential threat to Western rangelands” (William Perry Pendley, Acting Director, Bureau of Land Management, 2020), somehow millions of horses thrived as components of the diverse, thriving, natural ecosystems to which they had adapted. When Europeans invaded the West with livestock and bare ambition in the latter years of the 19th century, the horses’ range constricted and the horses became targets. Hope Ryden provided this hard-to-read synopsis of their fated collision with hell-bent humanity in “Mustangs, Return to the Wild”:
“The decimation of the vast herds of mustangs that once graced our Western landscapes demonstrates perfectly how Americans have traditionally viewed every facet of nature either as a resource to be totally exploited or as a useless impediment to be removed so that the exploitation of some other resource can be better accomplished. In brief, hundreds of thousands of wild horses were rounded up to serve in the Boer War and World War I; hundreds of thousands were captured and converted into chicken feed, fertilizer, and hides; hundreds of thousands were captured and broken into cow ponies; hundreds of thousands were killed by stock-growers who wanted all the free grass on the public lands for their cattle; hundreds of thousands were killed by the United States Grazing Service which, finding itself unable to cope with the human abuses of the vast piece of federal real estate it administered, took action against the wild animal occupants; hundreds of thousands were killed by game managers intent on making more habitat available for target species; and hundreds of thousands were shot by air-borne cowboys merely for the excitement of it.”
Though not alone in her treacherous battle to save wild horses and burros from certain extinction, Velma Johnston is credited with inspiring the groundswell of public opinion which resulted in the 1959 “Wild Horse Annie” statute restricting aircraft in the gathering and hunting (yes, hunting) of wild horses, and ultimately her efforts led to the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971.
Velma’s life story is compelling enough without the hard-fought victory of protections for wild horses and burros. Her work should be honored in perpetuity by many, many people reading her story of unbounded tenacity under continual threats to her safety, all so the carnage against wild horses and burros would end.
And so the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act became law, on December 18, 1971; Public Law 92-195. To distill the Act’s scope to a single sentence; the Act recognized wild horses’ and burros’ rightful place on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands, and made it a Federal crime to harass or harm them. Were it not for the many attacks on the law itself, and institutionalized disregard for its provisions, the Act’s language would have effectively protected wild horses and burros to this day.
Please continue to follow this series with us. This is a complicated and layered issue, or more accurately, untold numbers of issues under one heading. All is connected to a 1971 law; its intent, and its expressed managerial guidance. We will attempt to examine segments of the text, juxtaposed against real-time examples of how that text has been misconstrued or ignored by agencies and courts.
Thank you – for your interest in the preservation of OUR wild horses and burros.
