The wild horses of the American west are able to survive because of this idea of public land.
There are seventy-three thousand wild horses roaming the American West. Their federally designated territory, which is overseen by the Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.), extends across ten states, although most of it, nearly sixteen million acres, is concentrated in Nevada.
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. Today the United States is home to 9.2 million wild and domesticated horses. Upwards of 50,000 of these horses are Mustangs – wild horses descended from domesticated breeds brought to North America by Spanish settlers in the 1500s. These wild horses have since become a symbol for freedom and independence in the American West.
“To see a multigenerational herd gallop across the high-desert hinterland is to understand, in an instant, why all that open space exists”