What are the biggest threats to the wild horse population?
I think it comes down to mismanagement. Study after government study, dating back to the Teddy Roosevelt administration, shows that it’s livestock grazing that does the most damage to the range, not wild horses. You can’t say that 20-something-thousand horses are doing more damage to the land than 4 million cows. Yet the Bureau of Land Management claims that wild horses are overrunning the West and that there is an “overpopulation” problem. It’s simply not true. The only place there is an overpopulation problem is in government corrals—because the horses shouldn’t have been removed from their home turf in such great numbers to begin with. Then what’s spurring the BLM to cut herd sizes? There are a number of factors. The livestock lobby regards mustangs as pests, animals that steal food from cows, and since members of the lobby lease federal land for ranching, they pressure the BLM to curb the wild mustang population. There are also a lot of other things happening on public lands these
