08/27/2026
🐴 POST 5: MORE THAN 50 YEARS LATER — WHERE DID THE SYSTEM TAKE US?
In 1971, Congress protected wild horses and b***os on certain federal lands where they were found roaming.
More than five decades later, the wild horse program looks very different.
And to understand today's debate, we need to look at what changed.
🗺️ NOT ALL OF THE ORIGINAL RANGE REMAINS MANAGED FOR WILD HORSES
The original Herd Areas (HAs) identified after passage of the Act were much larger than the lands ultimately designated for continued wild horse and b***o management.
Today, the BLM manages wild horses and b***os in 177 Herd Management Areas across 10 western states.
Some original Herd Areas are no longer managed for wild horses at all. Others were divided, altered or incorporated into smaller management areas.
Why?
The answers vary by location — land ownership, habitat, water availability, conflicts with other land uses, management decisions and other factors have all played roles.
And the maps themselves can be complicated.
🏁 THE CHECKERBOARD PROBLEM
In parts of the West, public and private lands are intermixed in a checkerboard pattern — sometimes literally alternating sections of land.
A Mustang doesn't know when it has crossed from BLM land onto private property.
But legally and practically, that boundary matters.
In some areas, access to public land, water and seasonal habitat can also depend upon crossing private property.
That can make managing a truly “free-roaming” animal extraordinarily complicated.
🐴 MEANWHILE, HORSES KEPT REPRODUCING
Without enough population management occurring on the range, many herds grew beyond the BLM's established AMLs.
The primary response increasingly became:
Remove the horses.
Thousands upon thousands of Mustangs entered the off-range system.
The federal government then faced another problem:
What do you do with all of them?
🏠 ADOPTION WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PART OF THE ANSWER
For decades, the BLM has offered wild horses and b***os for adoption.
Training programs helped make some horses easier for the public to handle and adopt.
But there were still more horses entering the system than traditional adoption could consistently absorb.
So in 2019, the BLM introduced the Adoption Incentive Program.
Qualified adopters could receive up to $1,000 after adopting an eligible wild horse or b***o and meeting program requirements.
The idea was simple:
Encourage more people to adopt.
But the program also produced serious concerns.
Investigations and reporting documented cases in which people collected incentive payments, obtained title to the animals and later sold or transferred horses into situations where they entered the slaughter pipeline.
A program intended to get Mustangs into homes had created an unintended financial incentive that could be exploited.
The BLM subsequently changed safeguards and requirements within the program — but the controversy exposed a larger weakness:
Removal is only successful if there is a responsible destination waiting for the horse.
🇺🇸 AND THEN THERE WAS CAÑON CITY
Colorado had another important piece of that safety net.
For decades, the Cañon City Wild Horse Program housed and trained Mustangs through a partnership involving the BLM and Colorado Department of Corrections.
Then came tragedy.
In 2022, an equine influenza outbreak at the Cañon City facility killed 145 horses.
The event brought intense scrutiny to the facility and the conditions surrounding the outbreak.
The long-running program subsequently changed dramatically, and the traditional inmate wild horse training operation that had helped prepare Mustangs for adoption was no longer what it once had been.
⚠️ THIS IS WHERE THE CONVERSATION HAS TO CHANGE
For decades, much of wild horse management has followed the same basic cycle:
Population grows → AML is exceeded → horses are gathered → horses enter holding → government tries to find somewhere for them to go.
Meanwhile, taxpayers continue paying to care for tens of thousands of horses already removed from the range.
We believe we can do better.
That doesn't mean “never manage wild horses.”
And it doesn't mean allowing populations to grow until the land and horses suffer.
It means asking whether, more than 50 years after the 1971 Act was passed, we have better tools available to us.
Can we manage reproduction more effectively before populations explode?
Can we use smaller, lower-stress gathers when removals are necessary?
Can technology help us identify and treat individual horses?
Can organizations, trainers and adopters be incorporated into the plan before horses are removed, instead of trying to find somewhere for them afterward?
Can we protect healthy herds while also protecting healthy rangelands?
Those are the questions that bring this history directly into the present.
Because Wild Horse Annie fought to give these horses protection.
Our generation has to figure out how to make that protection work.
🐴 Next: Meet Mustang Annie — and let's start talking about what the next generation of wild horse management could look like.
