Wild Narrative Project

03/13/2026

Four wild horse gathers were announced in Nevada this week.

The operations, announced on March 10th, are scheduled to begin on March 15th and could remove more than 2,000 wild horses and 425 burros from public lands across the state.

The public lands where these horses currently live span about 5.5 million acres.

Well over 200,000 AUMs (animal unit month) of privately owned livestock are permitted to graze much of the same public acreage.

Unlike helicopter roundups, these operations will use bait-and-trap methods, and the Bureau of Land Management is prohibiting public observation, citing an effort to prevent excessive activity near the traps.

Nevada experienced severe drought in 2025, yet current conditions documented by NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System show mild drought improvement across the state at the start of the year, including regions where the four wild horse gathers will occur.

Read the full story at our link in bio.

02/05/2026

Federal grazing fees are going up—for the first time since 2016. The Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service announced the 2026 fee will be $1.69 per animal unit month (AUM), up from $1.35—the legal minimum that held from 2020 through 2025—with the new rate effective March 1, 2026.

An AUM (often treated as a “head month” for fee purposes) represents one month of forage for one cow and calf, one horse, or five sheep/goats. The fee is set by a formula rooted in the Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978 and a 1986 executive order that caps annual changes at 25% and locks in the $1.35 floor—constraints that have kept public-lands grazing prices unusually low for long stretches.

01/10/2026

Congress just moved the FY2026 Wild Horse & B***o budget — here’s what changed.
On Jan. 8, 2026, the House passed the Interior-Environment appropriations package 397–28.

Key points for the Wild Horse & B***o Program:

- $144,000,000 for FY2026 (House position)

- Up to $11,000,000 for immunocontraceptive fertility control strategies

- House report language also mentions permanent sterilization efforts

- Long-running limits remain in place that restrict using funds to destroy healthy animals and bar sales leading to commercial processing

Senate action is next; agencies are operating under continuing funding through Jan. 30, 2026

This is a budget story, but it’s also a policy story: the numbers and the rider language shape what BLM can fund—and what’s off-limits.

Keeps “no slaughter” guardrails and fertility control budget

12/06/2025

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We're a watchdog news organization covering public lands policy, combating disinformation, and sharing true stories from the range.

12/06/2025

ICYMI!

Nevada holds some of the most consequential public lands in the West — ground zero for how the federal government assesses drought conditions, manages grazing pressure, and makes decisions about wild horses.

A brief visual record of the public landscapes we documented across Nevada this year

11/29/2025

Nevada Public Land, November 2025

Cows in the road. Cows tucked into low draws, cows dotting the hillside and spread across the wash. Over the course of our field observation last week, we saw hundreds.

The ground told the same story: chewed-down grasses, cloven hoof-muddied watering holes, and bare swaths of land where the soil is taking the hit.

Wild horses, on the other hand, were almost invisible. In this area where they’ve been zeroed out for nearly two decades by the Bureau of Land Management “for range health,” we saw only four—and they were so far away we could barely pick them out, even with binoculars.

This is one snapshot of what “multiple use” looked like on this stretch of Nevada public land in 2025. We’ll keep documenting what we find out here, and dig into the decisions behind it in upcoming reporting.

Special thanks to for the es**rt and the local expertise.

10/18/2025

Nevada is in drought. Again.

But this time, the silence speaks louder than the science.

Our latest investigation uncovers how the Bureau of Land Management has failed to act as rangelands collapse — keeping cattle on the range, rounding up wild horses, and punishing employees who try to follow the rules.

According to data, 93% of Nevada’s grazing allotments were renewed without environmental review. In one valley east of Tonopah, BLM even authorized new water hauls to expand cattle range during peak drought — while blaming wild horses for the damage.

We called, emailed, and followed up with BLM Nevada for months - long before the federal government shutdown. No one responded.

Read the full report: Nevada’s Drought Denial: Inside the Silence of a Broken System — now live at link in bio.

As drought grips Nevada’s public lands, the Bureau of Land Management keeps cattle on the range, rounds up wild horses, and punishes employees who enforce the rules.

08/19/2025

YOU'RE GONNA WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS.

Breaking: Forest Service Plans Another Devil’s Garden Wild Horse Roundup The Forest Service has announced plans to remove 350 more wild horses from the Devil’s Garden Plateau in Modoc National Forest beginning September 2 in an apparent attempt to zero out the herd. What we know so far, based on...

07/28/2025

In a move drawing striking historical parallels, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has presided over another mass departure—more than 15,000 workers accepted deferred-resignation packages as part of a sweeping departmental reorganization announced on July 24. While framed as a modernization effort and mission renewal, the exodus signifies profound divestment in science and institutional knowledge. Much like the Bureau of Land Management’s collapse after its ill-fated Grand Junction relocation in 2019, this shake-up risks dismantling core scientific and regulatory capacity across federal land management.

One area of immediate concern is grazing oversight. The Forest Service administers approximately 9,400 grazing allotments across national forests, many of which are operating under outdated or expired environmental reviews. According to agency records, more than 6,800 allotments required NEPA analysis as of the early 2000s, and a large number remain overdue for reassessment under the current NEPA schedule (USFS NEPA Schedule 2017–2028).
Under authority from the Rescissions Act of 1995 and subsequent appropriations riders, expired permits are allowed to continue until NEPA analysis is completed. This legal mechanism allows livestock grazing to proceed even in the absence of updated scientific review or public input (USFS Grazing Handbook, Chapter 90). With key monitoring staff on administrative leave or removed altogether, the backlog of unassessed allotments—and the risk of ecological degradation—may only grow.

USDA Just Lost 15,000 Staff Members

07/27/2025

According to the press release announcing the roundup, the agency stated that due to “exceptional drought, little to no forage grew this year” in the area where the removals took place. We have reached out to our contacts at the Bristlecone Field Office to gain clarity about livestock use in the same area, and we’ll report here when we’ve checked all the facts.

Stay tuned.

07/24/2025

This decision relies on a decades-old management level, overlapping with active livestock grazing, without recent rangeland health assessments—and it ignores the agency’s own genetic science.

WNP’s Field Reporter, Monica Ross, shares her observations from a recent visit to Lahontan in our brief dive into the issue.

A decades-old management level, unassessed rangelands, and ignored genetic science underpin BLM’s plan to cut Nevada’s Lahontan herd to just 7 wild horses.