The Wild Horse & Burro Conversation
In the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range - yearling colt Yellowstone (Missoula/Pegasus) plays with Firestorm (Cloud/Velvet). 2025 Photo TCF
Changing the Wild Horse & Burro Conversation: Crisis Should Not Be the Status Quo
By Elise Vaughn
TCF Guest Author
All too often, wild horse and burro advocacy messaging leans heavily on crisis: removals, holding pens, shrinking budgets, and urgent calls to act. While the facts are true, focusing almost exclusively on crisis risks doing more harm than good. It inadvertently reinforces the BLM’s own narrative—that wild horses are a costly burden on our public lands. With federal agencies facing staffing cuts and deficit politics, that narrative could easily slide toward “humane euthanasia” as a budget solution.
What often gets lost is the full truth: wild horses belong on their native ranges and contribute ecological, cultural, and economic value. Without sharing that more complete story, many members of the public who are understandably unfamiliar with the complexities of rangeland management are left with the impression that horses are the problem, while the true drivers of degradation and water shortages go largely unexamined
What We Lose When We Only Talk Crisis
Water: Cattle on the Western Slope in Colorado consume nearly 25% of available water (through hay and feed), and extractive industries’ usage isn’t even included in these figures. Horses are not the source of water scarcity.
Science: Fertility control should not be treated as the “silver bullet” answer to wild equid management. Any use of it must be grounded in independent, science-based research that evaluates herd size, ecological function, and genetic health over time. Not all fertility control is benign: the methods now favored by BLM, such as GonaCon, cause permanent infertility that disrupts natural behavior and the sustainability of herds. Prematurely promoting fertility control as the only solution risks masking the broader causes of rangeland stress while weakening herd resilience.
Ecology: Wild horses can be part of broader rewilding strategies that restore trophic cascades, biodiversity, and ecosystem function across landscapes. Rewilding emphasizes restoring self-regulating ecological processes (predator-prey dynamics, nutrient cycling, seed dispersal) to strengthen ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change, wildfires, and human pressures.
Costs: Federal grazing subsidies for private livestock top $500 million annually, without adding in costs for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), Partners for Fish and Wildlife, Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and Wildlife Conservation and Restoration Program, and other such federal programs slanted to benefit ranching. Those are the real cost drivers, not wild horses and burros.
Economics: Extractive industries and livestock grazing contribute minimally to the broader economy compared to their subsidies and environmental toll. By contrast, wildlife can fuel rural revitalization: Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction generated multimillion‑dollar ecotourism returns that exceeded reintroduction costs.
Reframing the Conversation
If our messaging stays locked in crisis mode, we risk letting the narrative obscure the fact that wild horses are not the root problem on western rangelands. The ecological and financial costs come from overgrazing and extractive industries. What’s urgently needed is independent, science-based data to guide management decisions—including determining true ecological roles and ensuring that fertility control, if used at all, is carefully targeted, reversible, and supported by current data rather than outdated assumptions.
Wild horses also present an opportunity to anchor rewilding initiatives where conservation policy prioritizes ecosystem-scale restoration rather than single-species management. When we add a rewilding framework to the narrative, we shift the focus toward holistic land stewardship that integrates herbivores, predators, vegetation dynamics, and hydrological cycles. This systems-based approach aligns with modern ecological science and positions wild horses as contributors to biodiversity recovery, wildfire mitigation, and climate resilience.
If we want donors, policymakers, and the public to stay engaged, we must go beyond painting wild horses as victims. They represent a keystone opportunity: to model science-based land policy, healthier rangelands, and stronger rural economies.
For the Wild Ones,
Elise Vaughn
Note from TCF:
At The Cloud Foundation, we believe the conversation around wild horse and burro management must be broader than crisis alone. In this guest perspective, we share an important reminder: to protect these iconic animals, we must also highlight their ecological, cultural, and economic value—and the solutions that allow them to thrive on the range where they belong.
It’s so important to have balance in our wild horse & burro conversations.