Sharing Ground With Wild Horses: New Video Tutorials Create Space for Conversations

The management of wild horses is a topic that arouses keen interest, triggers passionate debate and fuels considerable misinformation. For managers trying to protect the welfare of horses, share space on public lands, conserve a landscape and manage their own budgets, it makes the issue very tricky to navigate.

Now a series of short informational videos from researchers and experts lays a foundation for common ground on the topic of wild horses — or at least a common understanding of basic ecology, law and terminology from which to launch more productive conversations, according to Nicki Frey from the Quinney College of Natural Resources and USU Extension. Frey is part of a multi-state group tackling the issue of burgeoning horse populations in places like Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

“It’s exceptionally hard to find reliable information on these topics with just a Google search — even to answer questions as basic as whether horses are native to the West and how they eat and reproduce,” Frey said. “As horse populations continue to expand beyond the capacity of the land to support them, we felt compelled to make available basic, well-established information with a hope for the chance to have more productive conversations.”

Each three-minute video summarizes a topic related to wild horse management that doesn’t tend to be well-understood by the public, based on the results of a recent survey Frey conducted of people across the U.S. The information provided is well-researched, well-established science, and used to explain the basis of the current social and political landscape for the management of free-roaming horses.

The video tutorials briefly cover:

• How U.S. law protects wild horses and limits options for the way they are managed.
• The difference between terms like “feral,” “free-ranging” and “free-roaming,” and why they matter.
• Why natural predators (such as black bears and mountain lions) alone can’t control the growth of horse populations on public lands.
• What happens (and is happening) to wild horses and to the environments where they live when populations can’t be managed.

“Public opinions on the way the Bureau of Land Management handles free-roaming horses on public lands has fueled change and angst for decades,” Frey said. “It has made management action complex. But horse populations are at or above carrying capacity. We are at the point that we have to find solutions.”

In 2024 the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service counted 73,520 wild horses and burros on public lands. To protect delicate landscapes and water sources as well as preserve some areas for cattle grazing, some of those animals are gathered and held in corrals. More than 60 percent of the BLM’s horse and burro management budget goes directly to caring for the horses and burros already in permanent holding facilities that cannot be adopted.

Meanwhile, herds continue to grow — often at rates exceeding 20 percent each year — and the process will need to be repeated, gobbling up an ever-greater percentage of the resources.

“Getting herds back to a sustainable level will require some difficult decisions, both economically and emotionally,” said Laura Snell from University of California Cooperative Extension, who produced two of the videos in the series. “Any management decision that is made will be more successful if it has public support. The first step toward fostering support is helping the public fully understand the situation.”