Surprisingly, since wild horses have always represented the incredible freedom we find out in the United States west, they are resulting in some major problems for everyone because they are protected legal assets of the US Government, much like a national wildlife park.
This means people who actually own the land can’t touch the tribes of wild horses that roam the fields and lands. And some of those groups of horses have grown to more than 60 of them. That many horses in a single area of land can consume all the grass and other vegetation and then move on, so then when owners of the land come along with their cattle or their horses there isn’t any food left for them.
Of course, under federal law, the horses are supposed to be on the properties they were set to. But recent land managers who handle the horses stated that there are more than double the amount of horses that can be sustained on the land, and that means the horses have to go elsewhere to stay alive and there isn’t much the land managers can do about it.
Projected estimates place current wild horse numbers around 48,000, when the ranches and federal lands can only sustain about 25,000. And in just the next five years, they are expecting the wild horse numbers to climb to around 100,000, leaving just far too many wild horses that aren’t being handled. If they continue to be left unchecked, it could result in entire grass and water amounts being destroyed on both public and private properties.
And these numbers are already counting the amount of horses that are removed each year from the wild and offered up for adoption and other functions like 4H. The only option seems to be coming back to slaughtering excess horses to keep the numbers down, but unlike other wildlife animals such as waterfowl and deer, we don’t have a hunting season for horses because they are so beloved in the United States.
Hopefully we can come up with something soon or else we could see those wild horses taking over our lands.What do you think?