As wild horse populations skyrocket in West, advocates blast plan to remove 12K animals

The Bureau of Land Management recently released an updated report regarding a program aimed to relocate wild horses and burros populations, which officials say are continuing to grow at an alarming rate. However, a national wild horse advocacy group is blasting a federal plan to round up additional horses this year. Officials from the federal agency wrote in the May 8 report there were 95,000 wild horses as of the beginning of March, which far exceeds the 27,000 wild horses and burros it believes the land can sustainably hold. That number continues to rise. In fact, the bureau projects there will be 2.8 million horses on the land by 2040 at the current population growth rate. "They can grow pretty rapidly — 15-20% a year, which means a herd can double in size every four to five years, triple every six years … and it can overwhelm the resources that are available to them out on the mostly in the high desert," said Jason Lutterman, spokesperson for the agency’s Wild Horses and Burro Program. This year, the bureau expects to remove a little more than 11,000 horses and burros from public land in western states, including Utah. The process has already begun, and thousands of more animals are expected to be captured this summer. The horses are gathered and brought to pastures in the West and Midwest, Lutterman said. He explained that once the animals arrive to those pastures, they are up for adoption or will spend the remainder of their lives there. There are about another 50,000 animals in those facilities, he said. The report states that the BLM anticipates upwards of 220,000 animals in the next decade...MORE