The wild horse controversy has many complex layers and could fill many books. To save you from the years of study I underwent exploring this issue in depth, I’ve made this post to highlight the critical points in order help you get to the heart of the “War on Wildness,” and find out what you can do to help put an end to it.

To make sense of where and when the conflict over the preservation of free-roaming wild horses in the United States began, we must take a long view of history. Note: this article contains explicit content that might be too sensitive for young readers. Reader discretion is advised.

Protected under the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the Bureau of Land Management is responsible for managing them “in a manner that is designed to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance on the public lands” (United States Code: Title 16, Section 1331). Wild horse activists frequently criticize the BLM for lack of utilizing proven on-range methods of managing horses, such as fertility control, and relying on roundups which are targeted as cruel and inhumane (Morin, 2006; American Wild Horse Campaign, 2019). On the surface, activist groups lead people to believe that if you value wild horses you should join the fight to keep them wild, period. However, it isn’t always that simple.

American explorer Zebulon Pike coined the term mustang in 1807 during his travels from Mexico to Texas as he encountered herds of free-roaming horses.

The term mustang is a combination of Spanish words mesteno and mostrenco, meaning “masterless” or “wild”, and cimmaron meaning “runaway slave” (Dalke, 2010: 99). Though the mustang fits into the domestic classification, it stands apart from the tame domestic horse who has never known a life apart from humans, and some theorize that if a tame mustang living in captivity “were returned to the mountains tomorrow... the veneer of domestication would fade away quickly, and once again they would go wild” (Stillman, 2009: 16).