Holy cows
While livestock grazing slaughters landscape health on public lands, the Bureau of Land Management scapegoats wild horses for the damage, and the agency uses taxpayer dollars to do its dirty work.
In 2022, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) published an analysis of 155 million acres of public land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management and concluded that of the millions of acres determined to be “failing landscape health standards”, livestock ranching is the leading cause of landscape degradation. Findings from the same data concluded that wild horses are the cause of just over 1% of damage.
Why it matters
The Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency within the Department of the Interior, is responsible for overseeing the health of 245 million acres of public land. Because it’s mandated to manage this vast acreage for multiple uses (recreation, oil and gas extraction, livestock ranching, wildlife, and preservation), it’s required to make sure the health of rangelands is not compromised due to such uses.
The agency has, for decades, rounded up thousands upon tens of thousands of wild horses at taxpayer expense blaming them for destroying public lands. Their running narrative is that wild horses are overpopulated on western landscapes and that the “rangelands” can’t sustain their numbers. The agency consistently cites wild horses as an out-of-control problem — for degrading landscape health, crushing and devouring native plants, disrupting riparian areas and biodiverse ecosystems, and spreading invasive plant species.
In 2022 alone, 20,851 wild horses and burros were rounded up by the federal government. Nearly all of them were permanently removed from their natural habitats. According to Congress.gov, the 2022 fiscal budget for the Wild Horse and Burro program was over 137 million dollars.
Meanwhile, the BLM has decades of extensive records that directly contradict their wild horse accusations. This recent PEER analysis shows proof that BLM buries its own records which show the failing health of these environments is the commercial use of public lands to graze swaths of cattle and sheep.
Brief background
The Bureau of Land Management is mandated to periodically assess landscape health on public lands allotted for livestock grazing. A primary goal of the assessment is to identify the main causes of landscape degradation. Upon this assessment, the agency is mandated to make management adjustments according to a lengthy list of standards and guidelines and to take action to ensure these public lands are protected.
The report
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) collected 22 years’ worth of the agency’s internal reporting on the rangeland health status of leased livestock allotments via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Through extensive and transparent analysis, PEER found that the agency’s own land health data neglects to prove that wild horses are the cause of rangeland degradation. Instead, after analyzing more than twenty years of records, PEER found that BLM most frequently cited livestock as the problem — by a vast majority.
“This report makes available to the public BLM data depicting rangeland health conditions of the 155,000,000 acres of leased livestock allotments under its administration. The data reveal that BLM most frequently cites livestock grazing, far and away, as the most significant cause of the failure of the allotment to meet Rangeland Land Health Standards (LHS)...
Though BLM identifies many reasons for an allotment to be classified as failing, including livestock, invasive species, weeds, drought, fire, off highway vehicles and wild horses, horses are cited very few times.” - PEER
The numbers
Of the total acreage assessed*, BLM reported that 50% fail to meet Land Health Standards (LHS). This 50% rangeland health failure accounts for a total of 54 million acres.
Of these 54 million acres, BLM reported that in 72% of the cases, livestock grazing was the “significant cause” of Landscape Health Failure.
That is approximately 40 million acres that are failing due to overgrazing.
In the analysis of the same acreage, PEER found that within failing areas where wild horses and privately-owned livestock are permitted, BLM sites livestock are “the significant cause” of that failure.
Of the 54 million failing acres of rangeland, livestock in conjunction with wild horses were determined to be just over 12.5% of the cause of failing land health standards.
Of the same 54 million failing acres of rangeland, wild horses alone (in areas where livestock are absent) were reported to be responsible for just over 1% of land degradation.
“Overall, in allotments including those within HMAs, BLM cites livestock as the number one cause of allotments failing LHS, not horses.” - PEER analysis
What’s it to taxpayers?
While the Bureau of Land Management has grossly expanded appropriations to fund its yearly nine-digit budget to continue its current wild horse roundup and feedlot incarceration system, it has yet to implement a similar system for removing or curtailing livestock roaming public lands.
“While wild horses do have impacts on the land, coherent landscape and recovery planning require a hard look at the policy of continuing to permit millions of cows to forage on increasingly stressed rangelands… The data calls into question BLM’s policy decision to prioritize the removal of wild horses instead of making management decisions to directly address the cited reasons for failure.” - PEER
Furthermore, while BLM has decades of records that identify public lands ranching as the primary cause of failing rangelands, BLM’s wild horse and burro program is almost wholly managed by an arbitrary reference point that has no basis in science, is not anchored in unbiased study, and has not been derived through analysis of actual impact to public land health due to presence of wild horses.
Additional context
Wild horses are permitted to graze on 27 million acres of public land (According to the American Wild Horse Campaign, the vast majority of that land is also grazed by livestock.)
Ranchers are permitted to graze livestock on 155 million acres of public land.
According to BLM, there are approximately 80,000 wild horses roaming on public lands.
This PEER analysis suggests livestock outnumber wild horses on public land by 125 to 1. BLM does not publicly report the number of cattle and sheep grazing public lands, but research estimates there are at least 1.5 million cattle grazing via the public lands grazing program.
*At the time records were collected by PEER, BLM had assessed Land Health Standards for approximately 108 of 155 million acres grazed by livestock in the public lands ranching program. The agency has yet to assess nearly 41 million acres of grazing allotments.