A shocking analysis of publicly available data reveals roughly 50 percent of fully assessed public rangelands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) fail to meet designated land health standards. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence showing the reason for its failure is overgrazing from cattle on BLM-subsidized lands. So why is BLM placing the blame on wild horses and burros? Because addressing the cattle grazing issue would cause BLM’s entire foundation to crumble.
First, it is important to understand the history of the federal agency's creation to grasp why BLM is so heavily invested in the beef and dairy industry. In the 1930s and early 1940s, farmers overgrazed their cattle on rangelands and depleted land resources due to a lack of awareness towards sustainable resource management. Because of this, wildlife conservation became a topic of federal policy interest for the first time in U.S. history.
Created in 1946, the BLM is a merger between the U.S. Grazing Service and the General Land Office. Its creation was intended to conserve what was left of U.S. public rangelands and simultaneously earn funds to support these efforts by cheaply leasing and offering permits to private farmers on heavily subsidized lands. The BLM was tied to the animal agriculture industry from the beginning. Its poor economic model based on government intervention which forced an unsustainable sector to stay in the market was a setup for failure.
Consequently, BLM loses taxpayer dollars on its cattle grazing program. Subsidized BLM grazing land is issued through permits and leases to farmers for $1.35 per animal unit, compared to the cost of private land, approximately $23.40 per animal unit showing the stark contrast in prices. In 2015, it was found that through the prior decade, taxpayers reportedly lost $1 billion on the grazing program.
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Since taxpayers are forced to pay for subsidized grazing lands, they should be able to access data regarding the land health status of every acre. Yet, the analysis of publicly available data shows that the health status of 25 percent of all grazing land acreage is completely unknown. Subsidized cattle grazing could be doing more damage than BLM is sharing with the public. Taxpayers have no duty to pay for a program that is not fully transparent with its data. Also, the cattle grazing program takes up 155 million acres of U.S. land but produces less than 2 percent of the country’s beef and dairy supply presenting its inefficiency.
Desperate to point fingers at anything but the actual cause, BLM has placed the blame for land degradation on America’s wild horses and burros. Former BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning made a claim in 2024 regarding the perceived overpopulation of wild horses stating, “By addressing overpopulation, we are not only ensuring the long-term well-being of wild horses and burros but also safeguarding the delicate balance of our ecosystems for the benefit of all wildlife and the health of our public lands”.
This could not be any further from the truth. The claim that wild horses are overpopulated is a major misrepresentation of the situation. The reality is that BLM has forced wild horses off their original homeland to support cattle grazing and confined the wild horse population to a mere 26.9 million acres of public land.
To make it worse, the public land left for wild horses overlaps with public land for cattle grazing forcing the horses to compete with domestic cattle for quality grazing space. Analyses of publicly available data collected from BLM show that cattle are the leading cause of public land degradation at a height of 33 percent, while wild horses and burros cause the least damage at 0.8 percent. The other 16.2 percent is a mix of degradation by cattle in conjunction with wild horses and burros, and other causes unrelated to either species.
We have the data proving the truth, but BLM still takes advantage of the false blame on wild horses and burros to justify their cruel government-funded population management programs. This includes roundups where horses are chased with helicopters inducing an extremely stressful experience that has led wild horses and burros to injury and death. After their capture, they are allegedly sold off to slaughterhouses under the guise of an “Adoption Program.”
If BLM is truly concerned with protecting our ecosystems and promoting the health of all living beings, the best course of action would be to eliminate the subsidized grazing program and sell land ownership to private enterprises focused on land conservation. The government has larger issues to concern itself with than managing grazing land for America’s cattle ranchers. The Trump administration should do what is best for the animals and taxpayers: eradicate the BLM cattle grazing program.
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