The Bureau of Land Management said the horses will be removed to manage overpopulation.

WASHINGTON — Thousands of wild horses across nine states will soon be corralled and removed to manage overpopulation.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management plans to remove more than 14,000 horses from Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming now through October.  

The Colorado Sun was the first to report the plan and found more than 1,100 horses will be corralled from Colorado alone. 

“Without natural predators that can control population growth, wild horse and burro herds increase rapidly on public lands and can quickly overwhelm the food and water available to them, and cause damage to the land that can take centuries to recover,” the BLM website reads. “These impacts occur in areas regardless of whether wild horses and burros share the range with permitted livestock or other wildlife. Management is necessary to ensure healthy horses and burros can thrive on healthy public rangelands for generations to come.”

This isn’t the first time the BLM has removed horses. In 2020, BLM removed more than 100 horses in Nevada due to “a lack of water and declining health of the wild horses.” 

While this happens nearly every year, some animal advocates warn against using helicopters when conducting these removals because they have led to injuries and death in the past. 

Nearly a dozen horses died in 2023 during after a helicopter tried to corral them. 


Why are there wild horses? 

Many of the wild horses roaming the United States are “direct descendants of domesticated horses, which do have some genomic differences compared to ancestral horses that lived in Eurasia before domestication,” according to BLM. 

“Some ancestors of today’s wild horses came with Europeans in the late 15th and 16th centuries, but most wild horses alive today in the Western US have far stronger genetic connections to breeds that were released or escaped captivity in the 19th or 20th centuries,” the BLM website reads. 

Herds can grow rapidly and can even double in size every four to five years and “quickly outgrow the ability of the land to support them,” according to BLM.