The federal Bureau of Land Management announced plans this month to remove 40 wild horses from the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range in Montana this fall, citing rangeland degradation and limited food resources. The removal is the first phase of a 10-year herd management strategy designed to shrink the population to between 107 and 120 animals, down from an estimated 187 in spring.
BLM field manager Nate Arave said the reduction is necessary to protect the range. “If you don’t have enough food for the horses, they can begin to have deteriorating health themselves, which is not what we want to see long-term,” Arave told KTVQ.
Fertility Control and Removal Methods
Beyond the 40 horses slated for removal, the BLM’s 10-year plan calls for administering fertility control treatment to 43 mares and returning them to the range. Horses will be gathered using bait-and-trap methods, then transported to holding facilities where they will be made available for adoption. No removal start date has been announced.
Herd Experts Challenge Population Goals
The removal plan has prompted swift pushback from wild horse conservation groups. Nancy Cerroni, director of the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center in Lovell, Wyoming, filed an appeal to the Interior Board of Land Appeals this week—her second such challenge filed this summer. Cerroni has expressed concern that reducing the herd to the BLM’s target range poses a genetic viability risk, particularly the risk of inbreeding among the remaining animals.
Ginger Kathrens, founder of The Cloud Foundation, a wild horse advocacy organization, characterized the population target as unworkable. “One hundred and seven is a ridiculous number. You start to lose that genetic viability,” Kathrers told KTVQ. Kerry Ferguson, the foundation’s executive director, shares similar concerns about the management strategy.
Cerroni, who conducts hundreds of guided tours of the wild horse range annually, has become a prominent voice in the debate over Pryor Mountain herd management. Her appeals represent an effort to halt or modify the BLM’s removal schedule before the fall operation proceeds.
The Broader Management Question
The Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range, located along the Montana-Wyoming border in Carbon County, has been a focal point of wild horse management controversy for years. The BLM balances multiple mandates: preserving habitat and rangeland health, maintaining genetically viable wild horse populations, and adhering to the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which established protections for wild herds on federal land.
The clash between the BLM’s rangeland-health projections and conservationists’ genetic-viability concerns reflects a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes sustainable wild horse management. The agency’s herd-size targets are based on carrying capacity—the number of animals a given range can sustain long-term without degradation. Herd advocates argue that maintaining a larger population, even if it requires more active management through fertility control, better preserves the genetic diversity necessary for a healthy, self-sustaining wild population.
The removal process, if it proceeds as planned, will be closely watched by both rangeland managers and wild horse groups across the West, as similar disputes are playing out on federal lands from California to Wyoming.
