
Running Bear leads one of two family bands at our sanctuary from the Sulphur Herd Management Area in Utah. Pure Sulphurs are of Spanish origin based on phenotype and blood-typing.
Utah asked to file a lawsuit in August, arguing that it has a right to directly manage land within its borders. About 70 percent of Utah’s land is under federal control.
Return to Freedom opposed this move because states neither have the resources that the federal government has for comprehensive wildlife management nor do they provide the protections afforded wild horses and burros by the 1971 Wild and Free-roaming Horses and Burros Act.
The history of Public Lands in America is controversial and complex.
Beginning in the late 1700s, the United States federal government acquired land through the cessation of lands by Native Peoples; negotiation as a part of statehood; through conquest; and by treaty settlements.
Starting in 1781, colonies surrendered unsettled lands to the federal government and still more land was purchased from other countries. By 1867, the federal government held 1.8 billion acres in public domain lands.
Over time, some federal lands were transferred to individuals, corporations, and states, and some were transferred to other federal agencies, including the National Forest System, the National Parks System, National Wildlife Refuges, the Department of Defense, and Native American reservations.
Today, the Bureau of Land Management, the largest lands manager in the United States, administers 245 million acres of public lands. In total, 640 million acres of public lands are administered in the United States today.
In the 1960s, through a series of hundreds of public hearings, the American public demonstrated enormous support for retaining public lands “for multiple use.” In 1976, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) was passed, the BLM’s “organic act,” which mandated that BLM public lands be retained by the federal government and managed for multiple use.
There’s a pragmatic and a philosophical view of our public lands, both of which are important.
Pragmatically, FLPMA clearly stated that multiple interests and multiple extractive uses of our public lands be managed together in a balanced fashion. Oil and gas extraction, livestock grazing, wildlife habitat and forage considerations, recreation, mining, and wild horses and burros are all to be managed thoughtfully and together, with a prioritization of sustained yield — NOT taking or using so much that you damage or, worse, eliminate the resource.
America’s public lands are quite literally for the people. We can be part of public processes to determine the appropriateness of a use, and we can argue and challenge uses that do not seem right for a place or for a people. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is a system that (at least in theory) listens to the perspectives of multiple interests.
There is strength in that because different areas of expertise can and should discuss what we should or should not be doing with our federal public lands. These discussions will change over time with new scientific information, especially due to climate change.
The safety we get with federal bureaucracies — however frustrating — is checks and balances, and careful thought.
Wild horses and burros would not receive federal considerations and could be managed in whatever way an individual state thought to be appropriate in that moment. Without the resources of the federal government, the idea that wild horses be managed humanely and non-lethally would likely be set aside.
Utah lawmakers have previously introduced resolutions demanding that wild horse numbers be reduced by the BLM or that the management of wild horses be turned over to the state. As of March 2024, Utah was home to a BLM-estimated 4,305 wild horses and burros on federally managed public lands.
Our public lands are special. Essential. Wonderful. Very few nations have public lands.
We must link arms hard around these great resources so that we do not further divvy them up into parcels and pieces only useful to one interest – whichever state-driven interest that is, which will be guided by the moment, rather than by careful and national thought, argument and analysis.