Federal agencies manage wild horses on public land across the West, including in SLO County

FEATURE

For four years, Colette Kaluza’s driven across California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and other states, traversing paved highways and barreling down dirt roads, picking her way across rugged terrain to find hard-to-reach places with the help of her trusty GPS app.

After damaging a vehicle along the way, she purchased a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a Trailhawk package.

“I bought that car for roundups,” she said. “This car will go anywhere.”

That’s how dedicated she is to the wild horse cause. Kaluza, who splits her time between Pismo Beach and Nevada, records what happens when federal agencies conduct gathers to reduce the size of horse herds on public land, so she can share it with the public.

“You can’t imagine how bad it is,” Kaluza said. “It’s the fear, it’s the sound, it’s the duration, it’s all parts of the roundup operation. … They push the horses with a helicopter for, who knows, miles.”

An estimated 80,000 wild horses and burros gallop and graze through 29 million acres of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service Land in 10 states across the American West. Those animals are federally protected thanks to The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971.

It declared that “wild free-roaming horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West … and that these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene.” The act aimed to protect wild equines from “capture, branding, harassment, or death” and specified that they are to be protected and managed as “components of the public lands.”

The public land they currently inhabit is not free and open, according to the founder of Wild Horse Freedom, the nonprofit Kaluza volunteers with. Instead, founder Laura Leigh said, “our public lands is a series of grazing allotments that are fenced off.”

While a deer or antelope may be able to jump a fence, it’s a little more difficult for horses or burros, who also compete with cattle for food and water sources as well as access to the full breadth of their respective management areas. In most of these areas, horses reproduce to the point where federal agencies conduct the “gathers” that Kaluza and Leigh attend and record for posterity. They don’t believe they should happen at all.

The government wants to reduce herd numbers to “appropriate management levels,” which the BLM describes as “the best way to ensure healthy horses and burros on healthy rangelands.”

“If left unmanaged, herds can double in size in just four to five years and quickly outgrow the ability of the land to support them,” the BLM states on its Herd Management website.

A wild horse herd in SLO County has a different issue. The Black Mountain Wild Horse Territory in Los Padres National Forest has a herd so small that it’s in danger of becoming extinct, Kaluza said.

The herd management plan, which hasn’t been updated since the 1980s, states that the herd’s appropriate management level is 20 horses. As far as Kaluza can tell, there are only eight horses alive and well in the 13,000-acre territory.

Los Padres counts the number of horses at 10.

“I don’t want to see these wild horses disappear,” she said. “I’m not going to claim that the Forest Service is mismanaging this herd without all the information, so I’m comfortable in saying that they’re mismanaging the herd.”

Counting horses

Kaluza is comfortable saying that because she has searched through everything she can find to learn more about how Los Padres said it was going to manage the herd. She can’t find anything that states the herd is going to be eliminated.

Last March, she ran her Cherokee up the rutted-out Red Hill Road near the La Panza Range, through public and private property (with permission), into the wild horse territory and installed a couple of trail cameras.

Although she has never seen a Black Mountain horse in person, she peruses her camera footage every morning. She’s captured mares, but no foals and no stallions.

“What I notice from my camera is they’re out there in the middle of the night,” she said. “I’ve seen eight for sure in one frame. I’ve never seen 10—that doesn’t mean there aren’t 10.”

In May 2025, Los Padres released a draft wildfire risk reduction project that included the Black Mountain territory.

“It’s pretty obvious by looking at that plan that they have no intention of managing the horses into the future,” Leigh said. “It’s very easy to see that their intention is to have that herd die off.”

Leigh, who’s been watching the way federal agencies manage the nation’s wild herds for 18 years, said that because the proposal mentioned the horses, it gave advocates like her the ability to weigh in during the public comment process. Most of their comments focused on the project’s plan to introduce more cattle grazing to better control vegetation.

“If we can increase the number of cows, we can increase the number of horses,” she said. “All you have to do is increase the number of viable horses, and then we have something beautiful for people to see.”

Horses, she said, “always find themselves between a rock and hard place.”

“They’re the only large grazing animal in the United States that’s wild and confined in our country,” she said. “The wild ‘free-roaming’ title of the act is kind of a fallacy.”

The Black Mountain herd’s origins date back to 1907, when the Bethal brothers ran cattle and horses on national forest land, according to Los Padres’ Black Mountain territory webpage. After World War I, the horses became wild as they roamed unmanaged from Wilson Canyon to the Carrizo Plain. By 1971, the herd size was pegged at seven horses.

In April 2024, according to data Kaluza received in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, there were 10 mares in the Black Mountain herd between the ages of 10 and 27 years old.

“Spring 2024 was very wet, lake and creeks full, feed should be good for the year,” according to the April 2024 document.

Documents from 2014, 2015, and 2017 note that because of drought stressors, the size of the herd—which was around 21 before 2015—should be reduced, so the Forest Service sold off a handful of colts/foals. In 2019, the documents state, Los Padres decided to remove the stallion from the herd so he wouldn’t breed with his own daughters.

Although Los Padres didn’t return multiple requests for comment, retired Santa Lucia Ranger District Resource Officer Melody Fountain said she used to manage the herd as part of her work caring for the range, wildlife, and watersheds in the district.

“I’m very sympathetic to the wild horse cause, but when things get tough, like there’s a drought or something, someone has to step in and help because they’re fenced in,” Fountain said. “And we can’t just let them run all over because they get into people’s yards.”

During droughts, Fountain and her husband, Bob Stone, took water and feed out to the horses. Stone worked for the Santa Lucia District as well and was the district packer before he retired, taking care of the Forest Service’s pack mules. He was instrumental in establishing the herd management plan for the district, Fountain said, because he loved horses.

Stone was the herd’s champion.

“It was time intensive. Bob donated a lot of time to make that all work, and not everyone is that passionate about it,” Fountain said. “Before he died—I know he knew I was suggesting this, and we never really talked about it because it would have broken his heart—but I think in his heart he knew it was unsustainable.”

Maintaining the herd numbers was difficult and could quickly get out of hand, she said, recalling a time when the horse population ballooned to 28 and the Forest Service had to cull, giving some to the BLM. They also had to bring in horses from outside the area to ensure genetic diversity within such a small herd.

“Even though the Black Mountain horses were kind of popular, at the very end of my career, I wanted to leave it in a good place, so we tried adopting some out, and so I went on this campaign, and I was only successful in adopting out a couple of them,” she said. “It was a lot of work without a whole lot of success.”

Fountain worked in the district for 20 years, retiring in 2019, and isn’t sure how Los Padres is managing the territory now that she’s gone.

“Frankly,” she said, “I’m recommending and hoping that the Forest Service will let the herd die out.”

Tracking the government

Most of the herd management areas or wild horse territories are much larger than Black Mountain’s 13,000 acres. Devil’s Garden Plateau Wild Horse Territory, for instance, is about 258,000 acres of land in northeastern California. It’s jointly managed by Modoc National Forest (248,000) and the BLM’s Applegate Field Office (7,600 acres) and includes some private and tribal lands as well.

In September, Kaluza attended a roundup there.

She and five other viewers were allowed to be on site Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays during the event and limited to certain areas. It was expensive to drive back and forth, but Kaluza feels that “it’s important to be there.”

“I want to see everything that’s going on for every second,” she added.

She documents waypoints and fences on her way to and from roundups, captures video of the action, takes notes, and posts it all on the Wild Horse Education page. At most of them, helicopters and bait traps help move the horses into makeshift corrals, where the animals are held before being loaded into trucks and taken to off-range holding areas.

These are animals that have never been penned up before, she said. They’re wild and scared. Some break their legs, some trample others to death. Agencies do publish how many horses are collected each day, but all you know is what they tell you, Kaluza said.

Generally, the agencies will circulate a rough plan for gathers at the beginning of each fiscal year. A couple of weeks before a roundup, the respective agency puts out a press release. That’s Kaluza’s signal to get ready to head out.

The Devil’s Garden press release came out on Aug. 15, 2025. The plan was to gather 350 of the approximately 700 wild horses “on and around the territory,” according to the Forest Service.

“The gather will continue movement toward the appropriate number of wild horses prescribed,” in the management plan (402, maximum), the press release stated. “The Modoc National Forest remains committed to managing wild free-roaming horses in a manner that is designed to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance and multiple-use condition on public lands.”

From Aug. 27 to Sept. 30, the Forest Service said it gathered 276 horses. According to the agency’s data, seven of those horses died. Over that month, Kaluza estimates that she spent two weeks total up there and she would have stayed longer, if the Forest Service had allowed it.

“When you’re an advocate, you’re an advocate,” said the retired court reporter, who once spent her free time volunteering for the Humane Society. “That’s what I always wanted to do … is to be a full-time advocate.”

New range

A green Can-Am Defender motored over steep, muddy tire tracks close to Prefumo Canyon Road in SLO. Passage through a few gates and a slow crawl up a set of hills brought dozens of horses into view.

As Neda DeMayo put the side-by-side in park, she pointed to the right, where the Devil’s Garden dozen was standing together, their thick winter coats catching the sun.

“Those are big-boned,” DeMayo said. “They like to range.”

Devil’s Garden conducts roundups all the time, she said. These horses were adopted out for $1 a piece, although she isn’t certain of the exact year.

To the left, on the ridgeline, two family bands from the BLM’s Red Desert Horse Complex in Wyoming looked down at the vehicle and its occupants.

“They’re so bonded,” she said. “They’re always together.”

Closer, the Cold Creek band from BLM’s Wheeler Pass Herd Management Area in Nevada meandered toward horses from Oregon’s Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge—which is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In 1998, Fish and Wildlife removed all of the wild horses from the refuge, and DeMayo took 25 of them.

“That’s when I started Return to Freedom,” the president and founder said. “Some of these horses were born at the sanctuary.”

DeMayo’s nonprofit began on her Jalama Road ranch in Lompoc. It expanded in 2015 to include 2,000 acres of SLO Springs Ranch off Prefumo Canyon, and it also has horses on land in Texas. Of Return to Freedom’s almost 500 horses, 68 of them graze in SLO hills alongside 15 cows and 23 burros.

“Most of the horses that are here were together in the wild,” she said. Return to Freedom aims to let “them live as they’re designed to live.”

Return to Freedom – Wild Horse Conservation aims to preserve the freedom, diversity, and habitat of wild horses and burros by providing sanctuary, advocating on their behalf, educating the public about them, and conserving unique bloodlines.

Watching a helicopter roundup on television in the 1990s pushed DeMayo to do something about the issue. But she didn’t want a place where horses were in pens. DeMayo wanted to enable the animals to stay wild and maintain their tight-knit social groups.

As she got more involved with the issue, she started to understand the politics around public resources.

“It’s a battle, and these guys are on the front line,” she said. “We would like to see horses managed on the range … and roundups to end.”

Cory Golden, Return to Freedom’s advocacy and outreach manager, said that DeMayo didn’t set out to participate in the issue’s politics.

“Quickly, though, she discovered that sanctuary alone couldn’t save the wild horses on our public lands, because the number of horses being removed exceeds the capacity that sanctuaries can offer,” Golden said. “To help keep wild horses on the range, she had to get involved with policy.”

Golden lobbies on Return to Freedom’s behalf, meeting with elected officials, the public, and other advocacy organizations.

“We view proven, safe, and humane fertility control as a key tool for ending inhumane government herd management by capture and removal,” he said. “From the start, though, we have also been active in the effort to end horse slaughter, which remains a threat to domestic and wild American equines alike.”

Resource-challenged

After a roundup, most of the captured animals end up in government holding—corrals or leased pastures—and they’re offered up for adoption or for sale, Golden said. Not all of them get adopted. While the BLM and Forest Service aren’t legally allowed to sell to kill buyers, the agencies don’t generally track what happens to horses or burros once their titles pass on to a new owner.

“They can fall through the cracks,” he said. “They can end up at auction.”

Difficulty with training a wild horse can result in its sale, as can rising costs, a divorce, or some other major change in an owner’s life. A horse could pass through several hands before ending up at an auction, where equines get sold and sometimes shipped out of the country, potentially ending up at a slaughter factory, Golden said.

“Our goal is to get a piece of legislation passed that would place a ban on horse slaughter and also ban the export of horses [for slaughter],” he said. “There’s a lot of bipartisan support for it.”

Polling shows that 80 percent of Americans oppose horse slaughter, he added.

Conversations about how to manage horses and burros on public lands are a bit more complex. The legislation passed in 1971, for instance, didn’t come with clear management guidelines. It does require agencies to set and maintain population targets, he said, which the agencies have “tried and failed” to manage through “capture and removal.”

That 1971 act also isn’t the only law governing how wild equines get managed. Golden points to The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which requires public lands to be managed for multiple uses. This includes livestock grazing, recreation, mining, protected species, and a litany of other things that are competing for resources and attention within federal agencies.

“All of those uses have to be balanced out by those agencies, which is obviously a difficult task,” Golden said. “They are admittedly in a difficult position, but the answer to this—we believe—is fertility control.”

The agencies can’t manage wild herds and continue to ignore reproduction, Golden said, as a herd’s population can return to pre-roundup numbers within a few years.

“Population modeling has shown that immediately implementing fertility control alongside any removal that the agencies are already conducting is the only realistic way to stabilize herd growth,” he said. “If they don’t use fertility control, they’re only perpetuating a costly cycle of capture and removal that will not work.”

Return to Freedom uses the fertility control it advocates for on its own horses and burros. DeMayo said it’s between 91 and 98 percent effective. Since 1999, they’ve used a non-hormonal, reversible birth control vaccine.

If federal agencies used it more consistently, Return to Freedom estimates it would save more than 40 percent on herd management costs.

“One stallion can impregnate like 100 mares, so it’s just slowing it down,” DeMayo said. “It’s a tool you can utilize.”

The tool is just one that Return to Freedom uses to demonstrate the herd management techniques it advocates for. Another is something DeMayo calls holistic regenerative grazing—using temporary fencing and enticement like hay or alfalfa, Ranch Manager Kas Bryan ensures that SLO Springs Ranch doesn’t get overgrazed or too impacted by the horses and burros.

It’s a relatively new technique for Return to Freedom, one that’s been successful and will be used on the Lompoc ranch in the near future.

DeMayo calls her work “a heart condition.”

She was surrounded by horses on the move and knew each of them by name. They’re her people. Sophia has the black nose. She’s from Devil’s Garden. Shilo’s black and beige. The palomino close by is named Winter. Lizard, a bay, has always been a bully, she said with a laugh.

She and Bryan noticed one horse a few feet up the hill that was thinner than she should be. DeMayo asked Bryan to check her teeth.

“You fall in love with them,” she said. “I feel like when I’m with them, I’m present here.”

Support the cause
Take action to support Wild Horse Education by visiting wildhorseeducation.org, where you can find more about the organization’s work, its efforts to hold the government accountable, and more.

Caring for wild horses and burros, advocating on their behalf, and educating the public costs money. Return to Freedom raises the dollars needed to pay for its work through a combination of immersive tours, fundraisers, volunteers, and donations. Potential donors can sponsor a horse, burro, or herd. The sanctuary offers private tours, photo safaris, and immersive experiences by appointment. Learn more about Return to Freedom and its work by visiting returntofreedom.org.

This article appears in Get Outside – Winter/Spring 2026.