Holle Waddell: So we are currently caring for over 57,000 wild horses. Sharyn Alfonsi: How many wild horses is the government now caring for? Keeping count of all those horses is Holle Waddell, the division chief of the program that oversees wild horses for the Bureau of Land Management. And the wild horses are a very dominant species.

There is a limited amount of resources in grass and water. Jess Oldham: The harsh reality is ecosystems are a delicate balance of each species coexisting together in the environment. Sharyn Alfonsi: Why not just let the wild horses be wild and run? Activists want the horses to remain free. The Oldham's are one of dozens of contractors paid by the government to feed and care for mustangs after they've been removed from the wild. The 1,400 acre facility is on an indian reservation. And- and- they're gonna be here long term. Government land managers say, in the West, wild horses are competing with cattle and wildlife for increasingly scarce water and food and their overpopulation often further strains the environment. But in this empty quarter of the Cowboy State is a thundering herd of mustangs, untouched, wild and breathtakingly beautiful.īut wild horses can also wreck the rangelands they roam. Sagebrush blankets the high desert all the way to the Rocky Mountains. It's hard to imagine anything surviving on this stretch of badlands in northern Wyoming. As Sharyn Alfonsi first reported in November, there is a program in Wyoming designed to rein in the wild horses – and an unlikely group of men. Today, federal land managers say the number of wild horses is nearly three times what it should be – and left unchecked, their population can double every five years.

By 1971, their numbers were dwindling and Congress stepped in passing a law to protect this romantic fragment of our history. 'Wild horses' are the descendants of domesticated horses, the first, brought here by Spanish explorers 500 years ago. There are more than 75,000 wild horses roaming public land in the west.

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