Above: Fiscal Year 2025 roundup year in a 5 minute edit

The shutdown is over and we are awaiting the new fiscal year roundup schedule. The spending bill language does maintain the prohibition against killing healthy wild horses and burros outright or openly selling them to slaughter (but the loopholes remain). We do thank all of you that took our action items and help to keep everything from sliding backwards. But the bill funds the status quo.

Roundups run all fiscal year from October 1 through September 30. There is a prohibition against helicopter capture from March 1 through June 30; the prohibition is for wild horses, burros can be captured using a helicopter all year.  Bait trapping can occur any time of year.

When the schedule is released it will not be complete. Each district will create a list of priority areas and send it to their State BLM office. The State Office (SO) will send that list to the national office. The national office is where approval occurs and then funding is distributed to each SO and a schedule is procused and released to the public.

Gorgeous (Kiger, 2025)

There are herds that we know BLM has stated will be on the 2026 schedule such as Kiger (OR) and Salt Wells Creek (WY). There are areas we know BLM is also trying to get on schedule such as Pancake and Stone Cabin/Saulsbury (NV) and Carter/Buckhorn/Coppersmith (CA). All of these areas are subjects of current litigation.

Other areas that have been relentlessly hit by BLM like the Antelope Complex and the Triple B Complex in NV are also on our “watch list.” In the last 8 years BLM has removed more than 14,000 wild horses from one of the last truly large areas left in the U.S. leaving vulnerable fragments in areas being overtaken by expanding mining and livestock. BLM has never released any documentation demonstrating where the asserted “overpopulation” actually is, but keeps hitting remote areas where mining is expanding on the best habitat in the entire complex. This area is also the subject of current litigation and BLM is trying to get around that hurdle by simply releasing a new removal plan (that we have also begun to challenge.

Salt Wells Curly, 2025

The herds listed above could appear on the first version of the schedule or a later version. It is really important to remember that the population growth reduction schedule (roundups/fertility control) is not a static document. Throughout the year the schedule changes often. The first version of the schedule will focus on winter with a few of the July through September slots “pencilled in.” Funding through the Appropriations bill was only approved through the end of January and we may all find ourselves back in a funding void come February if the bill stalls again. (Note: Helicopter capture is prohibited for wild horses from March 1 through June 30.)

It is important to always remember that at the heart of the broken program lies the term “Appropriate Management Level” or AML. The number represented in AML has nothing to do with what the range can sustain but was derived primarily through agreements with livestock permittees in the 70s and 80s. (As an example BLM might say that a million acres can only support a (genetically fragile) 100 horses, but permit 800 cows all year and an additional 1000 cows and 1000 sheep for part of the year (and numerous mines) on the same range. BLM will then say the area is ten times over AML and they must do an “emergency removal” for the sake of the horses without ever looking to see what the range could truly sustain protecting both herd and habitat from profit driven uses. Then they do a mass removal, hit the few remaining horses with long-term infertility drugs and create an unsustainable herd (and more aggressive dynamic due to the few fertile females). See more about AML HERE.

Antelope, 2021

Roundups are the most visible and ocntroversial aspect of the program.

Most injuries, illnesses and deaths are preventable.

Relentless litigation was necessary to drive BLM to craft draft welfare rules. However, the BLM simply did not review draft standards, or put them out for public comment and then finalize an actual enforceable policy. Instead, they simply typed the word permanent on the draft. Then BLM built a taxpayer funded team that creates documents to protect ongoing abuses from court sanctions. BLM does not have a formalized welfare policy. They formalized a program to create documents that endorse (pass) all BLM roundups and the few infractions they cite, even repetitive ones,  never include consequence.

Documents obtained by WHE through multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and litigation show clearly that BLM created draft welfare standards and never reviewed those standards prior to making them permanent.

The average death rate is 12% and can rise to as high as 22% from trap into holding facilities (first 6 months of captivity). If you do the math, that means that nearly 1000 died from capture. The death rate (according to BLM) is nominal on range accounting for less than 1% of the population. Capture is the number one cause of death for wild horses and burros.

Simply taking steps to make parameters of the existing standards align with current veterinary practices (including Heat and Air Quality Indexes), and making guidelines mandatory so they cannot “can be overridden through discretion” of the person in charge, could begin to make death and injury rates drop.

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Note: Burros do not handle the stress of helicopter capture well and suffer from capture myopathy related deaths instantly and for as long as a year after capture. 25% of the burros captured at Canyonlands died from “unknown illness” and additional deaths were recorded. Helicopters should never be used with burros.

In the current funding bill Congress does not address the broken foundation (AML), nor do they address the lack of enforceable welfare rules. For over a decade, Congress has simply given more money to infertility vaccine application. This year a bill was introduced to create a private contract to use drones to do roundups. This bill claims it is “more humane” without addressing the fact that there is no enforceable welfare policy and the public would be excluded from observing this experiment (and if you have ever watched true wild horses and drones you would know this is not going to be pretty or simple). Drones are not the ones you might use in your yard, these would have to be the big drones,

Instead of addressing the actual flaws in the system, Congress is still focused on those with “something to sell them.”

The bill for 2026 appears to be caught in another cycle of funding the status quo through short duration bills again. The likelihood of getting someone in Congress to even introduce a small line item to formalize the welfare rules (put out for public comment, review, finalize) is really slim… but not impossible.

While we wait for the roundup schedule to be published, you can reach out to your lawmakers.

You can urge your lawmakers to allot funding specifically to begin the process of formalizing enforceable welfare rules. The last few years Congress has simply added “comply with CAWP” into the spending bill. Those words are absolutely meaningless in practice and in law. Congress has the power to create accountability to a line item through funding. We made it easy: Just Click HERE

Thank you for being an active advocate for our beloved wild horses and burros. Remaining vigilant is not an easy task.

Your support fuels every mile, every courtroom battle, every victory for the wild.

Together, we stand for our wild ones.
WHE won’t back down.

Thank you for keeping WHE running for our wild ones!