The first roundup schedule for Fiscal Year 2027—announced six months into the fiscal year—accelerates removals to target 14,830 wild horses and burros for capture, 14,378 for removal and, after reaching AML range, returning 1,064 back to the range with infertility vaccines. Please remember BLM does not do releases where they are not “at or near” AML. A look “behind the numbers” on the roundup schedule HERE.
The national goal: What is AML? A hard look at AML, click here.
Helicopter roundups begin again in just 13 weeks, pushing newborn foals, pregnant mares, older horses and burros into another season of chase, heat, dust, and confinement—with still no enforceable welfare rules the public can see, comment on, or use to hold BLM accountable.
We take our work documenting and reporting to the public very seriously. We had to litigate just to gain daily access to roundups and change the policy that limited the public to a day or two every roundup. We also keep a real data-set on the backside to use in our work to create change.
Wild Horse Education (WHE) will again stand at ground zero, documenting every operation we can reach and turning that evidence into litigation, public records work, and congressional advocacy to force “humane management” to become more than a slogan. Our litigation drove the creation of the program. Now it is time to finish this avenue of our work and obtain an enforceable welfare policy as we continue the fight to gain real science-based management plans.
Newborn foals under the rotor wash
As helicopters lift off into foaling season, the smallest and most fragile members of each herd face the greatest risk, yet their needs are invisible in gather plans and decision records. Every mile of forced movement, every minute of pursuit, can have lifelong consequences—or end a life before it truly begins.
There is a prohibition against helicopter capture during foaling season. But that prohibition is just words on a page if foaling season, that BLM repeatedly manipulates by applying infertility drugs, has never been defined through actual data.
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Soft hooves and tissues: Newborn and very young foals are born with soft hoof capsules meant to protect the mare during birth, not to withstand miles of travel over rock and hardpan. Under helicopter pressure, those tissues can shear, bruise, and split, leaving foals lame or permanently deformed. Even at 3 months, the hoof is still in a developmental phase, changing from an “inverted cone” shape to a more mature shape. The epidermal tissues are increasing in thickness, providing a “malleable hoof capsule” meant to allow for skeletal growth rather than withstand high-impact, adult-level concussion. Roundups over varied and rough terrain can cause extreme pain and even death (if hoof slough occurs).
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Immature legs and joints: Open growth plates, tendons, and ligaments are easily damaged when foals are driven at a trot or gallop over uneven terrain as they struggle to keep up with panicked mares, leading to bowed tendons and long‑term limb deformities. Foals are born with relaxed tendons and ligaments, which can lead to angular limb deformities (such as “knock-knees” or “base-wide” stances) and limiting stress is often most critical around 2-3 months of age.
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Lungs, immunity, and heat: Tiny lungs cannot handle sustained exertion in dust, heat, or smoke; stress and exhaustion suppress their immature immune systems, increasing the risk of pneumonia and other infections in crowded holding. Foals also overheat and dehydrate faster than adults, so damage and collapse may not show at trap but can become fatal in the hours and days that follow. BLM “allows” a 4-hour separation from capture to temporary corrals even in the youngest foals that nurse as frequently as every 5-10 minutes.
Heat index and air quality: risks BLM won’t make rules
Any responsible horse owner adjusts work to the Heat Index and Air Quality Index (AQI); you do not ask a performance horse—let alone a foal or elder—to work hard in dangerous heat or smoke. Yet in planning and in its Comprehensive Animal Welfare Program (CAWP), BLM still refuses to recognize these basic measures let alone set hard limits.
WHE’s monitoring shows that rising heat index and poor air quality correlate with increased injuries and deaths, especially when high readings continue for several days. At roundups like Antelope and Blue Wing, BLM has run wild horses in “unhealthy” AQI and extreme heat while veterinarians warn that domestic horses should not even be worked lightly under those conditions.
The results are predictable: heat stress, organ damage, colic and collapse, respiratory injury from dust and smoke, and heightened risk for foals, pregnant mares, and older or compromised horses. Yet these factors are treated as “considerations,” not triggers that halt operations.
Video below: Little legs, big hearts. A video with snippets from range into holding of some of the youngest wild ones that have faced the chopper. The video below is not graphic, we left those out. Not all of the horses and burros in the video survived including a little one that starved after rolling under a panel into a neighboring pen and was just left there without mom; even though another mare tried to keep it safe, the foal slowly starved until BLM “put it down.” This video bears witness and honors the little legs that give it everything they have….
No place for the public to address welfare
Despite decades of comments and testimony, BLM has effectively sealed welfare off from meaningful public input. The agency does not offer a real avenue to shape welfare standards in:
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Land use plans and Resource Management Plans.
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Herd Management Area Plans, where they exist.
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Gather plans, environmental assessments, or decision records.
The annual motorized vehicle hearing required by FLPMA has become a box‑checking exercise. Year after year, advocates, veterinarians, and the public document helicopter impacts, heat, dust, and smoke, but BLM provides no substantive analysis, no clear response to what is raised, and no visible changes to practice. There is, in practice, no point in BLM’s current planning process where the public has a guaranteed, meaningful say on welfare and the agency must adjust.
The only way that changes is if BLM is forced—by Congress—to complete a formal welfare standard formalization that requires transparency, public comment, and reasoned responses.
CAWP: a program, not enforceable policy
BLM presents its Comprehensive Animal Welfare Program as proof that it takes welfare seriously, but CAWP is a program, not a finalized, enforceable policy.
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CAWP welfare standards were never completed as a formal regulation or policy with binding force, or even adequate recommendations.
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The welfare language inside CAWP has never gone through the full process needed to become rules the public can rely on.
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An internal CAWP assessment tool was created and then abandoned without a single full review of roundup or holding practices.
Without formal adoption and enforcement mechanisms, CAWP acts as a shield, not a safeguard. The agency can claim “compliance” even when documentation is incomplete, foals and miscarriages are under‑reported, and field practices deviate from the written standards.
“Cameras on the helicopter” and trap that BLM would set and control the feed (that many are advocating for) is also meaningless without enforceable welfare rules.
Don’t Forget Me (Take Action: Welfare Rules) details how these failures leave foals, pregnant mares, and captured horses invisible in the data and unprotected by real rules.
Ground zero and your role in forcing change
While Congress remains fixated on “Path Forward” talking points and “getting to AML”—even when that means pushing herds toward functional extinction—WHE focuses on ground zero: on range, at trap, and in holding. That is where the lack of planning, real foaling season protections, science‑based AML, and habitat protection shows up in broken bodies and shattered family bands.
WHE has launched more litigation to compel real planning, HMAPs that identify foaling seasons, valid AMLs, and habitat protection than at any time in the program’s history. In many ways, the real battles have just begun that can change management practices west wide. But we also must fight for the welfare each wild horse and burro that faces capture and a holding system designed to funnel them out the door.
Most people understand that rescuing one horse from a kill pen does not fix the system, but it absolutely saves a life.
In the same way, an enforceable welfare policy is systemic reform that will change the fate of every individual wild horse and burro that ever faces a helicopter, loading chute, or off‑range pen. Reducing suffering and preventable deaths for individuals should be a priority.
The public has been denied a meaningful place to shape wild horse and burro welfare. That will not change until Congress forces BLM to complete a real welfare rulemaking and open the doors to public participation.
Right now, you can help move that line:
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Share the alert with friends and networks.
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If you can, chip in to help keep our trained field team safely on the road as helicopters lift off again.
If you want to jump into this issue deeper, you can actively engage the Appropriations process at the first step— the request from your lawmakers to the Appropriations subcommittees— click here.
Thank you for being an active advocate. There is no shortcut to real reform.
Our team members are busy working on reports and litigation this week. We are blocking in our welfare team coverage for the coming helicopter roundup season. Our team members are also checking herd and range health on various ranges throughout the West.
We thank you for standing up for Freedom, Mercy and Justice.
Every mile we travel to cover roundups or assess a herd, every court case we bring, every win, every action we take… is only possible because of your support.