On Saturday, September 26, Americans observe National Public Lands Day—a day dedicated to the shared landscapes held in trust for the public. It is a fitting moment to remember that wild horses and burros are not separate from the public-land story. They are part of it.

Public lands belong to the public. The wild horses who live there are part of their history, their character, and and beloved.

National Public Lands Day is therefore not only a day to celebrate these places—it is a day to defend the promise that they will be managed for the public good.

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The Historical Fight and What It Was About

The historical fight over America’s mustangs was a clash over the purpose of public lands and commercial resource control.

Commercial hunters (“mustangers”) and livestock ranchers viewed wild horses and burros as destructive pests competing with cattle for forage or fast (unregulated or reported) cash. Mustangers routinely rounded them up for pet food and fertilizer using brutal methods like airplane chases and weighted tires. Water holes were poisoned. Public outrage, spearheaded by Velma Bronn Johnston (“Wild Horse Annie”), erupted when these horrific practices were exposed.

On September 8th, the Wild Horse Protection Act (known as the “Wild Horse Annie law”) passed. The law forbade these practices and was supposed to stop the horror and disappearance of wild horses and burros from the landscape.

Failure of the 1959 Law

The Wild Horse Annie Act of 1959 was largely ignored and unenforceable (due to jurisdictional “passing the buck”), making stronger federal protection urgent. The 1959 law only banned motorized vehicles or aircraft to hunt horses on public land and the poisoning of water holes, but it failed to establish federal jurisdiction or permanent legal protections. Local authorities frequently looked the other way, illegal slaughters continued unchecked, and by 1971, wild horse populations plummeted.

Timeline of the 1971 Bill

• January–June 1971: A massive public campaign, fueled by millions of letters from school children, forced Congress to introduce protection bills.
• June 29, 1971: The Senate debated and passed its initial protective framework.
• October 4, 1971: The House debated and passed an amended version establishing strict range boundaries.
• November 1971: A conference committee resolved differences between the House and Senate drafts.
• December 15, 1971: Congress finalized the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act (Public Law 92-195), signed into law by President Richard Nixon on December 18, 1971.

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Ground Zero: The 1975 First Roundup & Court Case

The first official roundup under the new law took place in 1975 at the Stone Cabin and Saulsbury Herd Management Areas (HMAs) in Nevada, triggering a landmark legal battle that set the standard for federal horse protection.

• The Challenges: The State of Nevada sued to claim ownership of the horses for commercial sale, arguing the 1971 Act violated state sovereignty. Simultaneously, wild horse advocates sued the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for failing to conduct proper environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
• The Ruling: The federal court firmly upheld the constitutionality of the 1971 Act, stopping state-led commercial exploitation. The judge also ruled in favor of horse advocates, declaring the BLM could not round up horses without formal, transparent environmental planning.

Stone Cabin wild horses

Today’s Fight in Stone Cabin: The Modern Mirror

Decades later, the conflict has come full circle at the exact location where it started. The modern legal war over the Stone Cabin Complex directly mirrors the 1975 battle, pitting commercial interests against federal preservation mandates.

The case at Stone Cabin today is, in an important sense, the same fight as the original case after the 1971 Act passed: whether BLM may treat its authority to remove wild horses as a blank check.

In 1975, the court made clear that BLM could not remove horses merely by asserting that range conditions justified action. The agency had to comply with environmental law, conduct meaningful planning, and consider alternatives rather than simply defaulting to removal.

Today, Wild Horse Education is arguing in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that BLM is attempting the same result through a different administrative mechanism. The agency approved a ten-year gather plan that could remove more than 1,000 horses while relying on limited, complex-wide information and utilization checks, rather than the herd-specific inventory, range-wide studies, sub-unit analysis, water-development work, and other measures required under the existing 1983 Stone Cabin Herd Management Area Plan. 

BLM cannot justify a roundup with broad claims that removing horses will improve range conditions while failing to supply the current, site-specific data and analysis needed to demonstrate that conclusion—or while disregarding the management plan already in place. The 1983 plan itself calls for specific monitoring and management work that was omitted from the challenged gather decision.

The battleground has simply shifted from lassoes and trucks to hefty government contracts, helicopters,  federal courtrooms and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit—but the question of who truly owns the American West remains unchanged and the question of what we value as a nation is continues.

We wish you a contemplative National Public Lands Day as our wild places and wild things are truly under assault. 

If you can, get out on public lands today and enjoy them … they belong to all. 

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. Sincere Gratitude. 

Limited Edition Shirt to help support our work. 

Click image or click here to order a two-sided shirt and support our work.

Help Defend Against The Broken Promise

Fifty-five years after Congress declared wild free-roaming horses and burros “fast disappearing from the American scene,” federal agencies are still driving their numbers down on the public lands meant to protect them.

Relentless removals are aimed at herd targets roughly one-third below the numbers found when Congress acted in 1971.

And the failures do not end there. After more than five decades, wild horses and burros still lack enforceable federal welfare standards that protect them through capture, confinement, transport, and disposition. Agencies continue to remove them without ensuring they are safeguarded from the slaughter pipeline.

This 55th-anniversary shirt honors the work of Velma Bronn Johnston—Wild Horse Annie—and refuses to let the cause she ignited be erased. We are carrying the fight forward for freedom, mercy, justice, and the right of wild horses and burros to remain wild and free on their public lands.

All proceeds fuel that fight.