America’s Majestic Wild Horses, Seen Through the Lenses of National Geographic Photographers

The more than 85,000 wild horses that roam the Western United States are not strictly native to this landscape, though, symbolically, they're undeniably America. They “fill this really lovely cultural niche,” says Leisl Carr Childers, professor at Colorado State University, who studies equine history in the United States.

While horses evolved in North America millions of years ago, they are thought to have gone extinct in the Western Hemisphere until Spanish Conquistadors and subsequent colonists brought them over from Europe, starting in the 1400s. “Horses proliferate at about 20 percent a year,” Childers says, and have few natural predators. “Which means in five years their herd population will double.”

And so, the horses quickly became a fixture of the American West, and National Geographic's writers and photographers over the decades have documented their majesty, made arguments for their conservation, and reported on the challenges involved in maintaining the herds.

Today, it’s hard to imagine the Western American landscape without them. “There's something magical about herds,” Childers says. To see them kicking up dirt against an uninhabited vista is to be reminded of a time when there were “fewer people, far fewer cities, and these vast open spaces where we saw herds of buffalo, antelope, and horses,” she says.

This romantic view is partly why in 1971 Congress decided to protect wild horses on federal land, which were in decline after decades of slaughter for pet feed. But the lawmakers’ actions were not strictly for ecological reasons. Instead, they decided horses and their burro cousins should be preserved as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West."

While the horses are federally protected, the Bureau of Land Management does monitor their numbers so they don’t overwhelm natural resources like food and water — which are needed for other wildlife and ranching. To cap population sizes, the BLM periodically rounds up a number of wild horses and puts them up for adoption or, in some cases, for sale. After the horses leave federal protection, some end up being resold for slaughter. “Inexperienced owners overwhelmed by the wild horses' powerful survival instinct or by the very real cost of owning a mythical part of the Old West sometimes end up sending their mustangs to auction, desperate to be rid of such trouble,” Alexandra Fuller wrote in a 2009 National Geographic story. (The New York Times also recently reported on the legal loophole that allows buyers to resell the wild horses to the meat market.)

Underlying the tensions is climate change, which, in some areas, could be lowering the number of animals the land can sustain. “Horses are feeling that same squeeze too,” Childers says. But for now, they remain a fixture of the Western landscape, where they technically are not considered wildlife. But “these horses are also not really livestock either,” Childers says. “They sort of sit in this lovely liminal area where they're both at the same time.”