‘It will never end’: Long a symbol of the West, debate rages over wild horse management

Jute panels strung between T-posts fan out in a funnel shape, with juniper bushes flanking the fencing on one side, a sea of sagebrush on the other. At the apex of the funnel, a makeshift horse corral sits empty and waiting. As the sun crests the horizon and lights up the Clover Valley and nearby Ruby Mountains, the corral is filled with the first of the many wild horses rounded up by contractors hired by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the federal agency tasked with managing most of the nation’s 83,000 wild horses and burros, over half of which (nearly 45,000) are in Nevada. The Appropriate Management Level (AML) – the land’s capacity to support them — for Nevada is 12,811.