Imagine your legs paralyzed by mud, your baby crying beside you as you sweat out what little water you have left in your body, searching for food in a home that has become a death trap.

A mare and her foal died this month of severe dehydration, victims of a war on wilderness funded with our tax dollars. Their bodies fell just feet from the Horse Valley Wilderness sign. They waited in excruciating pain, desperate to find water that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) denied them. The mare and her foal could not roam in search of an alternative water source, not only because the landscape was divided by fences, but also because their weakened legs were submerged in mud. In their final moments, mother and baby sought comfort from each other. Instead of giving the tormented mare water, the BLM eventually gave her a bullet to end the pain her life had been reduced to. After waiting for hours in the dried-up pond, the foal was finally taken to the Axtell sanctuary overnight. Unable to be resuscitated, they too were euthanized.

The agency’s callous response is emblematic of a much deeper, systemic dysfunction caused by the competing interests of ranching companies. While the agency limits the number of wild horses in the Muddy Creek Herd Management Area to 75-125, it allows 2,853 private cattle to graze in the same region. In Utah alone, the BLM’s appropriate management rate is 1,956 horses, while by contrast, for the same land, the BLM issues 1.3 million monthly animal unit permits, which equates to as many as 2.6 million individual cattle. Cattle not only impact the land through their sheer abundance and grazing habits, but also exacerbate natural drought, contributing disproportionately to the climate crisis and reducing the land’s ecological harmony to dust. The Bureau of Land Management’s 2021 drought monitor report PEER documents the Muddy Creek Herd Management Area as a parcel where “current livestock management or use of public lands is, or is likely to be, a significant causal factor in the failure to meet land health standards.” Despite these conditions, the BLM refuses to provide emergency water to the horses, arguing that providing water “will cause harm to the herds.”

While activists who try to give water to dying animals face harassment and even arrests by BLM officials, the agency cannot be prosecuted for its own violations of its core laws. Although the Horse and Burro Protection Act, which covers free-roaming wild horses and burros, is designed to permanently protect horses from “capture, branding, harassment, or death,” it is missing a key component: the right of the public to challenge the law in court. Unlike the Endangered Species Act, for example, the law lacks a provision allowing for legal action in court. This means that to prosecute abuse of authority, lawyers often have to prove that the BLM’s actions violated another federal law, not the law itself. And so the BLM continues to blame the wild horses for their own deaths.

What happened under the scorching sun of Muddy Creek is not an accident. It is not an unfortunate anomaly. It is the loss of life, freedom and wild beauty in the stranglehold of an agency that has repeatedly put the ranching industry ahead of its federal responsibility to ensure the survival of free-born horses.

If you believe our country needs to rise above such cruelty, call your members of Congress today and tell them that BLM’s policies do not align with the willful ignorance that took the lives of a mare and her foal. Demand that the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act be amended to include a citizen’s suit clause so that we the people can denounce the lack of enforcement. Share their story so we can drive change before the next horses fall victim to systematic inaction. By failing to challenge the current paradigm, we are bearing the future consequences of this agency’s negligence with us.

Josselyn Wolf is a 16-year-old artist, activist, and youth ambassador for the Wild Beauty Foundation. She is passionate about storytelling, especially stories that expose injustice and inspire people to work toward a more compassionate and sustainable world. For more information on the Muddy Creek tragedy, visit: https://wildbeautyfoundation.org/wild-horse-family-dies-at-muddy-creek-while-blm-does-nothing/

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