Think Our Wild Horses Are Safe? - The Atlantic

Think Our Wild Horses Are Safe? - The Atlantic

Dec 16 2011, 4:30 PM ET Forty years after its passage, The Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act is a shadow of its former self, undercut by amendments, the Bureau of Land Management, and the cattle industry.

Forty years ago this Saturday, on December 17, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon was moved to quote Henry David Thoreau. "We need the tonic of wildness," the president announced in a statement released from Biscayne Bay, Florida, on the day he signed into law the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the first federal law designed to protect and manage our wild horses. Nixon wrote that the new law was "an effort to guarantee [the] future" of the horses. and he credited grassroots public support for the political impetus behind the measure. The White House also offered this:

Wild horses and burros merit man's protection historically--for they are a living link with the days of the conquistadors, through the heroic times of the Western Indians and the pioneers, to our own day when the tonic of wildness seems all too scarce. More than that, they merit it as a matter of ecological right--as anyone knows who has ever stood awed at the indomitable spirit and sheer energy of a mustang running free. Read MORE...