To be fair, there is a real management problem underneath all this. BLM estimates that more than 85,000 horses and burros now roam Western lands it manages, compared with what the agency considers a sustainable population of about 25,600. Another 58,000 are being held off-range at substantial taxpayer expense.⁴
You cannot solve that problem by pretending the horses will politely stop reproducing.
But the horses expose a larger question about public ownership: what does it mean for something to belong to all of us if the government can transfer its economic value to somebody else without accounting for its full public value, and then cease responsibility for what happens next?
And that is where the $25 horse matters.
Congress did not protect wild mustangs because they were terribly useful. They do not drill oil, mine copper or write campaign checks. It protected them because Americans decided they had a public value that could not be reduced to whatever someone happened to pay for them.
The government had rounded up, fed and cared for an animal Congress called a “living symbol” of the American West.⁵ Then, once that animal became inconvenient, its value could apparently be reduced to the price of a couple of hamburgers and a beer.
The same question applies to the land.
Theodore Roosevelt understood that more than a century ago. He was no sandal-wearing environmental purist. He hunted. He supported logging, mining and ranching. He believed the country’s resources should be used.
He just did not believe they should be used up.
During his presidency, Roosevelt protected roughly 230 million acres through national forests, monuments, wildlife reserves and parks.⁶ His conservation philosophy was not preservation at all costs. Natural resources could be used, but the public interest had to include future generations as well as the present one.
At the Grand Canyon, he put it better than most politicians have managed since: “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it.”⁶
That broader idea of stewardship gradually became part of American law. Congress created national parks to be left “unimpaired” for future generations, while the Wilderness Act protected wild country for “the permanent good of the whole people.”⁷ Then, in 1971, Congress applied a similar idea specifically to wild horses and burros, declaring them “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.”⁵
Public ownership never meant that every acre had to be fenced off, worshipped and photographed at sunset. We have always logged public forests, grazed public grasslands and drilled and mined public land.
Stewardship means deciding what public value we are willing to exchange, for what purpose, and at what price.
That distinction matters in the West today.
This July, Trump cut Bears Ears National Monument in Utah from roughly 1.36 million acres to about 121,000. He reduced Grand Staircase-Escalante from about 1.87 million acres to roughly 182,000. The White House proclamations explicitly pointed to uranium, vanadium, copper, silver, cobalt and other resources and said excluded lands would again become available, subject to existing laws and protections, for mining, mineral leasing and other uses.⁸
This is not usually a literal sale of public land. Nobody is hauling Bears Ears down to Sotheby’s.
The transfer of value is more subtle.
You leave the land in public ownership and transfer the right to extract what is under it. Lower the royalty. Remove the protection. Rewrite the rule. Open the lease.
The government keeps the title.