Wildfire, Wild Horses and the High Cost of Fighting Fire Instead of Fuel

The fire business is killing people. Wild horses are already doing the job the budget will not fund—and a slice of the cattle industry is stuck in the 19th century.

By William E. Simpson

Editor’s note: William E. Simpson II is founder and executive director of Wild Horse Fire Brigade. The views expressed here are the author’s. This article has been lightly edited for clarity, formatting and length

Wildfires in the United States and Canada are not just a weather story. They are a budget story, a smoke story and a land-use story.

Suppression is overweighted. Prevention is underfunded. Fine fuels keep stacking in vacant forest. And a slice of the livestock lobby is selling cattle as the only four-legged answer—including on ground where cows cannot live, cannot pay their own keep and did not stop the last grass fire that ran through cattle country.

The video accompanying this piece shows what the paperwork leaves out: wild horses in wilderness, cutting dry grass and brush that become the ladder and the fuse.

SMOKE IS THE KILLER. THE DEATH CERTIFICATE SAYS SOMETHING ELSE

Wildfire smoke contains fine particulate matter—PM2.5—small enough to enter the bloodstream. It does not write “smoke” on the death certificate. It writes heart attack, stroke, COPD, dementia and cancer.

A 2025 Nature study led by Stanford’s Marshall Burke estimated more than 41,000 excess U.S. deaths per year from wildfire-smoke PM2.5 in the 2011–2020 baseline, and about 71,000 a year by 2050 under a high-warming path. Cumulative excess deaths from 2026 to 2055 could reach 1.9 million.

A 2026 Science Advances causal study estimated chronic wildfire-smoke PM2.5 was associated with about 24,100 all-cause U.S. deaths per year from 2006–2020, with no safe threshold identified.

In California alone, another Science Advances analysis of fire-sourced PM2.5 from 2008–2018 attributed 52,480 to 55,710 premature deaths to wildfire smoke over the period, with an estimated economic value of $430–$456 billion.

Those studies do not arrive at one number. They agree on the direction: wildfire smoke represents a substantial and growing public-health burden.

Children, working adults and the elderly all breathe the same plume. Canada’s fires load the same air mass onto U.S. cities.

This is not just a forest problem. It is a public-health problem paid for in lungs, Medicaid, Medicare, lost work and emergency rooms.

SUPPRESSION ATE THE FOREST SERVICE

The U.S. Forest Service itself has documented the growing financial weight of wildfire.

Fire went from 16 percent of the agency’s appropriated budget in 1995 to more than 50 percent. The agency warned that the fire share could eventually exceed two-thirds if the trend continued, pulling hundreds of millions of dollars away from the very restoration work that can help reduce future fire risk.

That is the fundamental problem: we spend enormous amounts fighting fire after ignition while comparatively little goes toward reducing the fuel before it burns.

Federal wildfire budgeting has changed over time, and individual accounts have been reorganized. But the underlying imbalance remains.

Billions of dollars are available for wildfire suppression and emergency response, while hazardous-fuels work receives a fraction of that amount.

When suppression funding runs short, agencies have historically been forced to pull resources from other programs—including work intended to improve forest health and reduce future wildfire risk.

That is not a sustainable cycle.

We pay for the emergency after the fuel bed is standing, then wonder why the next fire is so expensive.

THE SHEEP WARS—AND AN ARGUMENT THAT NEVER WENT AWAY

From roughly 1870 to 1920, the American West fought a long and sometimes bloody argument over grass.

Cattlemen had established themselves across much of the open range before sheep operations expanded into the same country. The resulting conflicts—the Sheep Wars—sometimes escalated from disputes over grazing into intimidation, destruction of livestock and murder.

The argument was often framed as scarcity: there wasn't enough grass for both.

There were legitimate questions about stocking rates and the effects concentrated animals could have on particular landscapes. But disputes over ecology were also disputes over access.

In some places, cattle interests attempted to exclude sheep operations from ranges they regarded as their own, including public lands.

The violence was real. Historical accounts document dozens of human deaths and the slaughter of tens of thousands of sheep across the West.

Texas offers an especially revealing example. Charles Goodnight's riders reportedly drove hundreds of sheep into the Canadian River and drowned them.

But Goodnight and the sheepmen eventually did what the rhetoric had suggested was impossible: they divided the range. Sheep occupied one area and cattle another.

The “not enough grass” argument lasted until a map made it unnecessary.

In Oregon and Wyoming, the disputes were even bloodier. Sheep were shot, driven over cliffs and dynamited. Camps and wagons were burned. Herders were beaten and killed.

The grass did not become more abundant because a sheep herder was shot.

The cattle outfit simply became more exclusive.

Open range was largely first-come, first-served until fences, forest reserves and eventually federal grazing law changed the rules. Cattle capital often arrived first. Sheep operations—frequently dependent on immigrant labor—then moved into country cattle operators had come to regard as their own.

“Not enough grass for both” did three useful things:

It turned a preference into a fact of nature.

It made violence sound like range husbandry.

And it kept the public from asking the adult question: Which ground is actually available, and who refuses to use it?

THE AMERICAN WILD HORSE IS STANDING WHERE THE SHEEP STOOD

Wild horses are not sheep. They are federally protected animals under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, not a competing livestock business.

But I see a familiar argument emerging.

There is not enough grass. There is not enough room. The horse is taking forage that belongs to cattle.

The proposed answers usually involve removing the horse: roundup, holding, fertility control, sale or, increasingly, arguments about slaughter.

What is rarely discussed seriously enough is the map.

BLM’s March 1, 2026 estimate was 85,466 wild horses and burros on the range. As of May 2026, another 58,025 were being maintained in off-range holding.

I believe that represents a management problem—not proof that America has simply run out of land.

California, Oregon and Washington contain vast areas of fire-prone forest and other landscapes where commercial livestock grazing is difficult or uneconomic.

Instead of concentrating wild horses in conflict areas or maintaining tens of thousands in holding facilities, we should be seriously testing the relocation of intact family bands onto suitable, fuels-heavy landscapes where their grazing could provide an ecological service.

The cow outfit keeps its allotment.

The horse leaves the battlefield.

The taxpayer stops buying lifetime hay.

And the landscape gets a year-round grazer eating fine fuels.

CATTLE ARE A TOOL, NOT A SILVER BULLET

Targeted livestock grazing can reduce grass and other fine fuels in the right places, at the right season, with the right infrastructure.

It is a useful tool.

It is not a continent-scale solution.

The Ranger Road Fire in February 2026 started in Beaver County, Oklahoma, and burned into southwestern Kansas, consuming roughly 283,000 to 300,000 acres.

Ashland and Englewood evacuated.

Ranchers who already had cattle on the landscape still lost grass, fences and animals. One High Plains operation reported approximately 35,000 acres burned, 120 miles of fence damaged and 227 cattle killed.

Cattle did not make that wind-driven grass fire unburnable.

The cattle themselves died in it.

Remote wilderness presents an entirely different economic problem.

There may be no county road, developed water, fencing or economically viable livestock operation. Running domestic stock there can require transportation, salt, fencing, riders, veterinary care and acceptance of losses to predators and winter.

Selling “more cows in the high backcountry” as the national solution to wildfire smoke confuses a useful management tool with a universal prescription.

THE HORSE ALREADY EATS THE FUSE WHERE THE COW DOESN’T PAY

A wild horse is a year-round herbivore.

It eats grass. When grass becomes scarce, it can also browse woody vegetation. It does not require a stock trailer into a roadless drainage or a federal hay contract once established on suitable habitat.

Research on free-ranging and semi-wild horses supports the basic fuel-reduction mechanism.

Research involving Galician feral horses found substantial reductions in aboveground vegetation biomass in grazed areas, while fire modeling indicated a lower surface rate of spread where horses had grazed.

Other European research has examined horses as tools for maintaining shorter grass and reducing vegetation that can contribute to wildfire behavior.

For more than a decade, I have also observed these relationships directly while living among wild horses on the California–Oregon border.

During the 2018 Klamathon Fire, which burned roughly 38,000 acres, I spent nine days on the fire line as an unpaid CAL FIRE technical advisor.

What I saw was straightforward: free-roaming horses had already reduced fine fuels in areas they regularly used. When fire reached some of those areas, firefighters encountered a different fuel condition.

That landscape is not being commercially grazed by livestock.

That is precisely the kind of place where this idea deserves a serious test.

BLM ALREADY PUT THE FUEL TRADEOFF IN WRITING

This is not only a Forest Service budget issue.

The Bureau of Land Management has acknowledged the relationship between wild-horse grazing and fine fuels in Environmental Assessments prepared for horse gathers.

In its analysis for the Carter Reservoir, Buckhorn and Coppersmith areas, BLM wrote that year-round grazing by ungulates reduces the overall amount of fuel available for wildfires.

The agency also acknowledged a consequence of removing horses.

Reducing wild-horse numbers to Appropriate Management Level, BLM wrote, would result in a short-term increase in the volume of fine fuels because less forage would be consumed year-round.

The agency said that increased fuel availability, particularly during late summer, could theoretically increase wildfire.

Similar language appears in the Lahontan HMA gather analysis.

BLM also argues that reducing horse populations can produce longer-term vegetation benefits, including changes involving invasive annual plants. That argument deserves consideration.

But it does not erase the immediate tradeoff.

The gather happens now.

The cured grass stands this summer.

And the smoke does not wait for a long-term vegetation model to mature.

If large ungulates reduce fine fuels, we should be asking a different question:

Instead of simply removing wild horses from landscapes where they conflict with other uses, why aren't we testing their relocation to suitable landscapes where reducing those fuels is itself the management objective?

STOP CALLING THE HORSE THE PROBLEM. MOVE THE HORSE TO THE FIRE.

BLM’s March 1, 2026 on-range estimate is 85,466 wild horses and burros. Off-range holding contained 58,025 animals as of May 2026.

Together, that is roughly 143,500 animals.

Tens of thousands are being maintained off-range at taxpayer expense while fire-prone landscapes elsewhere continue accumulating vegetation.

There is another model worth testing.

Move suitable horses from conflict areas and off-range holding into appropriate fire-prone landscapes where year-round grazing could reduce fuels.

Do it carefully.

Move intact social groups where appropriate. Select habitat capable of supporting them. Monitor vegetation, wildlife, horse health and fire behavior. Compare treated landscapes with controls.

And measure the result.

If it does not work, the data will show it.

If it does work, America gains another tool for managing wildfire fuels while reducing the enormous cost and controversy associated with holding wild horses indefinitely.

Ranchers who need horses removed from heavily contested allotments could get relief.

Taxpayers could reduce long-term holding costs.

And fire-prone landscapes could gain a year-round herbivore capable of doing work that is currently extraordinarily expensive to accomplish by mechanical or human means.

The current system deserves competition from a better idea.

THE POLITICAL FIGHT OVER WILD HORSE SLAUGHTER

Wild-horse policy is again entering the national political conversation.

Recent reporting about federally protected wild horses reaching slaughter has intensified scrutiny of the federal management system and the Trump administration’s approach to the issue.

That debate should not be reduced to whether someone is “for” or “against” wild horses.

There is a larger management question sitting underneath it.

If horses are creating conflicts on existing Herd Management Areas, where else could they provide value?

Opposition to testing a wilderness-horse fuels pilot should be evaluated against the same standard as the proposal itself: evidence.

Test it.

Measure it.

Compare the cost with helicopter gathers, off-range holding, mechanical fuel reduction and wildfire suppression.

The photographs, videos and fire-line observations I have compiled provide field evidence worth investigating. The scientific literature provides additional evidence about grazing and fuel reduction.

The federal government’s own environmental documents acknowledge that removing large grazers can increase fine fuels in the short term.

The vacant forest is still empty.

The smoke is not.

WATCH & SHARE THE VIDEO

Wildfire is already costing Americans lives and billions of dollars.

We should be willing to test every practical tool available for reducing the fuel before it burns—including one that can feed itself.

Watch the accompanying video and share this record.

The next plume will not wait for another conference.

REFERENCES

WILDFIRE SMOKE & PUBLIC HEALTH

Qiu, Minghao, et al. “Wildfire Smoke Exposure and Mortality Burden in the USA Under Climate Change.” Nature, 2025.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09611-w

Zhang, Yaguang, et al. “Wildfire Smoke PM2.5 and Mortality Rate in the Contiguous United States: A Causal Modeling Study.” Science Advances, 2026.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12871454/

Associated Press. “Study Ties Particle Pollution From Wildfire Smoke to 24,100 US Deaths Per Year.”
https://apnews.com/

Wang, Yu, et al. Research examining long-term mortality associated with fire-sourced PM2.5 exposure in California, 2008–2018. Science Advances.

WILDFIRE SPENDING & FOREST MANAGEMENT

U.S. Forest Service. “The Rising Cost of Wildfire Operations: Effects on the Forest Service’s Non-Fire Work.”

U.S. Forest Service. FY2026 Congressional Budget Justification.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/fs-fy26-congressional-budget-justification.pdf

Congressional Research Service. Forest Service Appropriations.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13101

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. Budget Explanatory Notes.
https://www.usda.gov/

Congressional Record. Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund and Forest Service appropriations.
https://www.congress.gov/

WILD HORSES, GRAZING & WILDFIRE FUELS

Bureau of Land Management. Wild Horse and Burro Program Data. On-range and off-range population statistics.
https://www.blm.gov/programs/wild-horse-and-burro/about-the-program/program-data

Bureau of Land Management. Carter Reservoir, Buckhorn and Coppersmith Wild Horse Gather Environmental Assessment.
https://eplanning.blm.gov/

Bureau of Land Management. Lahontan Herd Management Area Gather Environmental Assessment.
https://eplanning.blm.gov/

Lombardero et al. “Application of Remote Sensing to Understand the Role of Galician Feral Horses in Biomass Reduction.” BMC Ecology and Evolution, 2024.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12862-024-02276-5

Nieto-Espinet et al. “Dietary Strategies of Feral and Domestic Horses.” Agroforestry Systems, 2025.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10457-025-01291-9

Freitas et al. “Semi-Wild Horse Grazing as a Rewilding Strategy.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2025.
https://www.frontiersin.org/

Wild Horse Fire Brigade. Research, field observations and wildfire-fuels materials.
https://www.wildhorsefirebrigade.org/

RANGER ROAD FIRE

KSN. Reporting on the Ranger Road Fire and losses to High Plains ranching operations.

Tri-State Livestock News. Reporting on the February 2026 Ranger Road Fire, acreage burned and livestock losses.

THE WESTERN SHEEP WARS

Liles, Vernen. “Sheep Wars.” Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/sheep-wars

O’Neal, Bill. Cattlemen vs. Sheepherders: Five Decades of Violence in the West, 1880–1920. Eakin Press, 1989.
https://archive.org/details/cattlemenvssheep0000onea

Davis, John W. “The Spring Creek Raid: The Last Murderous Sheep Raid in the Big Horn Basin.” WyoHistory.org.
https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/spring-creek-raid-last-murderous-sheep-raid-big-horn-basin

American Heritage Center. “Last Open Attack in the Wyoming Range Wars: Spring Creek Raid of 1909.”
https://ahcwyo.org/2018/04/02/last-open-attack-in-the-wyoming-range-wars-spring-creek-raid-of-1909/

Sowards, Adam M. “Why Sheep Started So Many Wars in the American West.” Zócalo Public Square, 2017.
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/sheep-started-many-wars-american-west/

The Sopris Sun. “Historiography: Sheep Wars.”

Encyclopedia.com. “Sheep Wars.”
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/sheep-wars

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William E. Simpson II is an ethologist who lives among and studies free-roaming American wild horses. He is founder and executive director of Wild Horse Fire Brigade and author of more than 500 articles on wild horses, wildlife, wildfire and public-land management.

Wild Horse Fire Brigade
https://www.wildhorsefirebrigade.org/