> the other being the "wild" horses that we're too stupid to cull.

I'd like to hear more about your take on this. This past August I had an opportunity to take a ride with a lady who had adopted and trained several of these wild horses through an adoption/auction program run by the State of Oregon. To my ears it sounded very effective - the state rounds up the horses to keep them off public grazing lands and cares for them until they can be sold off. Felt like a win-win for nature, the horses, the state, and horse owners.

It's wonderful that some are rounded up and sold to people who want them, and it was even better back when there was more demand for cheap horses so that more were sold. The misguided meddlers who ended horse slaughter in USA (against the recommendation of every single association of veterinarians) destroyed the market for cheap horses, so it's no surprise that those numbers are lower. There's no guarantee that any particular mustang will make a good riding horse, so fewer people are willing to deal with that risk. The slaughter ban was bad for lots of domesticated horses about 8-10 years ago (one could drive around and see fields full of starving and neglected horses), but that level of owner is largely without horses at this point. If it's too big a risk to keep a few domesticated horses around, it's certainly too big a risk to buy mustangs.

That's only part of this particular issue, however. Even if five times the current numbers were sold to willing owners, feral horses would still be destroying the environment. They aren't native and they are uniquely suited to disrupting the life cycle of native plants. The American hunter is probably not ready to control this population in the way that e.g. deer and elk populations are controlled. The best solution is probably sterilization, but even that would be very difficult at this scale. That is especially the case given the level of interference that could be expected from the Humane Society, ASPCA, etc.

In my experience less than 1/10 of the wild horses can reliably be sold for this kind of use. In the southwest at least many of the wild horses are simply undesirable for any realistic use case more complicated than the glue factory.

In NM that's pretty good. I'm willing to bet if he was given ownership of some of that land he could improve it to the point it wasn't insane to do.

No, I'm not suggesting that my competitors be "given" vast amounts of capital goods. b^)

You're right that it is pretty good for that state. He said the rule of thumb was one head per square mile per (inch of rain per year). He was bragging about being from some blessed place where they got 12" rather than 8". But the point is that the vegetation is sparse. Even if he raised the capital to purchase land, the desert will only support so many cattle.

Fair, and I'd want the land to be sold, at a fairly steep price to encourage people to do something with it.

I'm with the amount of costs the federal government is passing to Utah for wildfire management on federal land anyhow, so that's def biasing my opinion.