At his ranch along the Klamath River in Siskiyou County in Northern California, near the Oregon border, William Simpson lives among free-roaming native American wild horses in what he calls an “immersion study.”

When he bought the ranch in 2014, Simpson discovered wild horses roaming his land. He noticed that they would eat dry grass and brush—the kind that fuels wildfires and the stuff that cattle and sheep won’t eat. He has since advocated wild horse grazing to mitigate wildfires, and the idea has gained support from Elko County in Nevada and groups such as the Nevada Lands Council.

Local governments in California such as Placer and Marin counties already use goats to reduce wildfire risk. Simpson says his plan would not only mitigate the fires but also clear up more areas for cattle grazing, make wild horse herds stronger and healthier, keep them from potentially being sold for slaughter, and save U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars—but most importantly save thousands of people’s lives and livelihoods lost to wildfires and smoke.

He is also a wild horse ethologist who teaches University of California students about horse grazing patterns and how they help prevent wildfires at his ranch, which consists primarily of grass and brush with scattered pine trees.

“She got sick right after the Klamathon fire,” he said. “The toxins in the wildfire smoke killed her.”

During that fire, wild horses grazed Agate Flat, which straddles the California–Oregon border, and played an important role by reducing fuel and creating a fire break that helped suppress the speed and heat intensity of the blaze to keep it from spreading to an old-growth forest wilderness area about two miles north in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, Simpson said.

“That was a critical point in the battle ... that helped Cal Fire win the war,” he said. “Thanks to the horses, we won.”

Everyone near his ranch was evacuated, but Simpson stayed—suffering lung damage himself—to help battle the blaze and keep watch over the horses.

“I stayed back because I wanted to see what these horses were going to do,” he said.

And by doing so, Simpson said, he discovered something quite interesting: “Wild horses are not afraid of fire.”

He watched and photographed the wild horses “grazing calmly” near the fire, which he attributes to the instincts of wild horses, whose ancestors have seen thousands of wildfires.

“The ancestors of these horses saw Mount Shasta erupting, and they’ve seen lava. They’ve seen erupting volcanos,” he said. “They’ve seen it all.”

Simpson has written two books and more than 500 articles about wild horses, wildlife, wildfire, and public land and forest management, and he has appeared on several TV and radio shows.

Alisa Vershinina and Beth Shapiro at the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab, and others, traced the DNA of modern horses to ancient ancestors in North America by analyzing well-preserved horse remains from across the Bering Land Bridge, a landmass that connected Eurasia and North America during ice ages of the past. Their research maps the historical journey of wild horses from North America to Eurasia and back.

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Unlike ruminants such as deer, cattle, sheep, and goats, which have complex and more efficient digestive systems, wild horses and burros have single-stomach digestive systems and don’t fully digest most of the seeds they eat, making them nature’s “re-seeding experts,” Simpson said.

Horses also graze differently and don’t tear out the roots of plants in the way that cattle and sheep do, he said.

A herd of 200 wild horses consists of about 20 family bands, each made up of a stallion with a lead mare, usually a harem, and foals.

“They all know each other. They’re very social. They have their own society,” Simpson said. “They actually have rituals, which I’ve documented, when one of their own that they really love dies, they actually pay respects. It’s pretty amazing to see. I filmed it.”.

“That’s a waste of tax dollars and our resources,” he said. “What I want to do is have them reallocated into wildfire mitigation.”

But the law also allows for “excess animals” to be removed to “maintain a thriving natural ecological balance among wild horse populations, wildlife, livestock, and vegetation and to protect the range from the deterioration associated with overpopulation.”

Those who adopt the wild horses must sign under penalty of prosecution adoption agreements stating that they will not give away or sell the horses or burros to any person or organization that intends to give away or resell that animal for commercial processing, Perrin said.

The program allows people to adopt up to four horses per year and be paid $1,000 per horse after successfully caring for the animals for one year. But, after the year is up, they are given ownership of these animals and are free to sell them, she said.

“When the program was announced in 2019, we knew that it would end in disaster for wild horses,” Perrin said. “Unfortunately, we were right, and—as our investigations has shown, people are adopting the maximum number of horses and burros that they can. They’re pocketing that adoption incentive money, and then they’re sending the horses and burros into the slaughter pipeline in direct contravention of a congressional ban on wild horse slaughter.”

She pointed out that public opinion is heavily in favor of protecting wild horses.

Wild horses symbolize freedom and the spirit of the West, and horses, in general, are “so deeply entwined in our culture” that most Americans don’t want to see them slaughtered, Perrin said.

The AWHC supports any alternative, including grazing to mitigate wildfires, that could keep wild horses from being killed, she said.

In November, the BLM announced five new public-private partnership agreements to place 11,000 of these animals, in addition to its existing adoption program. These partnerships could receive up to nearly $25 million in funding over five years and save taxpayers roughly $160 million by reducing the costs of caring for unadopted wild horses and burros.

“If nothing were done to reduce the annual growth rate of these herds, by 2040, the BLM estimates the on-range populations of wild horses and burros could increase to over 2.8 million,” the report stated.

Although the AWHC supports the agency’s adoption programs as a way to get horses out of holding, Perrin said the only way that the BLM can alleviate the burden on taxpayers is to stop rounding up wild horses and instead invest in humane fertility control programs.

The cost to treat one mare over her lifetime is about $2,500 and doesn’t affect her behavior or ability to nurse or nurture babies, Perrin said.

“Using wild horses to reduce fuels could also cause ecological problems. If targeted in the right season, high numbers of any grazer can reduce annual invasive grasses, like cheatgrass, that feed wildfires,” Lutterman said.

But intense, year-round grazing by unmanaged horses can reduce native plant and animal diversity and disturb soils in a way that “actually favors” these invasive grasses and “could even increase fire frequency and spread,” he said.

Introducing horses without fertility control would lead to uncontrolled herd growth in wilderness areas, Lutterman said.

“Predation doesn’t typically limit herd growth on BLM’s herd management areas, or on other western lands where there have been credible ecological studies,” he said.

If passed, it would allow permitted grazing on vacant land during instances of drought, wildfire, or other natural disasters.

Although the bill doesn’t specifically exclude wild horses, LaMalfa told The Epoch Times that it’s more intended for cattle and sheep because domestic livestock are more easily managed and moved to different sites to target specific areas for responsible grazing.

Wild horses, LaMalfa said, wouldn’t be as effective as cattle and sheep because they’re harder to manage than domestic livestock.

“They don’t herd as well,” he said. “They’re not manageable in the same way.”

And besides, LaMalfa said, the wild horse population is already unsustainable.

“Those horse numbers need to be brought down dramatically,” LaMalfa said. “Many of them need to be removed.”

Also, LaMalfa said he couldn’t imagine that many ranchers would support the idea of having to compete with horses for grazing land.

Those vacant wildlands, he said, are vacant for a reason: Ranchers don’t want to put cattle and sheep in there because “they’re too dangerous and too remote,” with predators such as mountain lions, bears, and wolves, and are harder to access, often by single-track roads.

In his opinion, the proposed bill, H.R. 7666, doesn’t go far enough to specifically include wild horses, which are more resilient to withstand harsher conditions and more rugged diets such as drier grasses and brush, which cattle and sheep won’t eat.

Wild horses “eat every kind of grass out there,” including cheatgrass and shrubs such as poison oak, and will even eat oak branches and leaves, cleaning up the forest floor around trees, which they use for shade and shelter, Simpson said.

“They graze under the trees, clean all that fire fuel out, which makes the trees more fire resilient,” he said.

Dry grasses and shrubs burn rapidly and “catastrophically hot,” while areas that have been grazed burn lower and slower and reduce the risk of massive forest fires, Simpson said.

“We don’t need to have all this fire, and we certainly don’t need more smoke with prescribed burning, which doesn’t scale,” he said. “Prescribed fire? Oh, really, so you’re going to burn those 300 million acres of vacant wildlands? Is that what you’re telling us?”

So if wild horses can mitigate fires, Simpson said, his plan could save the lives of thousands of Californians who die prematurely from wildfire smoke.

“That’s got to be the highest priority,” he said. “And that’s why I push as hard as I do.”

As the owner of a forest and natural resources consulting business and member of the California Professional Foresters Association, with a degree in natural resources management and forestry, Haupt said he supports “anything that reduces fuel” to help suppress the rapid spread of wildfires.

But, he said, the ecological systems involved in grazing are complex, with no “one size fits all” solution.

Grazing is effective in dry areas with grasses underneath the tree layer, but not in heavily forested areas with high tree density where “horrendous fires” are occurring, he said.

“Horses and cows don’t eat trees,” he said.

Haupt, a member of the Sustainable Forest Action Coalition, a grassroots coalition that seeks to restore an economically sustainable ecosystem on public lands through the “proper” management of watersheds, forests, and logging, has worked with Congress on natural resources legislation and on a research study with the University of California–Merced and University of California–Berkeley, published in 2014, that focused on changes in vegetation in a portion of the Scott watershed since 1935.

The study found that between 1977 and 1985, the region went through a wet spell that allowed more trees to grow on lands with thinner soils, increasing the forest density to four times as many trees per acre than there were in 1935, according to Haupt.

This shows a need to reduce fuel sources to prevent fires from spreading, he said, and policies “put in place as a reaction to politics” and litigation from environmental groups over the past few decades have hampered efforts to clear the dry underbrush and thin the forests.

During his first term, President Donald Trump voiced support for clearing the forest floors of overgrowth and conducting prescribed burns.

In September 2020, Haupt said, he met with Trump, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and state officials in Sacramento to discuss wildfires, but with the meeting so close to the 2020 election and the end of Trump’s first term imminent, no significant follow-up effort was made to clean the forest floors.

LaMalfa said he expects the next Trump administration to make necessary changes within government agencies to take a more “aggressive” approach to forestry and wildfire mitigation.