BLM officials rekindled the decades-old dispute when they announced last month that the Bush administration had assured them the nearly $30 million they’ll need to carry out roundups this year.

“The number far exceeds the rangeland’s capability to support them,” said Bob Abbey, the BLM’s state director for Nevada.

They want to reduce the herd nationally to about 26,000 by 2005, about 15,000 in Nevada, depending on the outcome of range assessments.

“We need to gather animals in sufficient quantity to get the numbers down to a level that’s healthy for the animals and the land,” Abbey said.

Or as the BLM’s Maxine Shane puts it:

“It’s just like if you keep two horses on your lawn or two cows on your lawn, pretty soon you would have no grass left.”

Environmentalists who want fewer livestock grazing on public lands anyway have joined the horse advocates in arguing the 25,000 wild horses in Nevada have little ecological impact compared with the hundreds of thousands of cattle that roam the range.

"Advocates for the wild horses say it’s a land grab at the expense of the herds they say have been roaming the West for centuries."

For example, Nevada’s Elko County ranked fourth among all counties in the nation in 1997 with more than 90,000 beef cattle, the most recent year calculated by the U.S. Agriculture Department.

“I’ve worked with the BLM for years and I think the problem is the pressure on them from the cattle ranching industry,” said Trina Bellak, an attorney and lobbyist for the American Horse Defense Fund in Potomac, Md. “It exceeds the noise the public can make.”

The Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 “wants horses preserved in balance with other competing interests,” Bellak said. “I don’t have any benefit from one of those head of cattle, but I get tremendous benefit from driving out on the range and seeing wild mustangs.”

Wild horse population estimates given to Congress at the time the act was passed ranged from 17,000 to 2 million.

“No one really knew,” said Shane, chief spokeswoman for the BLM’s National Wild Horse and Burro Program based in Reno.

The first census taken in 1974 estimated Nevada had 22,000 wild horses and 1,000 burros, far more than any other state. Apparently its remote, high-desert sage brush and grasslands were more to the liking of equines than homesteaders in the 1800s.

“People passed over Nevada on the way to California,” Shane explained.

Due primarily to weather cycles, horse population totals in Nevada have ranged from a high of an estimated 34,677 in 1992 to a low of 22,463 in 1998.

Some are believed to be direct descendants of the horses Spanish conquistadors brought to North America in the 1500s. But many date to ownership of the U.S. Calvary and others were turned out by farmers and ranchers over the years, Shane said.