A Horse Gather Big Enough to Make a Working Lady Blush

Ladies and gentlemen, saddle up your sense of outrage or relief—whichever suits your constitution—for the Bureau of Land Management has thrown its lasso around the wild horses of eastern Nevada and aims to make a mighty gather.

The grand equestrian escapade dubbed the “Pancake Complex Wild Horse Gather”–which sounds like a breakfast-time rodeo but is, in fact, a government affair–is set to thin the ranks of free-roaming mustangs from a sprawling 1.2-million-acre stretch of the Silver State. The stretch of untamed paradise includes such poetic locales as Jakes Wash, Monte Cristo, Pancake, and Sand Springs West—places where the horses roam, the wind whispers through the sage, and, apparently, the BLM figures there are too many hooves pounding the ground for comfort.

Bristlecone Field Manager Melanie Peterson, speaking with the authority of one who has wrangled many a bureaucratic report, assures us that this action is in the noble pursuit of maintaining “a healthy wild horse population” at the “appropriate management level” of 336-638 wild steeds. Ain’t no word yet on how the horses feel about their arithmetic-based existence.

One also suspects they didn’t get consulted either.