What happens when feral horses are removed from a landscape where they don’t belong? Following the 2023 roundup of the non-native horses, the Wind River Indian Reservation is thriving in a way that illustrates that occasional massive removal can be incredibly beneficial.

Art Lawson, director of Shoshone and Arapaho Fish and Game, was astounded when he recently drove through the Little Wind River Drainage. He told WyoFile that it was “[a]lmost overnight results, really.”

“The mule deer that I’ve seen since we removed horses is unreal,” said Lawson. “Really, deer [numbers] I haven’t seen in 10 years.”

The connection between the removal of thousands of free-roaming horses and now rebounding wildlife, which includes mule deer and other native species, is easy to see. Without round-ups and other ways of controlling non-native feral horse populations, their numbers can grow to an unsustainable number, damaging the landscape and creating competition for food and water that native animals rely upon.

“The cheatgrass that’s leftover after horses have been there for a while, it’s horrible,” said Lawson. “There’s no nutrition in cheatgrass.”

According to WyoFile, there were about 5,500 feral horses in the Wind River Range’s eastern foothills (spanning 1 million acres) in 2022 – taking over nearly half of the land area within those boundaries. That estimate didn’t include horses that were missed during the aerial survey or foals born that spring.

“We felt pretty confident there were at least 9,000 horses out there at that time,” said Pat Hnilicka, the supervisory biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Lander office, who added that the estimate was “very shocking.”

“It was at an ecological crisis point,” said Hnilicka. “If something wasn’t done, there was no turning back.”

Over the last two years, about 7,600 feral horses have been corralled and removed from the area, leaving “fewer than ‘several thousand’ horses” on the Wind River Indian Reservation, according to WyoFile. This means more forage and more space – and less competition – for native wildlife.

“Now that forage is available for wildlife,” said Hnilicka, “or for natural recycling — protecting the soil.”

With access to more grasses and forbs and healthy shrubs, antelope, elk, deer, and other wildlife seem to be flourishing. And Lawson believes it will only continue now that fewer feral horses are on the landscape.

“We’ll see more and more wildlife now,” said Lawson. “It’s almost like they thanked us.”