Wild Horse Basin Ranch covers 92,351 acres according to the agent’s listing.
The ranch boundary coincides roughly with that of the FL Ranch Allotment.
The allotment master report puts it in the Improve category, with 5,548 active AUMs on 35,098 public acres, equivalent to 13.2 wild horses per thousand public acres.
Your faithful public servants claim that public lands in the western U.S. can only support one wild horse per thousand acres (25,500 animals on 25.6 million acres).
The ArcGIS Viewer shows state and private lands within the allotment but the acreage is not given in the report.
The successful bidder will likely be a high net worth individual or corporation but will be eligible for generous government benefits with no means testing.
The listing does not give the deeded acreage but the difference between the total acreage and leased acreage is 31,892.
Thus, the ranch meets three out of four requirements for a wild horse refuge.
The agent’s video says the ranch can support 1,000 head year around, so that would be an estimate of the carrying capacity if it was repurposed as a refuge.
Wild horses can be placed on public lands not identified for their use by acquiring or controlling base properties tied to one or more grazing allotments and flipping the preference to horses.
There is no assurance that the stakeholders would agree to such a change and opposition at the state and local levels may be intense.
Western Horse Watchers Association 