THEY SHOOT WILD HORSES

“Somebody will be shot, or horses will be shot. Something will happen.”

Wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a long-sleeved plaid shirt, and dusty blue jeans with a massive star-shaped belt buckle, 56-year-old Jess Dancer is a cowboy straight out of central casting, complete with weathered hands, graying hair, and a Ford F-350. Half sitting, half leaning on a sawhorse in the shade of a toolshed at Alturas Ranches, where he works as a farm and ranch manager, he expresses his concern about what’s happening on the range around him.

“Somebody will be shot, or horses will be shot,” he says. “Something will happen.”

For some 15 years, the U.S. Forest Service allowed Alturas Ranches to turn out roughly 380 cattle on a part of northeastern California’s Modoc National Forest known as Emigrant Springs. The permits, covering land under both Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service jurisdictions, allowed Dancer’s cattle to spend around five months basking in the sunshine and eating wild grasses before being rounded up in late October and moved to lower-altitude, warmer pastures for the winter, prior to their eventual slaughter for meat.

But Emigrant Springs is home to more than just cattle from Alturas Ranches, and that’s what fuels Dancer’s concerns.

The allotment’s shallow eponymous springs provide a critical resource in this otherwise arid landscape. Deer and pronghorn visit to slake their thirst, frogs and salamanders make a home there, and waterfowl and other migratory birds use the wetlands as a rest stop on their long journeys. While cattle are allowed to graze in some of these areas, the ducks and geese don’t seem to mind. Some even prefer nesting in grasses that have been nibbled down.

But then there are the wild mustangs of the Devil’s Garden herd. Back in 2011, when he was first hired by Alturas, Dancer saw just a few horses moving through his permit area. “But then, in the spring of 2012, there was a major influx of wild horses,” he says. He isn’t sure why the horses