‘Wild and Free’ in Climate-Challenged Landscapes: Negotiating the Mobilities of Free-Roaming Horses in the American West

The wild horse herds that inhabit the rangelands of the western United States are variously celebrated and reviled within the competing affective regimes that regulate their mobilities. We ask how these mobility regimes intersect with climate change in the governance of ‘pervasively captive’ free-roaming horses. Federal policy’s restrictive-utilitarian regime operates with a political conception of ‘detainable life’ that enables periodic roundups and removals of ‘excess’ horses from the range; detainability, in turn, is enabled by claims that horses are not native to North America. An alternative permissive-convivial approach favored by wild horse advocates defends a vision of free-roaming horses that, in practical terms, rejects considerations of ‘nativeness’ while incorporating forms of management that seek to support their autonomy on the range. Neither regime, however, has adequately considered the survival implications of accelerating climate change in the region. To reflect on the political struggle about the future of free-roaming horses under conditions of pervasive captivity and climate change, we shine a light of multispecies climate justice on herd management practices in Colorado’s Sand Wash Basin and Arizona’s Tonto National Forest.