What it means
Say the wild horses in Scottsdale and nobody asks which ones. You mean the Salt River wild horses, the free-roaming herd that grazes the cottonwood and mesquite banks of the lower Salt River where it comes out of the dams northeast of the city, in the Tonto National Forest, under cliffs and saguaros about 45 minutes from Old Town. They wade the river at dawn, they cross Bush Highway at dusk, and a photograph of a bay mare belly-deep in green water with a saguaro behind her has become one of the Valley’s stock images. The river guide covers where and how to see them without being a jerk about it; this page covers the fight over them.
Because the herd’s fame rests on a fight. For most of a century the horses were simply there. In 2015 the Forest Service announced it would remove them, and the reaction, from petitions to the Governor’s desk, turned a few dozen or a few hundred horses into a state cause and gave them a legal status that exists nowhere else in Arizona: protected by a law written for them alone.
Where you’ll meet it
On the lower Salt below Saguaro Lake, at the Coon Bluff, Phon D Sutton, Goldfield and Granite Reef recreation sites off Bush Highway; floating past on a summer tube; and in every argument about public land in the East Valley since 2015.
Where the word came from
The horses were not called anything in particular until a group of volunteers started counting them. The Salt River Wild Horse Management Group, a nonprofit that says it has monitored the herd for two decades, gave the animals their public name, their individual names, and eventually their constituency. How long horses have run the lower Salt is itself disputed: advocates say more than a century and point to the Forest Service’s own acknowledgment of horses there since the 1930s; the agency’s position was that whatever their history, these animals had no legal standing.
That gap was the whole problem. The 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act protects horses only on land where the government designated a herd territory, and the Tonto never did. So when the Forest Service decided the horses were a public safety problem, horses hit on Bush Highway and wandering into recreation sites, it had one tool. On July 31, 2015, it posted a notice declaring them unauthorized livestock subject to impound and sale, with as little as a week before a roundup could begin. The agency estimated as many as 100 animals.
The response was loud and fast. The management group gathered more than 30,000 petition signatures, submitted a 50-page alternative built on birth control and sanctuary placement, and the state’s politicians lined up behind it. The Forest Service agreed to a 120-day delay and then, just before Christmas 2015, rescinded the notice. That October a mare the volunteers called Dotty was shot and killed, which hardened the mood. In the 2016 session Rep. Kelly Townsend of Mesa introduced HB 2340; it passed the House in February, cleared the Senate 27 to 2 in April, and Governor Doug Ducey signed it on May 11, 2016, with riders waving flags outside.
What it is not
Not a federally protected wild herd, like the burros at Lake Pleasant or the horses of the BLM ranges, and not anyone’s livestock. The law created a third category: Salt River horses, defined as horses that have historically inhabited the Tonto National Forest and carry no ownership brand.
The fine print
HB 2340 does five things, according to the Senate fact sheet. It makes harassing, shooting, injuring, killing or slaughtering a Salt River horse a class 1 misdemeanor. It bars anyone from interfering with, taking, chasing, capturing or euthanizing one without written authorization from the Arizona Department of Agriculture or the county sheriff, granted for humane purposes only. It declares the horses are not stray animals and are not subject to livestock seizure. It makes releasing a domestic horse into the wild a misdemeanor too, to stop people dumping animals into the herd. And it conditions the whole thing on the state signing an agreement with the Forest Service to manage the herd, which the law required by the end of 2017; the Department of Agriculture may contract the work to a private group, which in practice has meant the volunteers.
What the law does not settle is the number or the method. The fact sheet admitted the count was unknown. The management group runs a fertility-control program using PZP darts, an emergency feeding protocol in drought, fence repairs along Bush Highway and rescues of injured foals, all on donations. Critics, including some of the same advocates, argued in 2016 that the bill came with no funding and allowed the state to geld, spay or even cull the herd under the banner of management. The Community downstream, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, owns the land the river enters below Granite Reef and has its own view of horses that cross onto it.
For a visitor the rules are simpler than the politics. Tonto passes, dawn or dusk, long lens, no feeding, no approach, dog in the car, speed limit on Bush Highway. The horses’ survival depends less on the misdemeanor than on nobody teaching them that cars carry carrots.