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Anyone who lives in the West County of St. Louis knows the next chapter of the story. Like urban deer populations that thrive in subdivisions with no predators, wild horse populations expanded rapidly. And just as urban deer populations create problems for gardeners and automobile drivers, so numerous wild horses created new problems for cattle ranchers. There is not a lot of grass on the high plains of Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and Arizona, and every mouthful that a wild horse eats is one not available to a cow. Even worse, a horse crops much closer to the ground than a cow, so that the expanding herds of wild horses came to be viewed as destroying grazing land. From the ranchers’ point of view, wild horses were simply thieves stealing the food their cattle needed to survive, every horse lessening the number of cows the land could support.