The American West is home to roughly 82,000 wild horses and burros. As idyllic as that sounds, their grazing damages rangeland and some begin to starve when their numbers grow too large, according to a report from Boise State Public Radio.
Typically, the US Bureau of Land Management captures wild horses and keeps them in corrals, where they cost the agency around $2,000 per year in food and veterinary care. But with 6,000 animals currently in their care, the BLM corrals are at capacity, and numbers of the wild-roaming population continue to rise, Boise radio reports.
So the agency is offering to pay people who adopt one.
Through the BLM’s adoption incentive program, anybody willing to adopt one of the untrained animals from its corrals will be paid $1,000.
But adopting such a creature is not for everyone. For those who find the idea charming mostly in theory, the BLM Flickr page of successful wild horse adoptions may be a better fit.