Each year we host a few dozen horses on our winter range. They are given hay when snow makes grazing difficult but they normally feed on rangeland and uncut hay fields. The horses have running spring water just south of our house and most mornings they troop down to drink.

This is always a beautiful sight, especially when they’re running. They come down from the bench to cross the bridge over the Kleinschmidt Canal to reach our lower meadow with its constant flow of water.

Counterfactually, it would be easy to imagine that they are a herd of wild horses. Then, it’s a small step to appreciate the charm, in some cases even abstract love, that so many Americans have for our wild horses.

In 1971, Congress unanimously passed The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. The goal was to protect, manage, and control “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” Management was assigned to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service to achieve a “thriving natural ecological balance.”

Today there are an estimated 37,000 wild horses in 180 herds on 32 million acres (some 16 Yellowstone Parks) in 10 states. (The number of animals includes some burros whose ancestors were turned loose by prospectors generations ago.)

The majority of the animals live in arid regions where range productivity is low. Still, they need to eat. And they eat a lot, roughly 2 percent of their body weight per day, nearly 20 pounds. This means that they compete with wild animals, such as desert bighorn sheep and mule deer, as well as domestic livestock. This becomes a huge problem.

As the U.S. Geological Survey observed, “Largely unchecked by natural predators, wild horse populations often grow at rates of 18–25 percent per year. This unregulated growth can overtax vegetation and affect herd health as well as native wildlife populations.” This implies that unchecked horse populations will double in about four years.

The conjunction of ecological, arithmetic, and political forces and processes represents a huge problem for the assigned federal managers. Their mandated responsibilities collide with conflicting realities.

A huge number of citizens love the ideal of wild, free-ranging horses. However, these horses love to reproduce and are quite good at doing so. There are few natural predators capable of constraining numbers. Hence, the horses will naturally overstock the carrying capacity of their range. Given the government officials’ mandate to preserve ecological quality, this situation places managers in a difficult, if not untenable, position.

It seems that the one practical solution, harvesting horses for export and animal feed, isn’t politically acceptable. Fortunately, there may be technological solutions to this problem. It’s not difficult to imagine some sort of horse specific birth control via darts, drugs in their water, or some other politically palatable constraint on their excess. The agencies are working on such strategies.

I am confident that any reasonable person not blinded by ideology understands this logic and its implications for policy. Arithmetic is neither negotiable nor amenable to fudging. Reality checks dominate unrealistic hopes.

This situation is much like the logic of middle class entitlements, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, federal guarantees for retirement accounts, and a host of other federally guaranteed promises.

It is obvious to all attentive observers that, just like the wild horse situation, our pledges of entitlements, especially those to the middle class, are not sustainable. Today, there is no obvious and politically acceptable way to accommodate conflicting demands. Just as some are captivated by dreams of wild horses in harmony with nature, some politicians dream that entitlements can grow without constraint.

Alas, unlike birth control for feral animals, there are no magic bullets for constraining entitlements. And unlike the plight of wild horses, entitlement liabilities will hit us all. Absent fundamental political change, my only counsel is to cowboy up and prepare to live with much higher taxes and broken promises.