Free-roaming horses wander reclaimed mine lands in a handful of Eastern Kentucky counties, but as the population has grown, so has the need to manage the animals.
There are a handful of groups making the effort, including the Kentucky Humane Society. Equine director Lori Redmon said many of the horses are feral.
“They're populating, and they're outstripping the environment's ability to sustain them, and then they're thin, or they're getting in roads, or that type of thing, which is why we move more to population control strategies, proactive strategies,” Redmon said.
One herd roams Leslie County, not far from a local horse park. There’s more than a dozen of the creatures grazing the uninhabited mine land at the end of May. They’re among the thousands of free-roaming horses across roughly nine counties in the region.
Shauneece Wade, the executive director of the nonprofit Appalachian Horse Center, doesn’t visit the Leslie County herd often, but said it tends to stay in the same general area.
“There’s plenty of acreage for them to forage, so they don’t really need to leave much. Probably a few 100 acres is the most they travel,” Wade said.
Some herds roam unmanaged and stay on the mountaintops until they are clear of grass. When the horses wander downhill, into people’s yards and roads, it can cause problems and create safety risks, however. The horses also roam inconvenient places, like the landing strip of Martin County’s Big Sandy Regional Airport.
Volunteers with the Appalachian Horse Center drop off hay and salt for some herds throughout the year as needed, but mostly in the winter months.
The center has also begun tackling population management. It opened a barn facility in May to house sick, hurt and troublesome intakes. It’s challenging work — some of the horses have never been haltered and can be hard to catch. Eventually, if unclaimed, they may be adopted out.
Wade said the horses in Leslie County aren’t abandoned or suffering on the mountaintop.
“Occasionally, they are going to need help, but that’s not really that much different than any other type of wildlife in our state,” Wade said. “I do think they can be an asset to our communities. They’ve definitely been a proven tourist attraction.”
Financial crisis leads to population boom
Free-roaming horses have been part of Eastern Kentucky’s landscape for decades, Wade said. Grazing agreements were once common in the region, but that changed in 2008.
Owners began releasing horses in greater numbers during the financial crisis, and those released have bred, leading to a population boom.
The latest generations aren’t used to human contact, Redmon noted.
“Many of the horses that we saw were tame, and they were domesticated and turned out by owners that might pick them up and go riding and then drop them back off,” Redmon said. “These days, fast forward to 2026, and we find that the majority of the horses that we see out there are feral. They’ve been born out there.”
Redmon said though they are feral, the horses come from domestic stock and are not considered wild. But figuring out what to do with them remains a challenge.
“Anything that comes to us, the goal is to get them ready for adoption and to adopt them out. We're not a sanctuary, so we don't keep horses here forever,” Redmon said.
In 2024, an equine birth control, porcine zona pellucida, or PZP, was approved in Kentucky. The Humane Society works to administer an initial dose and annual boosters to eastern herds.
“That was a big game changer for us,” Redmon said. “It moved us from being reactive to when horses are in trouble or they’re not doing well and they’re physically suffering and offering to pick them up, to actually being proactive and looking at reducing the population to the point that the environment can sustain it through proactive measures of fertility and control and reducing the birth rate.”
The Humane Society expects to start seeing real results from PZP next year.
The Kentucky Horse Council is also trying to help manage population. Director Sarah Coleman said the group is working to geld, or castrate, young stallions to prevent breeding.
“The Horse Council specifically does what we call drop-in gelds,” Coleman said.
She and a volunteer veterinarian castrate stallions in the field, but they are limited on the number of gelds they can conduct each fall.
“If the stallions are all in a fairly close location, depending on county, we can do between 10 and 12 stallions in a day, which is still, again, it's a drop in the bucket compared to how many are out there,” Coleman said.
The population grows each year, and Coleman says she's sensitive to the role financial hardship has played in the problem.
“This is not a problem that our Eastern Kentucky continues created,” Coleman said, “they are just the recipients of unfortunate circumstances.”
Unlike the mustangs out west, Eastern Kentucky’s free-roaming herds aren’t protected.
“Our goal is simply that the horses that are out there are healthy and are not suffering, meaning they have adequate forage and that they do not have any egregious welfare issues, whether that’s starving to death, broken bones, etcetera," Coleman said. “Our goal is just to ensure that those population of horses are protected until that population can be run down to zero.”
