The Wild Horse Transition Team is hoping to win a zero-dollar contract to manage the wild horse population in the Tonto National Forest east of Mesa. However, one of the group’s founders, college history professor John Mack, announced he has left the group over disagreements with co-founder Jacquelyn Hughes over how many of the roughly 280 wild horses should be removed from the herd.
The split occurred five days after request-for-proposal applications were due to ADA on Aug. 25. Hughes and Mack both say Mack was asked to step down from his role with the group. On Facebook and in a statement to Phoenix New Times, Mack wrote that it became clear the two had “irreconcilable differences.”
"This outlook — that removal is never routine but always a matter of moral gravity — proved difficult to reconcile with approaches that regarded reduction primarily as a management tool,” Mack said, “and here too our perspectives were ultimately incompatible."
Mack acknowledged that the removal of some horses will be necessary, given the ADA’s apparent desire to thin the herd even further. But he maintained that the aim must be for the health of the herd first and foremost as a “conservative approach.” He did not think that Hughes, a U.S. Forest Service contractor who has aided in the removal of other wild horse herds, was aligned with that goal.
“Jackie has never really prioritized those factors in the same way,” said Mack, who teaches an online course for Georgia State University-Perimeter College.
In his statement to New Times, Hughes said she was surprised that Mack changed his mind.
“It appears he decided he does not want any horses removed,” Hughes said — though that contradicted Mack’s own admission that some removals would be unavoidable. “Unfortunately, the RFP speaks to reducing the herd. He knew this all along, so I was a bit caught off guard.”
The Salt River horses have been a feature of the Valley for at least 100 years, and some claim the horses have been running wild in Arizona for centuries. However, some conservationists say they are an invasive species and are damaging the environment in the Tonto National Forest. Despite that, the horses have become a beloved tourist attraction, and in 2016, then-Gov. Doug Ducey signed a law preventing the horses from being removed from the area without the ADA’s approval.
Since then, the horses have been managed by the nonprofit Salt River Wild Horse Management Group, which has controlled the population via a fertility program, ensuring that deaths outpace births each year. Per Simone Netherlands, the head of the group, the program has thinned the herd to its current level from roughly 450 horses in 2019.
The Wild Horse Transition Team popped up in opposition to Netherlands’ group. The two groups have a deep distrust of each other. Netherlands and her allies are skeptical of Hughes, who was a contractor involved in the 2022 removal of the Alpine Wild Horses from the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in the White Mountains. They have accused her of trying to sell those horses for slaughter, which Hughes denies.
Mack and Hughes, however, believe the Salt River horses are damaging to the environment in their current numbers and were inclined to thin the herd to a level that Netherlands felt would affect the herd’s ability to survive in the wild. Netherlands has also rejected claims, including from a University of Arizona study, that the horses are detrimental to the environment.
The last contract to manage the horses expired in July and a successor has not been chosen. Whichever group is tapped to handle the horses will do so for the next five years.
A history professor who lives in Fountain Hills, John Mack was leading an effort to take over the management of the Salt River horses before breaking with that group last month.
Courtesy of John Mack
Worried about removals
The ADA has not mandated a specific number of horses to be removed or a population reduction number that interested groups must achieve. Groups had to suggest numbers and methods themselves in their proposals. “I think it’s pretty well known throughout our communities by now that there is going to be a removal of some horses from that area,” Hughes said. Even Netherlands has acknowledged that ADA’s requirements will make some removals inevitable.According to a 2023 poll by Public Policy Polling, 78 percent of polled Arizonans opposed to some degree the removal of the wild horses from their habitat, even when weighing factors of environmental health. Scottsdale Mayor Lisa Borowsky has floated the idea of moving some of the horses to the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, which the city manages, though environmentalists and the commission that oversees the reserve have suggested such a move would do more harm than good.
Despite her openness to removing the horses, Hughes was not supportive of Borowsky’s idea, noting there’s no water and no fence and that it’s a high-traffic area for mountain bikers, hikers and hunters.
ADA spokesperson Rachel Andrews could not comment on specifics on when the contract might be awarded, the department’s population goals or the department’s stance on moving the horses to the McDowell Sonoran Preserve.
The department’s RFP stated that horses can be removed, through private or public adoption, or transferred to sanctuaries or wild horse refuges. Netherlands and allies like Suzanne Roy, the executive director of the American Wild Horse Conservation, are skeptical that adoption is a workable solution.
“It’s a complete fantasy that an adoption program will find quality homes for this many horses. It’s almost like a ruse,” Roy said. “Tell that to the (Bureau of Land Management). They have 63,000 wild horses and burros in holding facilities that need to find good homes.”
According to data from the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program, 68,000 unadopted and unsold horses and burros were cared for in off-range facilities in fiscal year 2025, including 39,000 horses living on off-range pastures. About 6,600 wild horses and burros were adopted and sold in the previous fiscal year.
Netherlands and others worry that horses sold at public auctions risk being sold for slaughter. Hughes, who has facilitated auctions of wild horses, dismissed that idea as a “buzzword.” Hughes said her contract in the Alpine horses case called for horses “to be removed from the national forest system and then disposed of through public auction,” but she said “disposed of” is an industry term and does not mean “killed.”
On Aug. 31, after Mack broke with the Wild Horse Transition Team, Hughes posted to Facebook a diagram of the difference between a human and equine brain. (The post is set to private and cannot be shared.) In a comment underneath the post, she wrote, “The prefrontal cortex in a horse is underdeveloped. This reduces the ability for them to have the same emotions as humans.”
Ask by New Times to explain the intent of the post, Hughes suggested that opponents of removing the horses are projecting their feelings onto animals that don’t have them. “It is in fact us humans that give them emotions,” she said. She thinks the public, spurred by advocates like Netherlands, have become emotionally attached to the herd, hindering a streamlined and necessary removal process.
“It's about reducing the emotion with education,” she said. “And I have been asked why I would break up a horse family. It's not a ‘family.’ It's a ‘band,’ which changes all the time.”
