Burro-like animals inhabited North America more than 60 million years ago though they became extinct about 11,000 years ago. Fossil history clearly documents that equids developed here in North America. The entire Equus species, which includes horses, donkeys, and zebras, evolved on this continent along with the grasslands.  The first equid, Eohippus, appeared in the Eocene Epoch 54-34 million years ago and was a small forest animal suited to the marshy environment of the time. Thousands of complete, fossilized skeletons of these animals have been found in the Eocene layers in North America, primarily in the Wind River basin of Wyoming. 

 

The direct ancestors of the wild burros that live here today evolved in the deserts of North Africa and Asia. The Spanish explorers brought them to the US in the 16th century to be put to work. During the 19th century, European immigrants who came west depended heavily on these rugged, loyal creatures to mine the land for gold and other precious metals and minerals. These animals worked tirelessly to carry supplies, ore, water, and machinery to mining camps and became indispensable to the workers. At the end of the mining boom, many of them escaped or were turned loose, and with their innate ability to survive under the harshest conditions, wild herds eventually formed and flourished.

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Since then, the wild burros have thrived, which is partly due to their adaptability to arid regions. They can go long periods without water, and will eat scrub that no other animal will touch, including creosote bush, paloverde, salt grass and the thorny sagebrush.

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Around the 1950s wild horses and burros became the targets of ruthless ranchers who saw these animals as a threat to the vegetation available for their domestic livestock. Consequently, they were relentlessly hunted, brutally treated, and often sold for slaughter.

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In 1971, thanks to public outcry and a successful grassroots campaign to end these practices, Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Wild Horses and Burros Act which designated the wild burros and horses as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” and protected them on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Forest Service land in ten western states. Soon after, the BLM developed a misguided “management” method which, to this day, still primarily relies on inhumane roundups and removals of these animals from their homes on the range.

When the Interior Department's BLM conducted its first wild horse and burro census in 1974, an estimated 15,000 wild burros roamed the West. (Remember, this was a time that Congress declared burros to be "fast disappearing from the American West.) Today fewer than 9,000 burros remain. Like their cousins the wild horses, burros in the Western United States have been rounded up en masse, often to make room for livestock grazing, big game hunting and other commercial uses of our public lands. (Burros do not compete with cattle for forage, though they do have dietary preferences that overlap with sheep, including bighorn sheep.)

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Unfortunately, wild burros on National Park Service (NPS) land are not protected under federal law and they have been subjected to extermination efforts in NPS areas such as the Grand Canyon and Death Valley.