CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — If you ever wished to gaze at a stomping, snorting, neighing panorama of Western heritage from your living-room window, now could be your chance.

A classic image of the American West — wild horses stampeding across the landscape — not only has endured through the years but has multiplied past the point of range damage. Through May 3, the U.S. government is seeking more private pastures for an overpopulation of wild horses.

Many consider rounding up wild horses to live out their lives on private pastures a reasonable approach to a tricky problem. Wild horses, after all, not only have romantic value, they are protected by federal law.

Just keep in mind a few of the dozens of requirements for getting paid by the government to provide wild horses a home.

“It’s not like you can do this in your backyard, or even a 5 acre plot,” said Debbie Collins, outreach specialist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program in Norman, Oklahoma.

You need a lot of fenced-in land, enough to sustain anywhere from 200 to 5,000 healthy horses. Exactly how much land depends on pasture quality as determined by the government, but you can safely assume several hundred if not thousands of acres (hectares).

The pastured horses typically are left on their own with little human intervention. Still, they require continuous water and basic shelter from the elements, such as trees or a canyon; supplemental forage; and corrals for loading and unloading from trailers.

Participants in the private-pasture system must live in 14 Western and Midwestern states, from eastern Washington to the Texas Panhandle. Over two-thirds of the 37 existing off-range pastures are in Oklahoma and Kansas.

And: These horses aren’t pets. They’ve had little exposure to people. Many are over 5 years old and therefore not ideal for training and individual adoption or sale, other options available through the BLM.

Still, there’s no shortage of interest in the off-range pasture program. People call all the time asking for details, Collins said.

“My only advice would be to go into it with your eyes wide open,” said Dwayne Oldham, a former Wyoming state veterinarian who has taken in wild horses on his family’s Double D cattle ranch outside Lander, Wyoming, since 2015.

Working with the government can be demanding, but providing for the over 130 horses on the Wind River Wild Horse Sanctuary on the ranch isn’t too difficult, Oldham said.

The sanctuary is a little different from most private wild-horse pastures: It’s open to the public. Tourists headed to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks increasingly stop there.

About 50 miles (80 kilometers) to the south, cattle ranchers, wild horse advocates and the BLM have been embroiled in decades of lawsuits over wild horses in an area of mostly unfenced, interspersed public and private lands called the Checkerboard. The booming wild horse population there competes with cattle for forage and water in the high desert, the ranchers claim.

The BLM abides by the 1971 Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, which protects wild horses and burros on BLM land in 10 Western states, attorneys for the government say.

“We want to be part of the solution and not just the adversary,” Oldham said.

A group often involved in wild-horse litigation, the American Wild Horse Campaign, says darting mares with contraceptives is the best answer to overpopulation but is underused. Roundups only encourage compensatory breeding and overpopulation, said Grace Kuhn with the group.

However, the group doesn’t oppose off-range pastures as an alternative to keeping wild horses in corrals for long periods.

“We do advocate that if the government is going to be removing wild horses from the range, long-term is more cost-effective than short-term holding,” Kuhn said.

Over 55,000 more horses and burros live wild in the West than the roughly 27,000 the BLM says can thrive in harmony with the landscape.

Adoptions and sales through the Wild Horse and Burro Program have recovered to over 3,400 a year after hitting a low of about 1,800 in 2014.

But while the number of off-range pastures has boomed from just a couple in the 1990s, the number of horses on them hovers very close to their current carrying capacity of about 36,500.

The number of pastured wild horses is determined mainly through roundups and adoptions. Stallions are gelded and kept at different off-range pastures than mares, preventing reproduction aside from the occasional pregnant mare rounded up from the wild.

How many new off-range pastures are established through the latest bid solicitation, the first of its kind since 2016, will depend on costs and how many existing ones get renewed, Collins said.

“It’s just a happier, healthier environment for a horse to be able to be out in a pasture,” she said.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Just over half of surveyed students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said they want red balloons to keep soaring over Memorial Stadium after touchdowns, despite protests about the environmental impact.

Almost 52 percent of the roughly 3,800 students surveyed indicated they wanted to keep the tradition alive, the Lincoln Journal Star reported. Almost 43 percent argued the practice should end, while 6 percent said they didn’t care.

The tradition to launch balloons after the football team’s first touchdown began in the 1940s. The university now uses thousands of biodegradable balloons tied with cotton string to minimize the environmental impact.

Sophomore Brittni McGuire is president of Sustain UNL, a student-led environmental sustainability organization that led an education campaign about the balloon issue.

McGuire said the balloons still take years to decompose and are a threat to wildlife.

“If we take away the balloons, we’ll still be celebrating touchdowns,” she said. “We don’t change the game, but we do save the water and the wildlife.”

McGuire said the survey was part of a broader conversation about what students can do to address issues about the environment and climate change.

“We’ve grown up with the science, and we see it as a huge threat and something we have to deal with,” she said. “My generation is thinking more about the future and the impact of our decisions now.”

McGuire said that although students seemed in favor of the balloon tradition, two-thirds of survey respondents indicated a desire to ban plastic bags from campus vendors.

There have been other attempts to end the tradition, including a billboard campaign last year launched by Balloons Blow, a Florida nonprofit, which equated the tradition to littering. An Omaha man in 2016 sued the university to stop the balloon release.

NORTH PLATTE, Neb. – One hundred and twenty mule deer does are wearing GPS monitoring devices for the second year of a research study designed to aid in the management of mule deer populations in high- and low-density areas of Nebraska.

A crew of about 15 people, consisting of graduate students, faculty, and collaborators from the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), along with Nebraska Game and Parks Commission (NGPC) staff, equipped the deer with monitoring devices after a helicopter capture crew caught them in four study areas last week; two in the northwest and two in the southwest.

The GPS devices will allow for remote monitoring via satellite and provide valuable data on movements and habitat use while still allowing researchers to locate the deer on the ground to investigate possible mortalities and other important events.

The study is being conducted by UNL professor Dr. John Benson and his team including crew leader Emma Kring. Data from this study will help determine survival rates and factors influencing mortality, habitat use, home range size and movements of adult female and fawn mule deer.

“Our research in southwest and northwest Nebraska is an amazing opportunity to obtain intensive data on mule deer in areas in close proximity at different densities and experiencing different environmental conditions,” said Benson. “This information will allow us to understand the population dynamics and habitat relationships that result in these different densities, which will have important implications for management of mule deer in Nebraska and should contribute broadly to understanding factors that limit mule deer populations across their range.”

Once captured, the mule deer does underwent DNA sampling, blood draws, weighing and other measurements; an ultrasound was used to determine body condition and whether the does were pregnant. The does will be closely monitored this spring and early summer so newborn fawns can be captured and collared soon after they are born.

Lance Hastings, southwest district manager-wildlife division with the Commission said the capture project and other research could not happen without the support of landowners who provide access for the captures and monitoring.

Video of the mule deer capture is available on the NGPC YouTube channel.

Video of the mule deer capture is available for download via Dropbox.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) – A prison inmate has been given more time behind bars for attacking two prison employees nearly a year ago at the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln.

Lancaster County District Court records say 21-year-old Jordan Baker was sentenced Thursday to four to six years. He’d pleaded no contest to one assault charge after prosecutors dropped the second. The records don’t contain details about what happened.

Baker has been serving consecutive sentences of 10 to 20 years for assault and five to 10 years for using a weapon in a Lincoln County case. Court records say he used a kitchen knife in July 2013 to attack two staffers at Nebraska Youth Center in North Platte. He was 16 at the time.