The objective of the regulations was to provide criteria and procedures for protecting, managing, and controling wild horses and burros as a "recognized component" of the public land environment. This meant that wild horses and burros now had a legal right to live on the public lands.The horses and burros would share this right with native wildlife such as deer and privately owned domestic cattle, whose owners leased the public lands from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service. Horses and burros on Department of Defense or National Park Service lands are not protected by the law.

The law gave the responsibility for the management and protection of these animals to the U.S. Department of the Interior to be administered by the BLM and to the Department of Agriculture to be administered by the Forest Service.

With the passage of the law, horses and burros could not be removed for commercial or private use, and it also confined them to specific areas. These areas were later to be called Herd Management Areas (HMAs) by the BLM. The law stated that where the horses and burros exsisted in 1971 they would be allowed to live as a recognized component of the ecosystem. Unfortunately, some of the areas where the horses and burros were living were never "surveyed" as was required by the law, others were not surveyed until years after the studies to determine where the wild horses and burros lived were completed. Although 303 seperate and distinct areas areas were home to the wild horses and burros, only 186 were later declared as HMAs.

As the populations of the confined animals grew, many horses and burros began to face starvation and water deprivation when they could no longer follow their normal seasonal migratory patterns out of the HMAs. Neither the wild horse and burro populations nor the number of domestic cattle on public lands within the HMAs were adjusted to prevent the environmental stress put on the ecosystem by the legal confinement of the horses and burros to specific HMAs. Clearly something had to be done to prevent the death of the now excess population.