Cecil the lion mattered, do the Salt River wild horses?

If you're really lucky, every once in a while you can catch sight of them along the Salt River.

Horses so wild and wonderful that they look as if they belong there. In fact, they just might.

According to the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group, the horses have been there for hundreds of years, brought to the area by Father Eusebio Francisco Kino in the 1600s.

If you're lucky, you might catch a glimpse of them.

"It's an absolutely life changing moment when you connect with wild horses on the river," Simone Netherlands, president of the non-profit, told me. "This is a herd that's so popular because people come from different countries. They come from all over to see this herd because they are so tolerant and accepting of people. They will let you right into their lives and everyone that I take out on the river still tells me today that that was the best day of their lives."

A day that soon might not be possible.

EDITORIAL: Forest Service aims at horses, shoots self in foot

MONTINI: Group fighting to save wild horses in Salt River

The U.S. Forest Service has announced plans to round up the wild horses along the Salt River. It seems forest officials don't see beauty or history or any sort of magnificence when they look at these animals.

They see "unauthorized livestock", horses who they say have wandered off ranches. A nuisance. A safety hazard. And so they must go.

On Friday, the Tonto National Forest officials posted a notice saying the horses will be rounded up and removed "on or after 8/07/2015, unless said livestock is permanently removed from the above described lands."

Then they'll be put up for auction.

"It just boils down to a safety concern for the Forest Service. We have horses out there on Forest Service land and we have no authority to manage horses and this is how they're proceeding to remedy the safety issue," Chandler Mundy, a spokesman for the Tonto National Forest, told ABC15.

Mundy hasn't yet returned my call to explain this dire safety hazard that requires giving these horses the old heave ho -- or worse.

According to the public notice: "Livestock not sold at public sale may be sold at private sale or condemned and destroyed, or otherwise disposed of as provided by Regulations 36 CFR 262.10(f).".

Netherlands and her group, which has been monitoring and studying the herd for 17 years, are trying to stop that.

“There will be kill buyers at that auction, so we will have to bid against kill buyers and if we can’t do it, then they’re going to end up in slaughter,” she said.

“This is really a point in time where we either are going to change the course of history and have some wild horses left for future generations or we’re going to rob future generations of this treasure that we have here in Arizona.”

Where there once were a half a million wild horses on public lands in Arizona, Netherlands says fewer than 500 remain.

The world still fumes over the fate of Cecil the lion. Will it fume as well for a herd of 100 or so horses that roam what's left of the once-wild west?