Inequalities are evident in most pastoral societies as owners with large herds are better able to maximize by grazing all available lands when conditions allow and hiring additional help with herding tasks like shearing and butchering. Furthermore, large herds can reproduce more quickly, are better able to survive hardship, and better maintain a minimum herd size threshold for viability. Nevertheless, pastoral wealth is widely recognized as unstable due to the overall vulnerability to drought, disease, parasites, predators, theft, and accidents that can cause declines of over 50% in a given year (Khazanov 1984: 156;Kuznar 1995;Nielsen 2000: 42;Salzman 1999). Herders mitigate this risk by diversifying production, maintaining extensive exchange networks, holding access to grazing land in common, and utilizing other institutional means of risk reduction, such as the redistribution mechanism of suñay among Andean pastoralists (Flannery, et al. 1989).

A significant pastoral institution that appears to function as a leveling mechanism is the corporate ownership of pasture. While herds are typically held by individuals or kin-groups, herding is spatially extensive rather than intensive, and access to pasture in herding societies almost universally requires community negotiation (Ingold 1980;Khazanov 1984;Nielsen 2000: 46-51). Among pastoral societies that do not store fodder the carrying capacity of the land, and therefore the intensifiability of production, is limited by the season with the lowest productivity (Nielsen 2000: 43). Finally, in some regions of the world, such as the Andes, modern herds are bilaterally inherited which serves to prevent accumulation in specific descent groups (Lambert 1977;Webster 1973: 123). Thus, herding does not organizationally contain the seeds for social inequality, but intensified pastoral wealth in the form of very large herds has been documented as one principal form of investment in ethnohistorically known hierarchical societies in herding regions.