Wild Horses Face Potential Slaughter or Euthanasia Under Trump Budget

The Trump administration's 2018 budget proposal has sparked significant controversy by suggesting the use of euthanasia and unrestricted sales to manage the growing wild horse population. This proposal has drawn criticism from conservation groups who argue it threatens the iconic symbols of the American West.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) spends about $50 million annually to house and feed more than46,000wild horses and burros in corrals. Another 73,000 roam freely across western states, producing foals and grazing onpublic landsthat conservation groups claim are deteriorating.

President Trump's fiscal 2018 budget suggests a solution: using “humane euthanasia and unrestricted sale of certain excess animals.” This change could lead to sales of wild horses to slaughterhouses in Mexico or Canada, as well as herd culling, addressing whatthe bureau calls an “unsustainable”situation. However, it has been condemned by horse and animaladvocacygroups, some of which have resisted efforts to impose limits on these federally protected animals since 1971.

The Trump proposal notes that theBLM’s wild horse and burro budget has quadrupled since 2000, from $20.4 million then to $80.4 million in 2017, with most funds going to care for animals in taxpayer-funded corrals. The proposed budget anticipates saving $10 million annually by selling some animals and reducingroundupsand birth-control programs.

The use of euthanasia and sales to manage the population is not new: The 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act permits the interior secretary to remove older and unadoptable animals by those methods. However,Congresshas used annual appropriations bill riders to prohibit the killing of healthy animals or “sale that results in their destruction for processing into commercial products.” An aide on the House Appropriations Committee said the request would be considered.

Although the last U.S. horse slaughterhouse closed in 2007, meat processing plants in Mexico and Canada slaughtertens of thousands of domestic American horseseach year for export to Europe and Asia. Despite the congressional ban, some wild horses sold to private buyers have been slaughtered. In November 2015, federal investigators found that a Colorado rancher sold 1,794mustangsto slaughterhouses in Mexico.

As wild horses and burros, which have no natural predators, have increased in numbers, officials and conservation groups say they have depleted forage food and water available to native species in the West, increasing the risk of starvation and thirst among these herds and wild animals onpublic lands.

Wild horse advocates counter that the bureau is pandering to ranchers who view the horses as competition on public range land also used for cattle grazing.

Meanwhile, adoptions by the public — the bureau’s primary program for reducing the population in government corrals — have not increased with the population. Last year, 2,912 wild horses and burros were adopted, up from 2,583 in 2012,according to agency figures.

The budget proposal comes eight months after the bureau’s wild horse and burro advisory board, a volunteer body that makes no binding decisions,sparked an uproar among wild horse advocatesby recommending euthanasia or sales for the animals. Subsequent false reports about a looming government plan to kill 45,000 wild horses prompted theBLM, then under the Obama administration, to say it “does not and will not euthanize healthy animals.”

Some board members said their recommendation was made, in part, to shockCongressinto addressing a problem they believe is spiraling out of control.

The question of how to address the problem appeared on Interior SecretaryRyan Zinke’s radar not long after he was confirmed. According to his personal schedule, he held a video call on the topic on March 24 with theBLM’s acting director, Michael Nedd, and several other senior officials.

For more than 40 years, past administrations have tried but failed to control the animals’ numbers. In 2009, then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazarproposedthat the U.S. government spend roughly $96 million to buy land in the Midwest and East to create two preserves that could each support 3,600 horses. He also suggested that federal officials partner with nonprofit organizations and other private groups to create five additional preserves, so that 25,000 animals would be living on preserves within five years. The government also would aggressively sterilize the horses and burros to keep them from reproducing.

At the time of Salazar’s proposal, about 37,000 horses and burros were roaming and another 32,000 were in holding pens. But the money did not materialize, and the number of animals on public range lands increased sharply. It now is about three times more than officials say is sustainable.

Some animaladvocacygroups say theBLMhas not proactively pursued horse and burro birth control, though other activist groups have sued the agency over the use of injectable contraception and the spaying of mares. In a statement this week, Matt Bershadker, president and chief executive of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said the animals could be “humanely” managed with fertility control, but theBLM“would rather make these innocent animals pay for draconian budget cuts with their very lives.”

Weikel said she hopes Trump’s budget proposal promptsCongressto consider lifting its usual rider. Considering the proposal, along with the advisory board’s recommendation, “maybe thoughtful people…would realize we have a true problem out there. And we are not using all the tools.” In addition to euthanasia and sales, she said, permanent sterilization should be utilized more.

In a statement, theBLMsaid its goal “is always to find good homes for the thousands of wild horses and burros gathered from overpopulated herds on our country’spublic lands.” It continued, “With an expanded suite of management tools, theBLMcan strengthen its efforts to reverse the declining health of our nation’s wild horse and burro herds and manage the public lands on which they and so many other species depend.”

Originally posted by The Washington Post