A Congressional committee vote on Tuesday amounts to a death warrant for the mustangs and wild burros that roam America’s range land, an advocate for the animals said.
The House Appropriations Committee voted to reverse a ban on destroying healthy wild horses and burros that was contained in a spending bill signed into law by President Trump in early May.
“Let’s be clear: House Appropriations Committee members just signed a death warrant for America’s mustangs and it will lead to the wholesale destruction of these irreplaceable national treasures,” said Suzanne Roy, director of the American Wild Horse Campaign in a news release.
If it becomes law, the amendment would allow the Bureau of Land Management to kill horses and burros deemed unadoptable as long as the animals aren’t used for commercial purposes including human consumption.
“It’s being spun as ‘euthanasia’ but it’s really license to kill tens of thousands of healthy wild horses and burros,” Roy said.
The BLM, which oversees the National Wild Horse and Burro Program, wanted the ban lifted to control populations of the horses. “This request comes out of the desire to do well by the horses,” said Jason Lutterman, a BLM spokesman.
The population of wild horses and burros continue to outstrip the resources available for them, he added. “It’s a growing problem on the range and BLM doesn’t have the tools to manage that population effectively.”
But Roy said ranchers view horses as competition to their livestock on grazing land the animals share.
“They want to turn back the clock … to when they could just round them up and cart them off.”
Wild horses share only a small amount of their grazing land with cattle, Roy said, but ranchers “want the whole pie.”
Last week, the appropriations committee voted to overturn a ban that blocked the Agriculture Department from providing inspectors at meat plants that slaughter horses.
In 2007 the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled it is illegal for horse slaughterhouses to pay the U.S. Department of Agriculture to perform health inspections,which ended the plants in the U.S. The lack of funding for federal horse meat inspections has kept horse slaughter operations from reopening.
“The two changes would reopen American slaughterhouses and could eventually lead to wild horses being sent to them. Right now, they could be killed en masse by the BLM or a contractor, so long as it’s for non-commercial purposes,” Roy said..
Senators Tom Udall, D-N.M., and Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., are expected to introduce an amendment to restore the ban on funding for USDA inspections of horse slaughter plants, Roy said.
The Associated Press contributed information for this report.
