FILE - In this July 18, 2018, file photo, a wild horse jumps among others on Bureau of Land Management land near Salt Lake City. A Senate panel has approved $35M for a new wild horse initiative backed by animal welfare groups and the livestock industry but condemned by the largest mustang protection coalition that says it would put the free-roaming animals on a path to extinction. In a lifetime of working with horses, Gary Kidd, 73, had never adopted an untrained wild mustang before.
But records show that instead of going to good homes, truckloads of horses were dumped at slaughter auctions as soon as their adopters got the federal money. A program intended to protect wild horses was instead subsidizing their path to destruction. Wild horses once roamed North America in the millions, but as the open range disappeared in the early 20th century, they were nearly all hunted down and turned into fertilizer and dog food. When they were finally protected in 1971, there were fewer than 20,000 left.
“It’s completely unsustainable,” said Terry Messmer, a professor of wildlife resources at Utah State University who has studied the program history. “I don’t think anyone who passed this law would be happy with how things turned out 50 years later.”Bureau leaders have repeatedly proposed culling the storage herds, but they have always been blocked by lawmakers mindful that a vast majority of voters do not want symbols of their heritage turned into cuts of meat.
“Those people weren’t there because they cared about the horses,” Walker said. “They were there because they cared about the money.” Even so, records show several instances where families like the Kidds banded together to get more than four horses. And numerous mustangs bearing the distinctive government brand began showing up at slaughter auctions after the one-year wait was up.
The papers show that many adopters who quickly resell live in stretches of the Great Plains where pasture is cheap and people often derive a living from several sources. These adopters often took the maximum number of horses and sent them to auction soon after their final government payments cleared.
Getting mustangs out of storage is critical for the bureau because its wild-horse program is in a crisis. The cost of storing horses has cannibalized the helicopter budget, and roundups can no longer keep pace with growing herds. There are now about 100,000 wild horses in the West — triple what the bureau says the land can support. If left unchecked, in another decade they could number 500,000.
amylecza
Barbaric.
Should be a criminal offense.
Terrible.
rhcm123 This is business as usual - remember HAMP? Same strategy - banks got federal funding to process HAMP applications, 'lost' the packages repeatedly and foreclosed ASAP. Bank of America also had a lock on escrow accounts that prevented HAMP applicants from rec'ing escrow overages.
Jesus fuck.
This is atrocious.