WASHINGTON – A congressional committee Tuesday night authorized the “humane euthanization” — some called it “extermination” — of what many acknowledge is a large and unsustainable population of wild horses and burros on public land in the West.
After debating the merits and flaws in plans to adopt or find ways to limit the population of an estimated 67,000 wild horses through contraceptive darting, the House Appropriations Committee voted to remove language from the Interior Department’s budget that would have prohibited “the destruction of healthy, unadopted wild horses and burros in the care of” the Bureau of Land Management or its contractors. It passed by voice vote.
The action follows a close roll call vote last week by the same committee to end the prohibition on the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection of horse meat.
The author of the euthanization amendment, Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, stressed that it did not make the horses available for sales that would result in their “processing as commercial products, including for human consumption.”
“The bottom line is this: these horses are starving. They’re destroying the range. They’re crowding out the deer and the elk because we cannot manage them,” Stewart said.
Wild horse enthusiasts and animal rights advocates denounced the measure.
“Let’s be clear: the House Appropriations Committee members just signed a death warrant for America’s mustangs and it will lead to the wholesale slaughter of these irreplaceable national treasures,” said Suzanne Roy, executive director of the American Wild Horse Campaign. “The Stewart amendment is a mass slaughter amendment, and its proponents are trying to hide that fact from the American public.”
The debate on the measure took place almost eight hours into a hearing, and most members elected not to talk about it.
“First let me say I hate this issue and I think everybody here hates this issue,” said Rep. Mark E. Amodei, R-Nevada, who supported the amendment. “The reality is we have a problem. We have to face it and we have to deal with it.”
“You think you’re being kind to horses? You’re not. Letting them starve out on the range?” Amodei asked opponents during the 17-minute debate. “Nobody’s adopting these things — these horses. Not very many people anyway.”
He added: “There is no silver bullet – well, maybe that’s the wrong term to use. There is no one thing that’s going to fix this.”
Only about 2,500 wild horses and burros are adopted each year, Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., noted. He said he supported the amendment “with a heavy heart.”
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said better efforts using contraceptives to limit horse populations should be adopted.
“It’s as simple as this: Americans overwhelmingly oppose the extermination of wild horses, which is what this amendment would allow,” Wasserman Schultz said. She said the BLM has stopped spending on horse contraceptives.
The population of horses on the Out Banks of North Carolina is successfully limited using a fertility drug called PZP, North Carolina Democrat David Price noted. He said his constituents are overwhelmingly in favor of finding “some alternative to the kind of extermination that’s proposed here tonight.”
Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, asked Stewart to respond to a scientific journal’s recommendation for limiting wild horse fertility that she said would reduce populations by 1,000 a year. Stewart noted that efforts with contraceptives have been tried for 30 years and “it simply isn’t practical.”
Stewart began the debate on his amendment by telling of his time in survival school, eating slugs and worms and even a rabbit’s eyeball.
“I would never eat horse meat,” he said. “I feel the same way about horses that most of us feel about our pets, like cats and dogs: I view them as companions, not as a source of food.”
President Donald Trump's proposed 2018 budget cuts funding to the wild horse management program and would drop rules preventing BLM from selling captured wild horses to slaughterhouses.
