An advocate for wild horses is decrying a House committee amendment as providing a ‘license to kill” tens of thousands of the animals, while a representative of two local conservation districts says it’s necessary to curb excess numbers of the animals on Western rangeland.
An amendment the House Appropriations Committee recently approved before passing a 2018 budget for the Interior Department removed language continuing a longstanding prohibition against the destruction of healthy, unadopted wild horses and burros by the Bureau of Land Management. It retains a restriction against their sale for slaughter and processing into commercial products, and clarifies that those products include ones consumed by humans.
If the revised language is approved by the full House and by the Senate and becomes law, “the BLM would now have license to kill as many as 90,000 horses so long as it’s for noncommercial purposes,” said Suzanne Roy, executive director of The American Wild Horse Campaign.
Callie Hendrickson, executive director of the White River and Douglas Creek conservation districts in Rio Blanco County, said the move is fully warranted.
“The bottom line is we have pushing 100,000 excess horses and we have to do something,” she said.
The Trump administration has asked Congress to remove the limits on destroying healthy, unadopted animals or selling them for slaughtering and processing for commercial products. That’s in keeping with a recommendation made last year by the BLM’s National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board.
Hendrickson said public lands will support 27,000 of the animals, but there are 72,000 out there not counting this year’s new foals, as well as another 47,000 in holding facilities, which costs taxpayers $50 million a year for feed and care. Every year, another 15,000 wild horses are being born, she said.
“I appreciate Congress being willing to have this conversation and start looking at the facts and talking about what are we going to do about curbing this population,” she said.
U.S. Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, introduced the amendment, and said in a prepared statement that in his congressional district wild horses are significantly impacting rangeland and in many instances starving to death.
“We crafted this amendment as a compromise position to ensure the humane treatment of these animals and to ensure that the prohibitions against slaughter and human consumption remain in effect,” he said.
Roy said there’s no evidence of horses starving to death, and the BLM needs to make far greater use of fertility control treatments in herds, as has been successfully demonstrated in Colorado.
She said the House amendment would allow actions such as aerial gunning of horse herds. She thinks it’s intended to mislead the public by saying horses won’t be sold for slaughter, even though they still would be able to be killed in large numbers.
“That is slaughter. It’s just not for commercial purposes,” she said.
This fall, the BLM hopes to gather and remove up to 72 horses that are roaming outside its Piceance-East Douglas Herd Management Area southeast of Rangely. Roy said she expects more public opposition to such roundups as the full implications of Stewart’s amendment are understood.
