With its decisive vote on Thursday to block a law that gave the Bureau of Land Management the ability to commercially sell wild mustangs and burros, the U.S. House of Representatives essentially told the federal agency what parents have told teenagers for generations: Hold your horses.
The House overwhelmingly approved, 249 to 159, an amendment sponsored by Nick Rahall (D-WV) and Ed Whitfield (R-KY) that prohibits the BLM from using any of its budget to sell wild horses and burros to commercial interests, who can then resell the animals to slaughterhouses. Last December, the BLM was allowed to start selling horses older than 10 years, or those not adopted after three attempts, when Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT) quietly slipped an amendment into an omnibus spending bill without any discussion, unceremoniously undercutting the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Protection Act of 1971.
The legislative battle will now move to the Senate, which does not yet have a similar amendment to consider. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) has introduced S. 576, which would prohibit the commercial sale and slaughter of wild free-roaming horses and burros, but animal advocates are hopeful that the Senate may yet debate an amendment similar to the one sponsored by Rahall and Whitfield.
Congress can’t act quickly enough. On the same day that the House voted to protect these symbols of the American west from slaughter, the BLM resumed the commercial sale of wild horses. The Interior Department, which includes the BLM, had halted the sale of these animals last month when 41 mustangs were sent to an Illinois slaughterhouse, which killed the horses for human consumption in overseas markets. Interior officials had halted sales pending a legal review as well as a review of procedures.
In resuming sales, the BLM says that commercial buyers will now sign a statement in which the new owners promise not only to treat the horses humanely, but also not to knowingly sell the animals to anyone who intends to slaughter them. Those in violation of the agreement would reportedly be subject to criminal penalties, including fines up to $250,000 and imprisonment up to five years.
According to The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, the BLM also claims to be negotiating with the three U.S. slaughterhouses that process horse meat for overseas meat markets. The newspaper reported that, under Memorandums of Understanding with the BLM, the slaughterhouses would agree not to buy government horses. The newspaper contacted officials at two of those slaughterhouses, and neither had yet been contacted by the federal agency.
“While the BLM’s new procedures sound good in theory, the new contract language appears to be even weaker than the language used for adoptions. We strongly suspect that enforcement by BLM will not only be lax, but nearly impossible given the ambiguity of this new language,” says Nancy Perry, vice president of Government Affairs for The HSUS. “Even if the BLM were able to obtain a commitment from the U.S. slaughterhouses to prohibit the processing of wild horses, killer buyers could easily take animals across the border to Canada or Mexico and turn a handsome profit. The fact is, the right to commercially sell horses is essentially a license to slaughter them. We need to restore the protections that these animals have enjoyed since 1971.”
The BLM has instituted extremely aggressive round-up schedules, removing so many horses from the range as to overwhelm its adoption program. The agency already has between 22,000 and 24,000 animals in its holding facilities, a swelling number of horses that the BLM has rounded up with helicopters, but can’t seem to adopt out through its under-funded program. Ranchers want the BLM to move those horses out of holding facilities so that the agency can round up even more free-roaming mustangs, which would then clear public lands for the ranchers’ livestock.
There are approximately 31,000 wild horses on U.S. lands at the moment, a 50% reduction from when Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act and recorded 60,000 horses in the first census in 1974. At that time, Congress declared that the mustangs were “fast disappearing from the American scene.”
“Despite the 1971 law designed protect wild horses and burros from sale and slaughter—a law incidentally that the BLM is required to implement—the whole federal bureaucracy appears to cater to big-money ranchers, not these horses whom Americans cherish as symbols of their rough-and-tumble past,” says Michael Markarian, executive vice president of External Affairs for The HSUS. “We need to shift the focus back to the spirit and letter of the 1971 law.”
The Big Mo
Congressional offices tell The HSUS that they were flooded with calls and emails in the days leading up to the House’s vote on May 19. That kind of public outcry is reminiscent of the volume of mail and calls that Congress received in 1971 as it considered the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Protection Act—which at the time was second only to the correspondence about the Vietnam War—and was enough to get the attention of House members, who responded in kind.
The lopsided victory in the House bodes well for the legislative battle looming in the Senate. “The House victory clearly gives us momentum as we move to the Senate,” says The HSUS’s Perry. “House members overwhelmingly sided with Americans who prefer to protect a living, breathing link to their history. Senators will be faced with the same choice, and we hope they will make the same logical decision.”
Despite the momentum, Senator Burns, author of the amendment that stripped protections for wild horses and burros in December, has pledged a pitched battle over a Rahall-Whitfield-style amendment in the Senate. The chairman of the Senate Appropriations Interior Subcommittee said on May 19 that if such an amendment reaches the Senate, he plans to "throw it out." "I'm in the livestock business, and I've bought and sold horses all my life," Burns said. "Basically, the marketplace works."
When the Senate battle heats up, The HSUS again will contact its constituents with the goal of urging Congress to side with wild horses. But until that time, you can take other actions: You can contact your federal legislators about a trio of horse slaughter bills. The first pair, H.R. 297 (introduced by Representatives Rahall and Whitfield) and S. 576 (introduced by Senator Byrd)—collectively known as the Wild Horse Act—would outlaw the commercial sale of our wild horses and burros. The third, the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act—H.R. 503, introduced by John Sweeney (R-NY), John Spratt (D-SC) and Whitfield—would ban the transport, possession, purchase or sale of horses to be slaughtered for human consumption. (Incidentally, Senators John Ensign (R-NV) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) are expected to introduce a companion bill to H.R. 503.)
Finally, you can contact your Representative about his or her vote on the Rahall-Whitfield amendment. You can click here to find out how your Representative voted. If your Representative voted "Aye," please thank him or her for protecting wild horses, and if your Representative voted "No," please let him or her know how disappointed you are. You can click here to look up your Representative and his or her phone number.
