BLM Opens the Door to Slaughtering Wild Horses Even Wider

By Carol J. Walker

On January 12, The Bureau of Land Management issued a press release touting offering an increased ability to purchase wild horses through its sales program. Now, for only $25 each member of the public can purchase up to 4 horses every six months, and “the BLM also offers and application process to purchase groups larger than 4.”

This ability for group sales has been severely limited since 2013 when the story about Tom Davis broke, where he bought 1700 horses over three years and was unable to provide any proof that he had “provided humane care,” and those horses had gone to slaughter.

In 2004 Senator Conrad Burns slipped the Burns Amendment into the Appropriations Bill, which calls for the sale of wild horses “without limitation” for those over 10 years old and for those horses who had been offered for sale 3 times without being adopted.

The whole point of the wild horse adoption program was to protect the wild horses under the BLM’s care. Each adopter had to keep the horse until a a year had passed and was supposedly inspected to ensure the horse was being cared for properly before the adopter received title. This was a way to get the horse titled immediately so it could potentially go to auction and be purchased for sale to slaughter.

In 2019, the Adoption Incentive Program was started wherein the buyer of a wild horse would receive $1000 per horse. In 2024 a judge ruled against the BLM and the program was ended after thousands of wild horses had been sent to slaughter by abusers of this program who used it to pad their pockets. https://www.wildhoofbeats.com/blog/a-win-for-wild-horses-cash-incentive-for-adoption-overturned-in-federal-court

Now by opening the slaes of wild horses back up top group sales, this is a way for the BLM to start to empty the corrals. They have not renewed the prison program contracts, moving the number horses in privately held facilities with no public access higher and higher. They cannot outright slaughter the horses because Congress just passed the Interior Appropriations Bill that precludes this, so the way around this restriction, the way to conform to Project 2025’s mandate to get rid of the 63,000 wild horses in holding is to open up these “group sales.”

https://www.wildhoofbeats.com/podcast/project-2025-wild-horses-debbie-coffey

BLM has in 2018 explored the options of transporting wild horses to Russia for use as food in tiger sanctuaries, transporting them to Guyana and other countries, also likely to end up as food, and with no ability for any oversight by our government once the horses had been sold.

BLM relinquishes any control or say in how the wild horses are treated once they are sold.

The Adoption program still exists for horses under 10 years old but another work around for the BLM is to offer more and more wild horses, over a thousand at a time, in the Online Adoptions. Each time a horse appears and is not adopted is a “strike” against them, and after 3 strikes even the youngest of horses is eligible to be sold outright.

Wild horses and burros need to be protected from these plans to empty the corrals, likely just to make room to fill them again with rounding up the wild horses that are still free. Instead of managing our wild horses on the range where they belong with research and humane management, the push is toward removal and disposal, driven by livestock, mining and other interests in our public lands.

What can you do to help? Tell your Senators and Representatives that you want the BLM to withdraw this change in policy and that you want added protections to the Wild Horse and Burro Program to add federal monitoring requirements, follow up inspections and most importantly, welfare protections for our wild horses and burros.