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Thousands of horses could be sold to slaughter under new law
By BILL McKEOWN THE GAZETTE
Thousands of wild horses in the West could be sold to slaughter under a provision of the 2005 budget bill President Bush is expected to sign in the coming days.
The provision would allow the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, to sell to the highest bidder any mustang over 10 years old or any horse that has been unsuccessfully offered for adoption three times.
That could allow the immediate sale – and potential slaughter – of many of the more than 14,000 older horses now living on seven BLM-funded sanctuaries.
Most horse meat rendered in the United States is exported to Europe, especially France and Belgium, for human consumption.
The provision allowing the sale of the mustangs was added to the Interior Department’s portion of the 2005 budget by Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., the chairman of the Senate panel that has jurisdiction over the BLM’s budget.
The provision reportedly caught BLM officials off guard and has infuriated wild horse advocates, including Ginger Kathern of Colorado Springs.
“It’s a potential cruel action that will lead to the death of thousands of animals,” said Kathern, co-chair of the Colorado Wild Horse and Burro Coalition. She’s also a film producer who has documented a white wild stallion in Montana she calls Cloud in two books and two documentaries now running on PBS.
Kathern said wild horse advocates have sent out alerts asking that people e-mail the president and their congressional representatives expressing their opposition to Burns’ provision.
J.P. Donovan, press secretary for Burns, defended the proposed change in BLM policy.
“Right now, the government is spending around $40 million annually to manage these wild herds,” he said. “The population levels on public lands are exceeding the ability of the lands to sustain them. Plain English is, the herds are just too big.”
Donovan said Burns expects the agency to continue finding ways to adopt out the horses. Still, he said, qualifying animals could be sent to auction “without limitation.” He said the money made through those sales would be used to fund the adoption program.
BLM spokeswoman Celia Boddington said Thursday the provision allowing the unfettered sale of what Burns calls “excess” wild horses was not in the budget request the agency sent to Congress.
She said the agency is studying the language of the provision and what it will mean for management of the estimated 37,000 wild horses in 10 Western states.
“We have barely received the language and are still reviewing it,” she said. “It would be premature to speculate on how this language would be implemented. But if the president signs the budget bill, it will be law, and we will comply.”
Ironically, officials with the federal agency said recently they were on the cusp of resolving the mustang overpopulation problem.
Over the last decade, despite opposition from wild horse advocates, the agency has staged large roundups designed to reduce the number of mustangs from a high of more than 50,000 in 1976 to between 20,000 and 29,000 by 2007.
In Colorado, the BLM plans to eliminate a herd of about 120 horses south of Rangely because of booming natural gas exploration in the area. It plans to reduce another herd near Grand Junction by half, from 180 to about 90, partly because drought has dried up forage and water.
Those roundups, plus others since 1996 that have removed 1,900 mustangs from Colorado herds, will cut the number of wild horses in the state to between 500 and 800. An estimated 900 horses live here now.
Wild horse advocates have strongly opposed the plan, saying the agency is ignoring its mandate to care for the wild horses in favor of livestock producers and oil and gas interests who want to exploit the public lands where the herds live.
Because the BLM had been prohibited from killing the animals under the 1971 Wild Horse and Burro Act, it had just two options before the Burns’ provisions if it wanted to lower the number of wild horses: adopt out the animals or put them on sanctuaries, paying to feed the animals until they die.
There are an estimated 14,000 older and unadoptable horses living at seven BLM-contracted private sanctuaries, and the agency had planned to add several more sanctuaries in the next few years. If the Burns provision is approved by the president, many of those horses could be sold at auction under the wording of the budget bill.
Although the agency has adopted out 200,000 mustangs since 1976, it has become difficult to find homes for the animals. There are about 6,000 adoptable mustangs now in holding corrals around the West, according to the BLM, and some of those presumably could be auctioned off under the provisions of the appropriation bill.
“Those auctions will be populated by killer buyers – I’ve been to them,” said Kathern. “Those animals will be stuffed in corrals, packed in trucks and sent to two slaughterhouses in Texas that are owned by foreign interests.”
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