CONTACT: Ginger Fedak, (303) 349-0779, ginger@idausa.org

REPORT: https://goo.gl/kw6WHF

WASHINGTON, DC (May 1, 2018) - In a rush job, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) delivered a report to Congress ​on April 26 that proposes slashing wild horses and burro herds to near-extinction levels through mass killing, sale to slaughter and sterilization. The report has yet to be publicly released but has already stirred outrage from animal rights organizations and equine advocates.

“The Bureau of Land Management has confused horse protection with mass killing,” said Marilyn Kroplick, President of In Defense of Animals. “This out-of-control agency has perverted its responsibilities to preserve and sustainably manage wild equines. The BLM has once again defied Congress, scientists, NGOs, and the American public with its aims to slaughter wild equines until they are rare curiosities. We stand with the American public in calling for solutions, not slaughter.”

The BLM plan centers on achieving its “appropriate management level” of just 27,000 wild horses and burros, the same number that prompted the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act because America’s wild equines were “fast disappearing from the West.”

Since 1971, when Congress passed that Act to protect horses and their rangelands, the BLM has removed a shocking 42 percent of the public lands designated for wild horse and burro habitat. At the same time the agency has squandered taxpayer funds on an insane program of chasing down terrified wild horses with helicopters and penning them indefinitely in cruel holding facilities.

The result is depleted horse herds at levels that are genetically unsustainable. Without supporting evidence, the agency insists that wild horses are rampantly overpopulating, starving, and destroying range ecology, while designating more public lands to ranchers.

In May 2016 and again in March 2017, Congressional appropriations committees demanded that the BLM submit a plan for humane, on-range management of wild horses and burros. In its budget report, Congress encouraged proposals from non-governmental organizations be taken into account.

More than 100 wild horse advocacy organizations penned a Unified Statement recommending affordable, safe and sustainable wild horse management. The solutions proposed include: implementing reversible fertility control in targeted herds; returning wild equines from expensive government holding facilities to their historic ranges; adjusting population targets to ensure genetically viable numbers; and enabling more successful public-private partnerships for improved herd and rangeland stewardship.

Instead of listening, the agency surged ahead with proposals that clash with public opinion and the findings of the BLM-commissioned National Academy of Sciences report. The Academy urged the BLM to support birth control programs and to change its management practices, saving its most pointed criticism for the agency’s so-called “appropriate management level”, which it deemed “not transparent to stakeholders, supported by scientific information, or amenable to adaptation with new information and environmental and social change.”

The BLM has spent zero percent of its budget on safe, reversible fertility control. It continues to scapegoat wild horses for rangeland damage while ignoring the critical impacts from the use and abuse of public lands by the meat, mining, and oil and gas industries.

Among the tactics proposed by BLM to achieve its level are the removal of 50,000 wild horses and mustangs from their rangelands; the “euthanasia” and unlimited sale to slaughter of those held captive; and the sterilization of 80 percent of those remaining in the wild, an option unacceptable to the National Academy of Sciences as it is deemed dangerous to the animals and destructive of their wild free-roaming behaviors.

In Defense of Animals is calling for members of the public to take action: www.idausa.org/savehorses.

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In Defense of Animals is an international animal protection organization with over 250,000 supporters and a 30-year history of protecting animals’ rights, welfare and habitats through education, campaigns and hands on rescue facilities in India, Africa, and rural Mississippi.