Last month, the Senate Appropriations Committee rejected an Administration budget proposal that would have paved the way for horse slaughter on US soil by funding horse meat inspectors. Your calls and actions helped turn back a request from the US Department of Agriculture to bring back equine slaughterhouses within our borders! But, the fight is just beginning. The lives of 96,000 wild horses hang in the balance and they need your urgent help.

Sickeningly, the House Appropriations Committee has voted in favor of allowing the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to “sell without restriction” or “humanely euthanize” healthy wild horses and burros, including 46,000 held captive and another 50,000 the BLM deems “excess” on the range. This despicable plan would send up to 96,000 innocent animals to the firing line or to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. The Administration’s proposal is based on a web of corruption, misinformation and outright lies.

Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke claims the BLM has no choice but mass destruction because wild mustangs are overrunning the range and are too costly to keep in captivity. Zinke and the BLM are pinning range degradation on wild horses to give cow ranchers a free meal ticket. By scapegoating wild horses, cow and sheep ranchers can continue running down public lands through overgrazing and ever-increasing commercial exploitation at public expense.

In Defense of Animals has stood alongside our friends at the National Academy of Sciences and 40 other national organizations to counter the ridiculous claims being made against the horses and offer real alternatives to the BLM’s wasteful, cruel, and unsustainable system of helicopter roundup and removal.

Practical solutions to allow wild horses and cow ranchers to coexist on public wild lands include restoring the acreage originally dedicated to wild equines by the 1971 Wild Horse Act, readjusting the government’s arbitrary population targets, engaging willing citizen partners in range stewardship, and increasing the use of safe, reversible fertility control.

The Senate Appropriations Committee is next to consider the Administration’s grisly proposal to eradicate mustangs and burros. We must ensure they throw out plans to extinguish our nation’s wild herds and instead protect and preserve these important wild animals and symbol of American freedom.

What YOU can do:

1) Please make three simple phone calls. Making personal contact with Congress is key to give voice to those in peril and is the only hope we have to prevent this mass slaughter.

Find your two US Senators and your one US Representative’s numbers here. State your name, your town or city, and telephone number. Be respectful. You may wish to say:

Please oppose any language or provision in the 2018 budget that would allow wild horses and burros to be destroyed either directly or indirectly, by “sale without restriction” or by “euthanization.” They deserve to live safely and freely, not to be vilified and destroyed to cover up government mismanagement.

Congress must maintain the ban on killing wild equines and on sending them to slaughter. It’s time for the BLM to conduct on-the-range management that is humane and sustainable.

The great majority of US citizens oppose equine slaughter and reject the idea of killing innocent captives or shooting horses and burros on the range. Please commit to opposing this inhumane budget proposal. Please support solutions, not the destruction of a treasured and protected part of America’s heritage.

2) If you haven't already done so, please send our letter (with your personal touch) to Congress.