​Divisions over federal policy on wild horses and burros have come into sharp focus in the last two weeks after the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) announced a collaboration with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), Return To Freedom, and pro-horse slaughter groups such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) and the American Farm Bureau Federation to convince the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to add $50 million to the Bureau of Land Management’s budget for management of the equids.  Specifically, the groups have called for the round-up of 15,000 – 20,000 horses and burros annually for as many as ten years and for placement of these horses in government-funded holding facilities, perhaps in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Utah (on top of the 50,000 horses already in holding facilities).  They’ve called for a step-up of “growth suppression programs,” specifically targeting the individual horses and burros remaining after gathers in order to make sterilization or fertility control more practical. 

Every reputable animal protection group – including all animal groups on both sides of this debate – opposes the slaughter of wild horses, and also pushed for federal legislation to stop the slaughter of any domesticated or wild horses or burros. And I have no doubt that the program staffers at the HSUS and the ASPCA advocating for this plan have a deep concern for horses and burros. They deserve our respect for their passion for animals. In this case, however, I think they’ve made the wrong judgment and negotiated a bad deal that puts horses and burros at risk. And the absence of a perfect plan in the alternative doesn’t make their plan any more acceptable
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• These groups are distracting our community of organizations from the larger battle to end the slaughter of American horses across North America for human consumption overseas. The Democrats took the House in the mid-term elections, and generally speaking, it’s been a core Democratic position to oppose horse slaughter. With Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul Grijalva, and Appropriations Committee leaders Nita Lowey, Betty McCollum, and Sanford Bishop, we have a dream team of anti-slaughter advocates in key positions in the House. We are in the best position in years to fend off pro-slaughter maneuvers in the Interior and Agriculture spending bills and to advance the Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act, which would ban any horse slaughter operations. By advancing a divisive and controversial plan now, HSUS and the ASPCA -- which have made an alliance with the leading proponents of horse slaughter (the NCBA and the Farm Bureau) -- have split the equine community when our unity is required to secure a transformational policy gain on the broader issue of horse slaughter.  

• This agreement has no adequate safeguards and is open-ended, vague, and far too malleable. The Fiscal Year 2020 Appropriations language proposed by these groups requires the removal of 15,000-20,000 horses in a single year, but does not guarantee any funds for contraception or require a specific number of horses to be treated. If mass round-ups occur, it creates conditions for accelerated reproduction and survivorship. That’s why it’s considered a best practice to treat 80 percent of remaining mares with a contraceptive vaccine, If fertility control strategies are not applied, herds may rebound in short order and, in a few years, the population may bounce back to pre-gather levels. There’s no evidence that this plan contains the necessary resources and resolve to conduct a contraception plan on the scale required to achieve the stated objectives.

 

• There’s not enough money in the plan to allow for its goals to be met. The groups are calling for an extra $50 million for BLM. But if the agency is rounding for 15,000 – 20,000 horses per year, and feeding them and growing the physical size of the holding facilities, that will cannibalize the new monies, just as the growth of the captive herds at holding facilities is already consuming upwards of 70 percent of the BLM’s current wild horse and burro budget. This wouldn’t leave funding to implement contraception. If it called for appropriations of another $100 million, it might get them there, but at this point, that kind of sum is not even on the table.

 

• The appropriations process is among the least transparent of ways to address a complicated, multi-dimensional plan like the one proposed. There is no singular lawmaker heading the appropriations process, and the final language of whatever comes out of that process gets folded into a multi-billion-dollar, must-pass spending bill. The vast majority of lawmakers will favor or oppose the bill based on a much larger set of policy and spending priorities, and our allies may have little power to take off barnacles that got attached during the bill's back-room formulations.

 

• BLM and the Interior Department have a history of slow-walking and even fighting contraception. BLM has treated contraception as a “do-gooder” idea that cannot be broadly applied in the field. A small number of their field staff have been enthusiastic endorsers of contraception for a few horse and burro herds and participated on contraception programs largely driven by volunteers and animal protection groups. But many key agency personnel have warned that most herds cannot be contracepted because of the unsuitability of the terrain, the behavioral wariness of the horses in many herds, and for other reasons. This plan asks the BLM to transform its culture on this issue, and that’s a very abrupt transition to ask this agency to make. Inserting vague language on contraception – which has already been done for years – is not going to change the BLM overnight.

 

• Swelling the captive population of horses is going to create future pressure to kill captive horses. The NCBA and the Farm Bureau have not signaled any change in their broader philosophy that it’s fine to kill horses for human consumption. They’ve long treated this as a matter of convenience and economic opportunity. When the composition of the Congress changes – and that’s what elections guarantee – and there is a stronger, pro-slaughter contingent in Congress, they may very well use the presence of 100,000 horses in holding facilities and talk about how it’s eating up $200 million a year, and argue that we must reduce the population through euthanasia or slaughter. And this will make it more difficult to maintain anti-slaughter language in subsequent years. You don’t need to think seven moves ahead to avoid walking into this trap.

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The best and most rationale step forward is to use this year’s appropriations cycle to require BLM expand its contraception programs and fund that expansion. If BLM demonstrates an ability to apply the fertility control strategy in a far larger number of Herd Management Areas, then it’s time to talk about a broader plan for managing horses and burros given the presence of a more trusted and reliable government agency.
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​Author, Wayne Pacelle, published on Drovers. ​

​The Bureau of Land Management spends about $50 million a year to house and feed more than 46,000 wild horses and burros in corrals. Another 73,000 of the animals roam freely across the western states, producing foals and grazing on public lands that conservationists and federal officials say are quickly deteriorating.

It’s an escalating equine-population problem, and the fiscal 2018 budget President Trump proposed this week suggests a solution: using “humane euthanasia and unrestricted sale of certain excess animals.”

The change could lead to sales of wild horses to slaughterhouses in Mexico or Canada, as well as to the culling of herds, to address what the bureau calls an “unsustainable” situation. But it has been condemned by horse and other animal advocacy groups, some of which have consistently resisted efforts to impose limits on an icon of the American West that has been federally protected since 1971.

The Trump proposal notes that the BLM’s wild horse and burro budget has quadrupled since 2000, from $20.4 million then to $80.4 million in 2017, and that most of the money goes to care for animals that reside in taxpayer-funded corrals. The proposed budget anticipates saving $10 million annually by selling some of those animals and by reducing roundups and horse and burro birth-control programs.

The use of euthanasia and sales to manage the population is not a new idea: The 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act permits the interior secretary to remove older and unadoptable animals by those methods. But for much of the past three decades, Congress has used annual appropriations bill riders to prohibit the killing of healthy animals or “sale that results in their destruction for processing into commercial products.” While it is unclear whether lawmakers would now be willing to lift the prohibition, an aide on the House Appropriations Committee said the request would be considered.

Although the last U.S. horse slaughterhouse closed in 2007, meat processing plants in Mexico and Canada slaughter tens of thousands of domestic American horses each year for export to Europe and Asia. And despite the congressional ban, some wild horses sold to private buyers have been slaughtered anyway. In November 2015, federal investigators found that a Colorado rancher to whom the government had sold 1,794 mustangs turned around and sold them to slaughterhouses in Mexico.

As the wild horses and burros, which have no natural predators, have increased in numbers, officials and conservation groups say they have depleted the amount of forage food and water available to native species in the West. That, in turn, has increased the risk of widespread starvation and thirst among these herds and wild animals on public lands.

Wild horse advocates counter that the bureau is pandering to ranchers who view the horses as competition on public range land also used for cattle grazing.

Meanwhile, adoptions by the public — the bureau’s primary program for reducing the population in government corrals — have not increased with the population. Last year, 2,912 wild horses and burros were adopted, up from 2,583 in 2012, according to agency figures.

The budget proposal comes eight months after the bureau’s wild horse and burro advisory board, a volunteer body that makes no binding decisions, sparked an uproar among wild horse advocates by recommending euthanasia or sales for the animals. Subsequent false reports about a looming government plan to kill 45,000 wild horses prompted the BLM, then under the Obama administration, to say it “does not and will not euthanize healthy animals.”

Some board members said their recommendation was made, in part, to shock Congress into doing something about a problem they believe is spiraling out of control.

“All these horses in long-term holding are eating up 60 percent of the wild horse and burro budget. Other things can’t be done well or thoroughly because we’re feeding a lot of stockpiled horses that no one wants,” Julie Weikel, a large-animal veterinarian on the advisory committee, said in an interview this week. “I fully expect a full-court press from the advocates to put the rider back on. But I assure you that will not solve the problem.”

The question of how to address the problem appeared on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s radar not long after he was confirmed. According to his personal schedule, he held a video call on the topic on March 24 with the BLM’s acting director, Michael Nedd, and several other senior officials.

For more than 40 years, past administrations have tried but failed to control the animals’ numbers. In 2009, then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposed that the U.S. government spend roughly $96 million to buy land in the Midwest and East to create two preserves that could each support 3,600 horses. He also suggested that federal officials partner with nonprofit organizations and other private groups to create five additional preserves, so that 25,000 animals would be living on preserves within five years. The government also would aggressively sterilize the horses and burros to keep them from reproducing.

At the time of Salazar’s proposal, about 37,000 horses and burros were roaming and another 32,000 were in holding pens. But the money did not materialize, and the number of animals on public range lands increased sharply. It now is about three times more than officials say is sustainable.

Some animal advocacy groups say the BLM has not proactively pursued horse and burro birth control, though other activist groups have sued the agency over the use of injectable contraception and the spaying of mares. In a statement this week, Matt Bershadker, president and chief executive of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said the animals could be “humanely” managed with fertility control, but the BLM “would rather make these innocent animals pay for draconian budget cuts with their very lives.”

Weikel said she hopes Trump’s budget proposal prompts Congress to consider lifting its usual rider. Considering the proposal, along with the advisory board’s recommendation, “maybe thoughtful people…would realize we have a true problem out there. And we are not using all the tools.” In addition to euthanasia and sales, she said, permanent sterilization should be utilized more.

In a statement, the BLM said its goal “is always to find good homes for the thousands of wild horses and burros gathered from overpopulated herds on our country’s public lands.” It continued, “With an expanded suite of management tools, the BLM can strengthen its efforts to reverse the declining health of our nation’s wild horse and burro herds and manage the public lands on which they and so many other species depend.”

Source: The Washington Post

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​"It really at a fundamental level provides some stability for the grazing industry by assuring that our permits will be renewed in a timely fashion," said Jim Magagna, executive director of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.The legislation allows agencies to approve permits in the face of environmental lawsuits against permit renewals.

U.S. Bureau of Land Management officials reported a permitting backlog of more than 5,600 permits nationwide in September. At the time, Congress was required to renew these permits annually.