This New York Times investigative Article by Dave Phillips is going quite viral. Below link will let you read it for free.
While it may be unsurprising to horse advocates, many Americans new to the issue are shocked. It is hard to understand that this could really be happening at the hands of, or at the very least blind eyes of, the very agencies who are charged with wild horse protection. (the BLM and the Forest Service)
However, it’s true. We, SRWHMG, know it firsthand all too well. We go to those auctions where you see formerly glorious wild and free horses, terrorized, while they run them through the sale and later stuff them on the slaughtertrucks. If that’s hard to hear, imagine being there, knowing what they are going through, and not being able to save them all.
While the Salt River wild horses will continue to run wild and free in the Tonto National Forest, we currently still have a lawsuit against the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest for the way they handled the zeroing out of the Alpine wild horse herd. Approximately 600 of them were sold at auctions, where we had to bid against multiple kill buyers, just so we could place them in sanctuaries all over the country. (Which the Forest Service themselves should have and could have done.) We managed to save 422 of them, but it cost us and our donors dearly, and we are still wondering about the ones we documented in the forest, that never actually showed up in the auctions put on by Rail Lazy H.
Currently, that same Apache Sitgreaves Forest Service is trying to do the same thing with the Heber wild horses. There is a lawsuit underway about that currently, (by ISPMB) so a judge will get to decide. We do not believe, and we hope the USFS will not get away with the loopholes that circumvent the wild free roaming horse and burro act.
To us, it’s just incredibly sad that these agencies can stoop so low. Especially because there is no reason for it, because THERE ARE BETTER WAYS. More sustainable, more affordable and more humane ways of lowering a population. We know, because that’s what we do, every day. We’ve prevented more than 1000 births of Salt River wild horses, and with that we believe we’ve prevented more than 1000 deaths of Salt River wild horses, while at the same time affording the rest of the herd the legal right to continue to roam free. All that, can be done on a much larger scale across America as well. #managewildhorseshumanely
Here is the beginning of the very viral New York Times Article, exposing how the BLM is using loopholes to “get rid” of as many wild horses as possible. Thank you for sharing:
= > “They once had run free through the desert mountains of the West, a multicolored band of 68 wild mustangs that had never been saddled or corralled.
Then the federal government rounded them up with helicopters, as it has with tens of thousands of other mustangs, in an attempt to control wild populations on public lands. The horses were held for years in a feed lot in Idaho while the government tried to find them what it called “loving homes.”
Abruptly this March, the government found a home. Whether it was loving didn’t seem to matter.
The horses were packed into echoing metal trailers and trucked 1,800 miles east to the pens of a hard-luck livestock trader in Ohio named Brandon Jones, who bought them for $25 each.
A day later, two double-decker cattle trucks pulled up at midnight, loaded the mustangs and quickly drove off into the night.
From there the mustangs disappeared. They never appeared at a public auction. The trader won’t say where they went. Wild horse advocates suspect the horses were shipped to slaughter.
But that’s not the government’s concern — it got what it wanted: two more trucks of wild horses off its books.
It wasn’t the first time, or the last. In the past year, the government has shipped the trader one truckload of mustangs after another. And not just him.
An examination of government records by The New York Times found that all over the country the Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses, is quietly selling thousands of horses to buyers like the one in Ohio. Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but the bureau’s actions create a loophole that enables people to get mustangs on the cheap and then quickly resell them to be exported alive, processed into cuts of meat and sold abroad.
Livestock inspection records show mustangs sold by the government soon ended up on trucks bound for slaughter plants in Canada.
The U.S. government’s sales of wild horses were once rare, but started to rise after President Trump took office. In 2025, they more than doubled to 3,700 horses, according to bureau records.
In that time, the bureau has sent about 500 horses to Mr. Jones. They came from all over the West — the windswept ridges of Cedar Mountain in Utah, the canyons of the Clan Alpine wilderness in Nevada, the high meadows of Twin Peaks, Calif., and the carved red rock hoodoos of Adobe Town, Wyo.
In an interview, Mr. Jones said he was able to resell the horses quickly though he didn’t advertise online or even post a FOR SALE sign at his corral. He would not say where the horses went and denied selling any to slaughter.
“The B.L.M. is saying to the public that slaughter is off the table, but they’re doing it in plain sight using a third party,” said Clare Staples, who runs a wild horse sanctuary in Oregon called Skydog Ranch. “There are simple steps the bureau could take to end this, but they are turning a blind eye. And the only ones getting punished for what is going on are the horses.”
About 73,000 wild horses roam federal public lands in the West, where they are protected from hunting or capture. For decades, in an attempt to keep the population sustainable, the bureau has rounded up 9,500 on average each year and offered them for adoption. But it finds adopters for only about half.
The rest go into a labyrinth of feedlots and pastures that the bureau calls “the holding system.” The system now stores 58,000 wild horses at an annual cost of $100 million. Caring for them eats up most of the bureau’s $142 million wild horse budget.
Over the years, bureau leaders have floated various lethal proposals for reducing the herds, including using sharp shooters, selling horses directly to slaughterhouses and building a gas chamber. But Congress — aware that the public wants mustangs protected — has barred the bureau from spending any money to kill healthy wild horses.
The recent surge in sales is not the first time the Trump administration has taken actions that indirectly enable horses to be sent to slaughter. During Mr. Trump’s first term, a program that paid people $1,000 to adopt a wild horse had similar results.
Project 2025, a policy paper by the Heritage Foundation that in many ways has acted as a blueprint for the second Trump administration, has argued that the bureau needs to be able cut costs by killing horses and said that Congress “must enact laws permitting the B.L.M. to dispose humanely of these animals.”
There are alternatives to the roundups that have left so many horses in storage. For 20 years, the bureau has had access to inexpensive fertility-control drugs delivered by dart gun. They have been used effectively to control a few wild herds, and the government’s own experts have repeatedly urged the bureau to use them more widely.”