Editorial: Wild horses still go to slaughterhouses

Wednesday, Oct. 27, 1999 | 10:03 a.m.

The Bureau of Land Management's wild horse adoption program is supposed to compassionately decrease the size of wild horse herds on federal lands, turning over to caring owners one of the last remaining symbols of the Western frontier. But an Associated Press report in 1997 revealed that shortly after adoption that thousands of horses actually ended up at slaughterhouses -- where sellers can fetch between $500 to $800 -- allowing their owners to make a tidy profit for the $150 fee they paid the federal government.

A wild horse advocate group, Fund for the Animals, filed a lawsuit in 1997 against the BLM in an attempt to stop the horses from being killed at slaughterhouses, where the horse meat either ends up as pet food in this country or on the dinner table for some people in other nations. In response, the BLM consented to include in future wild horse adoption agreements a requirement that adopters must state they don't have any intention to sell the wild horses for slaughter. But wild horse advocates say that the BLM isn't enforcing these agreements, noting that almost 600 wild horses adopted in the past year have been slaughtered. The Fund for Animals wants the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute those who violated the agreements for making false statements to a federal agency, but BLM officials said earlier this month there was little they could do since the a nimals were now private property.

Fortunately, last week BLM officials backed off their initial insistence that nothing could be done and told the Reno Gazette-Journal that the BLM and the Justice Department will consider the possibility of prosecuting those who have sold the mustangs for slaughter. It's about time. The federal government should explore every option to ensure that commitments made by adopters are indeed kept. Failure to enforce these agreements will leave a permanent stain on the wild horse adoption program.