Editorial: Stop the slaughter of West’s wild horses

Friday, Dec. 14, 2001 | 9:33 a.m.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has had oversight of wild horses on federal land for three decades. In order to prevent overpopulation, several thousand horses are captured by the agency every year and put up for adoption. While on its face the plan seems sensible, the problem is that unscrupulous buyers purchase the horses, only to turn right around and sell them to slaughterhouses, where they're killed and sold as meat for consumption by Europeans and Japanese.

The BLM, starting in 1997, required people who adopted wild horses to sign an affidavit that they had no intention to slaughter the animal. But the Fund for Animals, the group that forced the BLM to require the affidavit, notes that some of the horses get slaughtered anyway. As the Associated Press reported this week, 40 wild horses were sent to slaughterhouses in a six-month period ending in February. This can be a lucrative endeavor: The BLM sells the horses for as little as $125, but the horses' new owners can re-sell them for as much as $1,000 to a slaughterhouse.

Nevada has had a special kinship with the wild horse, a symbol of the West. Of the nearly 48,000 wild horses and burros in the West, about half roam in Nevada. Two years ago the BLM pledged that it would prosecute those who sold the mustangs for slaughter. The number of horses being slaughtered has dropped off from what it was in 1999 after the BLM said it would toughen its policy, but it's clear that there still are abuses in the adoption program. It's time for the BLM to help initiate federal prosecutions against those people who are willing to sell wild horses to slaughterhouses.