Thanks for point out the typo. Not a lot of time to do this article, but yes, these horses are not going to win the puissance but stuffing them into a truck to Mexico with broken legs and killed by a knife to the back of the head which paralizes then and the cutting them up alive is not worth the U.S. budget savings. Find the money elsewhere like not spending $500,000 to find out if a student drinks more beer in a fraternity than one who is not in a fraternity. If you went to college you don’t need a one-half million dollar study.
I live in Nevada. East Coasters like you are the worst thing that ever happened to wild horses.
Don't know if you've ever been in the horse business (sounds like not - puissance isn't of wide currency anymore - only two recognized events in the U.S. last year) but the dirty little secret is that banning humane and necessary slaughterhouses in the U.S. led directly and inevitably to the Mexican horrors.
Unfortunately, many horses are not viable for anyone to keep, let alone your average owner. Some are temperamentally dangerous (try having a 1400 pound animal actively trying to bite you, strike out at you, or pound you into jelly). Some are unsound and cannot be used for any purpose (what we call "pasture ornaments"), others are so lame that they cannot move about and inevitably succumb to colic, founder, or some other disease that overtakes immobile horses. Euthanasia is very expensive, and whether the horse dies of colic or a lethal injection, you are left with 12-1400 pounds of dead weight to dispose of - not an easy task (I have assisted at several backhoe burials on the back 40).
With no option to send vicious or unsound horses to slaughter, and the high price of hay and feed, the owners often just turn them loose or sneak them into somebody else's pasture (my pro trainer says she used to worry about going down to the pasture and finding tire tracks and a horse missing - now she goes down to the pasture and finds tire tracks and two horses she never saw before). And THAT adds a risk of communicating deadly diseases to the whole mix, not to mention the risk of colliding with a loose horse or three on the highway.
The banning of slaughterhouses in the US was not done to save money - it was at the behest of ignorant animal rights activists who have never been any closer to a horse than a Disney movie.
The wild horses are a whole separate issue. We spend a lot of time calculating our pasture yield and how many acres are needed to support a horse - the BLM horses overpopulate quickly and destroy the relatively delicate range (it's not like a well-watered, fertilized pasture, and too many horses will quickly churn up even a well cared for meadow). Over time the bands inbreed, and you get the weedy, knock-kneed, jug-headed gray horses that are useless for much of anything other than destroying rangeland.
BLM needs to (1) do some serious culling to reduce numbers and remove bad examples of inbreeding; (2) start an overall breeding/rebuilding program and judiciously add breeding stock to particular herds; (3) get the horses off the most delicate land. And USDA needs to reinstitute a network of humane, well-inspected slaughterhouses.