Wild Horses Sold by U.S. Agency Sent to Slaughter

National Geographic News ^ | May 5, 2005 | Maryann Mott

[ZULU]

Wild Horses Sold by U.S. Agency Sent to Slaughter

Maryann Mott for National Geographic News

May 5, 2005 The U.S. government has halted its sale of wild horses while it investigates two separate incidents of mustangs being resold for human consumption.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is responsible for managing the 37,000 wild horses on public lands, mainly in Nevada, Oregon, and Wyoming.

The agency's mission changed in December, when Congress passed a bill that made it legal for the BLM to sell wild horses outright.

Supporters of the law said its goal is to reduce the number of horses that BLM keeps in holding facilities and to reduce the agency's horse-care costs (see "U.S. Wild Horse Slaughter Legalization Draws Fire").

Previously the agency had been allowed to sell wild horses, but titles to horses were not turned over until one year later. The lag had allowed BLM staff to check on the horses and to ensure new owners were properly caring for the animals.

The yearlong waiting period also discouraged people from buying wild horses and selling them for profit, since the cost of a year's worth of care and feeding would have canceled out any potential resale profits.

Since December the BLM has sold about a thousand wild horses under the new rules. The slaughtered horses were originally sold to the Rosebud Sioux Indians in South Dakota and to an unnamed Oklahoma man who said he wanted the horses for a church youth program.

The Sioux group bought 105 wild horses at a dollar apiece, then traded 87 of them to a horse broker, who sold some of the horses for slaughter. The Oklahoma man bought six at $50 apiece, according to the BLM. Slaughterhouses are known to pay hundreds of dollars for a horse.

Thirty-five of the Sioux-bought horses and all six of the Oklahoma man's horses ended up at Cavel International in DeKalb, Illinois, where they were slaughtered. One of three foreign-owned slaughterhouses in the United States, Cavel ships horse meat overseas for human consumption.

"We're very upset by what happened," said Tom Gorey, a spokesperson for the BLM. "We're assessing our protocols. We want to make sure that if there are any additional steps we can take to ensure the horses are protected, we take them."

Another 52 horses were scheduled to be slaughtered, but on April 26 the BLM intervened to halt the delivery of the horses. Ford Motor Company, maker of the Mustang car, then paid $20,000 to buy the horses back from Cavel and a horse broker.

Gorey said the rescued horses will go to the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in Hot Springs, South Dakota.

Slaughterhouses

Animal advocates say they had feared this would happen after the outright sale of wild horses was legalized. U.S. law now allows the BLM to sell wild horses and donkeys, as long as they are more than ten years old or have been unsuccessfully offered for adoption at least three times.

"We feared this would happen, but we prayed that it would not," said Congressman Nick Rahall, a Democrat from West Virginia, at a press conference last week. "Those involved in the slaughter of wild horses and burros have blood on their hands, and what has transpired is a wake-up call to the Congress."

Two bills have been introduced in Congress—one that would restore protection of wild horses and burros, and one that would ban horse slaughter in the United States.

Chris Heyde of the Society for Animal Protective Legislation in Washington, D.C., supports the bills. Altogether, more than 65,000 horses—few of them wild—were sent to U.S. slaughterhouses last year, he said.

Heyde said he recently visited the Cavel slaughterhouse and was upset by what he saw. Crammed into small quarters, the horses wait until it's their turn to enter the "kill box," an area where workers use stun guns on the animals' heads, rendering them unconscious, he said.

It usually takes the workers several attempts to knock the horses out, he said, because the horses panic and try to flee. The unconscious animals are then strung up on a conveyor belt by their hind legs, and their throats are slit.

Animal-welfare advocates believe more wild horses will meet such a fate if federal legislation to ban their slaughter is not passed soon.

Advocates trying to protect the BLM-managed horses believe the population size is perhaps 25,000, versus the agency's 37,000 figure.

The BLM plans to remove 9,000 wild horses and donkeys from the range by the end of this year. Once they are removed, the animals are sold or put into long-term holding facilities indefinitely.

The BLM said it currently cares for about 24,000 wild horses, at an estimated cost of 20.1 million dollars this year.

Horse Meat for the Needy?

Floyd Schwieger, a retired minister and board member of the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center in Lovell, Wyoming, supports the new law and the government's effort to reduce the horse population. Sending excess animals to slaughter is fine, he says, as long as it's done without cruelty.

"I would like to see the federal government simply have their own slaughterhouse," he said. The meat could "be given to the poor and needy people around the world, compliments of the United States government, as a means to help alleviate the suffering in the world."

Trina Bellak of the American Horse Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., proposes another solution.

Her organization is calling for an examination of 102 herd-management areas throughout the country where wild horses once roamed. If the land can still support the mustangs, she wants the thousands in captivity released back into the wild.

Management on the range, she said, is less expensive than a capture-and-removal program.

Bellak also wants a halt to government roundups and sales.

"If any of us [at the American Horse Defense Fund] thought that leaving the horses out there would be bad for them, then this would not be our mission," she said. "We're in this to try and make life better for the animals."

[PeterPrinciple]

Why is it called cat food and dog food instead of cat feed and dog feed?"


It is called food when associated with humans, feed when associated with animals.