1. The goverment determines that wild horses are "over-grazing" the land.
2. The government rounds-up the wild horses and places them in pens.
3. The government leases the "over-grazed" land (for pennies) to ranchers so they can graze their cattle.
4. The horses pile up until the government determines it is wasting money by caring for them.
The damn things are overrunning their grazing areas and are protected so the public can’t slaughter them.
The situation with the wild horses began in the 70’s. Locals would round up the horses, keep the ones they thought would make good horses, ranchers would do the same and those that they didn’t want they sent to the sale barn for extra income. Bleeding heart people found out that some of the horses sold ended up at slaughter houses and started a campaign for the government to save the wild horses.
The government began rounding up wild horses, adopting out the ones people wanted and placing the excess- thousands of them at this point- in feedlots and taxpayers pay for their upkeep.
A couple of points people need to understand- the horses cannot be left where they are in the wild- the range will only support so many and some of the land they range on is privately owned ranches and the rancher needs the grass for his own livestock. A few are left on the range, determined by where they are and how many the range can support. Also many of the wild horses are inbred and have defects that make them not usable/not adoptable. Some have injures that also keep them from being adopted and some are just- well ugly enough that no one wants them. There are not enough people who want to adopt them to take care of those that are adoptable.
This is an example of a program that was demanded by bleeding hearts without thinking it through. Something has to be done with the numbers of horses that don’t get adopted for one reason or another. The solution to this point has been for the taxpayers to care for them until they die of old age.
This is an ongoing boondoggle from the 1970s that still has no good solution. The way things were done before the bleeding hearts got the government involved was working out well for everyone and cost the taxpayers nothing.