Tell Congress: Hold an oversight hearing on the Wild Horse and Burro Program >>
The following is from the American Wild Horse Campaign:
Thank you so much to everyone who renewed their support over the last month to help us protect America’s wild horses and burros in 2022 and the years to come. We’re grateful for your generosity and dedication to protecting our wild herds.
Right now, the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Program badly needs critical reforms.
Every single year, thousands of America’s wild horses and burros are brutally chased by low-flying helicopters and cruelly captured. These cherished animals that once freely roamed our public lands are sent to holding facilities across the country, costing them their families, their freedom, and for some of them — their lives. Far too many are ending up in the slaughter pipeline through a BLM program that pays individuals $1,000 per animal to adopt up to four untamed wild horses or burros per year.
What happens during these roundups is equally as upsetting — wild horses and foals run for their lives, chased to pure exhaustion. Foals are left abandoned and hungry without their mothers, and panicked horses break their limbs, backs, or necks during the chase or in the trap pens.
The continuation of helicopter roundups as the primary method of population management is fiscally reckless, unscientific, and grossly inhumane. The BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program needs reform and it needs it now.
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If we don’t speak up for America’s wild horses and burros, thousands more will be mistreated at the hands of the BLM and their contractors. Just this month, the BLM finished the largest roundup in U.S. history in the Wyoming Checkerboard, throwing nearly 4,000 formerly free-roaming wild horses into feedlot pens and leaving behind a trail of animal welfare violations. Action must be taken to drastically reform this mismanaged program.
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— AWHC Team