Photo by Meg Frederick
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The House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee this week recommended allocating $143 million to the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program for Fiscal Year 2025.
While the program would dodge large cuts being taken by other programs, the funding would fall well below the BLM’s request of $170.9 million.
The wild horse and burro program received $142 million for 2024, down from $148 million in 2023.
The Senate Interior Subcommittee has not yet released its funding recommendation for 2025. Progress toward completing a funding package is expected to be slow, at least until after election day.
With nearly 70% of the BLM program’s budget now going to care of captured wild horses living in off-range holding facilities, the House Subcommittee’s recommendation would leave relatively little money for steering wild horse management in new directions.
For more than two decades, Return to Freedom has used safe, proven and humane fertility control at its wild horse sanctuaries and called for it to be utilized on the range to slow herd growth and end the costly, traumatic capture and warehousing of wild horses.
On a positive note, the House Subcommittee calls for the continued prohibition of sales or actions resulting in the killing of health wild horses and burros and for the BLM comply with its Comprehensive Animal Welfare Program (CAWP).
Other language in the House Subcommittee’s budget report is problematic, however:
–The Subcommittee calls for the funding to support “continued implementation of the May 2020 plan.”
That BLM plan focuses on reaching an arbitrary “Appropriate Management Level” of fewer than 27,000 wild horses and burros across 10 states before implementing fertility control in any real way.
Population modeling has shown that immediately implementing fertility control alongside any removal that the BLM is already conducting is the only realistic way to stabilize herd growth, replace removals as the agency’s primary management tool and save taxpayer dollars over the long run.
From 2020-23, the BLM removed more than 50,000 wild horses and burros from their home ranges while treating just 2,099 mares with fertility control, then releasing them. That pattern continues this year, with a goal of removing 19,614 horses and burros from their home ranges while treating 710.
The result? As of April, more than 63,000 wild horses and burros under BLM’s management were living in often overcrowded corrals or on leased pastures at a cost to taxpayers of more than $108.5 million annually. The agency estimated in March that there were 73,520 wild horses and burros still roaming the public lands that it manages.
— The Subcommittee would keep permanent sterilization on the table.
The subcommittee’s report calls for $11 million to be used “for the administration of humane population growth suppression strategies, including immunocontraceptive vaccines and permanent sterilization efforts, prioritizing the implementation of existing immunocontraceptive vaccines when appropriate.”
In its budget proposal, BLM requested $15 million for permanent sterilization. RTF strongly opposes surgical sterilization. Previous agency attempts to sterilize wild horses have only led to litigation, not progress toward more humane and sustainable on-range herd management.
Most recently, in 2021, the agency dropped a plan to perform ovariectomy via colpotomy on captured mares only after RTF and others sued. This is an invasive surgical procedure that includes risks of infection, bleeding and death.