Wild horses on the Onaqui Mountain Herd Management Area in Utah. Photo by Meg Frederick.

LOMPOC, CALIF.—Return to Freedom Wild Horse Conservation on Monday urged lawmakers to push wild horse management forward on public lands, not let it take a step back. Congress approved a 4% cut to the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Program last week as part of a $467.5 billion spending package to avert a government shutdown.

“We urge Congress to support consistent funding increases while firmly holding the agency responsible for immediately implementing safe and proven fertility control that can stabilize herd numbers and end decades of failed, inhumane management by capture-and-removal,” said Neda DeMayo, president of Return to Freedom (RTF), a national nonprofit wild horse and burro advocacy organization.

“Changing BLM’s antiquated management of America’s wild horses, burros and their habitats cannot wait any longer.”

The Fiscal Year 2024 funding package approved last week includes:

—$141,972,000 for the Wild Horse and Burro Program;

—a continuing prohibition again the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service destroying healthy wild horses or burros or selling them to slaughter;

—language continuing an effective ban on horse slaughter.

While the cut is relatively modest, it recalls periods (as from 2014-19) when the program’s budget remained largely flat. With more than 60% of the program budget going toward the care of captured horses in off-range holding facilities, little funding remained for range management, restoration, personnel, and administration, let alone fertility control.

Even as the agency continued removing horses from the range, the BLM pointed to those off-range holding costs and year-to-year funding uncertainty as cause for delaying changes. Congress boosted the program’s budget by 85 percent after 2019, funding needed to support the use of fertility control, because of diverse stakeholder efforts.

In the package approved last week, both the House and Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittees directed $11 million towards fertility control. Their instructions for how the BLM should spend it don’t jibe, however.

The Senate Committee’s guiding report language calls for the $11 million “to be spent to continue implementation of a robust and humane fertility control strategy of reversible immunocontraceptive vaccines.” The House language allows the money to be used for research, including on permanent sterilization. RTF strongly opposes existing sterilization surgeries for wild mares.

The Senate subcommittee emphasizes that it expects the BLM to place “specific attention on increasing the use of fertility control, including measurable objectives in reducing population growth with fertility controls, targeting removals from the most heavily ecologically impacted and populated areas, expanding long-term, off-range humane holding, and continuing adoptions while fully implementing and enforcing existing safeguards.”

This language initiated by RTF was included as a direct result of collaborative messaging to appropriators. Its goals include: Congress calling for increased fertility control use and for using more than BLM-set population targets, called “Appropriate Management Levels,” as the program’s lone gauge of success; ending the BLM’s practice of selecting removals based more on inner-agency politics than range conditions; relocating captured wild horses from expensive, overcrowded corral facilities to less expensive and more natural pastures; and pressing BLM to better safeguard adopted wild horses and burros, even as we push for stricter guidelines.

The House Subcommittee similarly “supports plans that utilize a multi-pronged management strategy that includes the use of fertility control.”

For more than two decades, RTF has modeled fertility control use at its wild horse sanctuary 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.

More than 64,000 wild horses and burros now live in often-crowded government corrals or on leased pastures, costing more than $109 million annually.

Population modeling has shown that immediately implementing fertility control alongside any removal that the BLM conducts is the only way to stabilize herd growth, replace removals as the agency’s primary management tool and save taxpayer dollars over the long run.

Yet the agency’s actions have changed very little.

Between now and September, the BLM intends to remove 11,112 wild horses and burros from the range while treating just 219 with fertility control. The BLM also continues to focus on removals in smaller Herd Management Areas where fertility programs are in place and the populations are already decreasing substantially.

Regarding horse slaughter, RTF appreciates Congress continuing to prohibit the Department of Agriculture from paying horsemeat inspectors. That budget language has kept horse slaughter plants from operating since 2007.

However, it does not affect the export of horses for slaughter. Last year, 20,283 American equines were shipped to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada.

RTF continues to advocate for the anti-slaughter provision to be made permanent and for the passage of the Save America’s Forgotten Equines Act (H.R. 3475 / S. 2037). The bipartisan legislation would ban both horse slaughter in the United States and the sales and shipping of American horses to other countries for slaughter.

Return to Freedom Wild Horse Conservation (RTF) is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to wild horse preservation through sanctuary, education, conservation, and advocacy since 1998. It also operates the American Wild Horse Sanctuary at three California locations, caring for more than 420 wild horses and burros. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for updates about wild horses and burros on the range and at our sanctuary.