Wild horses at the Salt Wells Herd Management Area in Wyoming. Photo by Meg Frederick.
The U.S. Senate on Thursday approved a funding package that includes wild horse and burro protections and rejects proposed cuts to the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program.
The Senate voted 82-15 to pass the appropriations package, which will fund through September the Interior, Energy, Commerce and Justice departments, as well as NASA and the EPA. The House passed the bill last week, 397-28.
The Interior bill, which now goes to the president’s desk:
- bars the Bureau of Land Management from euthanizing healthy wild horses and burros — standard annual language not included in the president’s budget proposal.
- allocates $144 million for the wild horse program, a $2 million increase, compared to $106.7 million proposed by the president — an amount that would have slashed the wild horse program’s budget by 25% and put wild horses and burros living in off-range holding facilities at risk.
We’re grateful for appropriators’ continued support of proven, safe and humane fertility control, the use of which we’ve long supported. Used correctly and robustly, it could slow population growth without stopping it, replacing capture and removal as the BLM’s main management tool.
Thank you to our lobbyist, Chris Heyde, and our advocacy team for their efforts.
Unfortunately, the bill sets aside $11 million for “fertility control” that its guiding report language says can also be used for permanent sterilization.
We strongly oppose sterilization — especially for wild mares. We will continue to do so in our lobbying efforts and in court, if need be. Invasive sterilization surgeries for mares are not only opposed by the public, they are dangerous, painful and costly.
Courts have halted previous BLM plans to sterilize wild horses after being sued by us and others. Those fights are a distraction from scaling up readily available fertility control, which now enjoys public and broad stakeholder support.