Take Action: Click here to send messages to Congress about wild horses and about horse slaughter.

Donate: Please consider a donation to our Wild Horse Defense Fund, which fuels out Washington, D.C., lobbying, grassroots advocacy and selective litigation.

Wild horses on the Onaqui Mountains Herd Management Area in Utah. Photo: Meg Frederick.

The Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program remains on ice despite the government shutdown ending, one of several concerning developments around oversight of wild herds and public lands.

Wild horse capture and removal operations intended to reach the agency’s “Appropriate Management Levels,” or population targets across Herd Management Areas, are on hold unless deemed an emergency.

A lack of roundups provides only a temporary reprieve for wild herds. Past lulls often caused by inconsistent federal funding have been followed by the agency calling for increased removals when money became available.

However welcome the pause, it has a very real downside:

Each day that the BLM delays the use of fertility control shown to be proven, safe and humane perpetuates the agency’s failed and inhumane practice management by capture and removal.

We strongly support the use of fertility control as a key tool to reduce the frequency and size of removals and replace them with minimally intrusive, on-range management.

The National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board has not met since January and will not meet again this year. The board was created by law to provide the BLM and U.S. Forest Service with management recommendations from different interest groups, including wild horse advocates.

The terms of three members have expired since the last meeting. The BLM has yet to announce that it is taking nominations for their replacements.

The BLM continues to feed and care for wild horses and burros in off-range corrals or leased pastures. As of August, more than 64,200 wild horses and burros were being warehoused in off-range holding — compared to 73,000 living on BLM-managed rangelands.

Wild horse and burro adoption events also continue, but without controversial $1,000 incentive payments as part of the agency’s Adoption Incentive Program. In March, a federal judge has ruled that the BLM failed to provide adequate safeguards to prevent wild horses and burros from being sold to slaughter.

Protective language barring the BLM and U.S. Forest Service from killing healthy wild horses and burros or selling them to slaughter remains in 2026 funding bills. Earlier this year, that language was omitted from the president’s budget proposal.

The House and Senate version of the Interior Appropriations bill both include about $142 million for the Wild Horse and Burro Program, about the same as in 2025.

That compares to $106.7 proposed by the president — an amount that would have slashed the wild horse program’s budget by 25% and placed it near the $101 million the agency spent last year caring for wild horses and burros living in off-range holding facilities.

We are grateful to appropriators for continuing to fund the Wild Horse and Burro Program at a time when others are being slashed and for their ongoing bipartisan support for the use of fertility control.

We continue to urge lawmakers to hold BLM’s feet to the fire on the implementation of fertility control.

BLM NOMINEE

We are very concerned about the Trump administration’s nomination of former New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce to lead the BLM.

Seen as a pro-oil and gas choice, Pearce has called for the sale of public lands. Environmental and animal-welfare groups gave his voting record low scores during his time in Congress.

Pearce was among the few lawmakers from either party who did not oppose a proposed horse slaughter plant Roswell, N.M.  RTF and other organizations filed a lawsuit that was part of what was ultimately a successful effort to prevent the plant from opening.

At the time, the owner of Valley Meat Co. said that he was working with Pearce to push the U.S. Department of Agriculture for action on his application to covert a cattle slaughterhouse into a horse slaughter plant. The USDA approved the application in 2013.

RTF and other organizations filed a lawsuit that was part of what was ultimately a successful effort to prevent the plant from opening.

PUBLIC LANDS

RTF strongly opposes proposed efforts to remove protections for our shared public lands. These include:

• Rolling back the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which was designed to put conservation, ecosystem restoration and access to public lands on equal footing with extractive uses like mining, drilling and grazing.
• Scapping the Roadless Rule, which for 24 years has prevented road building and commercial logging and mining in wild forests across the country and could affect wild horses and burros on USFS-managed public lands.
• Revising the Endangered Species Act to make economics a factor in choosing which vulnerable animals to protect. To be clear: Wild horses and burros though herds in designated areas have some measure of federal protection under the law but are not listed as endangered. In any way reducing protections for animals is always a concern, however, and changes in the Endangered Species Act can also have unintended consequences for other species and their habitats — including wild horses and burros.

COURT CASE

We continue to fight for the future of wild horses in Southwest Wyoming in federal court. Back in July, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the BLM broke the law when it removed 2 million acres from wild horse use.

The appeals court ruled for Return to Freedom and our co-plaintiffs, Front Range Equine Rescue, and photographers Meg Frederick and Angelique Rea, as well as other advocates that sued separately.

A District Court judge must now determine whether there is an appropriate remedy or whether the plan amendment should be vacated entirely.

The Checkerboard is an area of unfenced one-square-mile blocks of public and private land set up in the 1860s.

The BLM decision to amend its Resource Management Plan benefitting the region’s private ranchers because it deemed it too difficult to manage wild horses there.

The agency has pushed back a planned helicopter roundup intended to capture and remove all of the disputed areas’ remaining herds — more than 1,920 wild horses — until at least next summer.

HORSE SLAUGHTER

The Save America’s Forgotten Equines (SAFE) has amassed 204 bipartisan cosponsors in the House. The bill would place a lasting ban on horse slaughter in the United States and end the shipment of American horses out of the country for slaughter.

We’re also supporting an effort to add the SAFE Act language to the Farm Bill, a massive, five-year package of legislation that funds agriculture, food and related program, and continue to look for other opportunities to pass a slaughter ban.

Through August, slaughter exports were 14,146 — a year-over-year increase of about 23%.

Trade data for horse slaughter exports to Canada are lagging because of the shutdown. Through November, exports to Mexico were up 29% from 2024 at 15,106 American equines shipped to slaughter plants there.

OTHER BILLS

RTF also strongly supports:

• The Horse Transportation Safety Act (HR 3623) would ban the use of double-deck trailers to haul horses under any circumstances. It has 25 bipartisan cosponsors. Previous federal legislation banned the use of double-deck trailers to transport horses to slaughter — but no law has been passed to stop a relatively small number of other irresponsible haulers from using double-deck trailers against manufacturer intent.
• The Ejiao Act: Ejiao, a traditional Chinese medicine made from gelatin extracted from donkey hides, is behind the mass slaughter and decline of donkey populations worldwide. The bill (HR 5544) would prohibit the transportation, sale, and purchase of donkeys / hides to produce ejiao and the transportation, sale, and purchase of products containing ejiao.

Take Action: Click here to send messages to Congress about wild horses and about horse slaughter.

Donate: Please consider a donation to our Wild Horse Defense Fund, which fuels out Washington, D.C., lobbying, grassroots advocacy and selective litigation.