What You Need to Know About BLM Wild Horse Management
The Situation—The Reality
I am the spokes horse. I am an older mare.
We were rounded up from our pasture.
We were never used to people.
Why did they take us?
We did not argue with them.
But we were confused.
Where are they taking us and what are they doing with us.
We are hot and we are hungry . . .”
—The BLM Horses in the double-decker cattle carrier en route from Colorado to a Mexican slaughterhouse.
The remaining wild herds face shrinking and depleted wild habitat. They are subject to harassment, fly over joy-killings, years of BLM captivity and eventual slaughter. They live in terror and are perceived with unwarranted fear. This is, in part, due to the long-term misinformation campaign that portrays wild horses as unsuitable for domestication, damaging to the ecosystem, and outright dangerous.
In captivity, they are separated from social groups, interred with similar age and gender, and stand in manure-mud year after year. A select few are taken to on-site adoptions. The public has no concept of the thousands of beautiful, adoptable horses that are in holding corrals, totally unseen.
Horses that go to long term holding facilities on lucrative grazing contracts stay for five years. When they are above legal adoptable age, like our proud herd sire, they have no future. They can be sold for any purpose, including slaughter.
The media broadly publicizes that a sanctuary is available for the 33,000 wild horses in captivity. There is no sanctuary and there will not be a sanctuary under present BLM Policies.
The much publicized sanctuary offer by Madeline Pickens was rejected by the BLM. In their response to Mrs. Pickens' Sanctuary offer, the BLM asked Mrs. Pickens to restructure her sanctuary proposal into an application for a lucrative long-term grazing contract. Holders of grazing contracts pocket many millions over a five year contract period, after which the horses, still subject to BLM regulation, disappear back into the BLM system rather than being allowed to spend their years at liberty.
Contract-grazing lease BLM horses go to pasture from ages 5-10 or 11 at which time they are legally too old for the BLM adoption system. Off the radar screen, these horses are sold out of the BLM system at $25.00 per head. Too old for adoptions, purchased at $25.00 per head, most will be sold to slaughter at substantial profit.
. . . Slaughter? Money?
What does money have to do with anything?
Do they not know that there is enough for everyone and that we would gladly reorganize our ways to make room for more people, animals, too?
Yes, we were wild horses.
Not mean, just wild and unaccustomed to people.
What are our options to captivity and slaughter?
—The 45 undocumented BLM horses in a double-decker carrier en route from Colorado to a Mexican slaughter house.