Slaughterhouses
Animal advocates say they had feared this would happen after the outright sale of wild horses was legalized. U.S. law now allows the BLM to sell wild horses and donkeys, as long as they are more than ten years old or have been unsuccessfully offered for adoption at least three times.
"We feared this would happen, but we prayed that it would not," said Congressman Nick Rahall, a Democrat from West Virginia, at a press conference last week. "Those involved in the slaughter of wild horses and burros have blood on their hands, and what has transpired is a wake-up call to the Congress."
Two bills have been introduced in Congress—one that would restore protection of wild horses and burros, and one that would ban horse slaughter in the United States.
Chris Heyde of the Society for Animal Protective Legislation in Washington, D.C., supports the bills. Altogether, more than 65,000 horses—few of them wild—were sent to U.S. slaughterhouses last year, he said.
Heyde said he recently visited the Cavel slaughterhouse and was upset by what he saw. Crammed into small quarters, the horses wait until it's their turn to enter the "kill box," an area where workers use stun guns on the animals' heads, rendering them unconscious, he said.
It usually takes the workers several attempts to knock the horses out, he said, because the horses panic and try to flee. The unconscious animals are then strung up on a conveyor belt by their hind legs, and their throats are slit.
Animal-welfare advocates believe more wild horses will meet such a fate if federal legislation to ban their slaughter is not passed soon.
Advocates trying to protect the BLM-managed horses believe the population size is perhaps 25,000, versus the agency's 37,000 figure.
The BLM plans to remove 9,000 wild horses and donkeys from the range by the end of this year. Once they are removed, the animals are sold or put into long-term holding facilities indefinitely.
The BLM said it currently cares for about 24,000 wild horses, at an estimated cost of 20.1 million dollars this year.
Horse Meat for the Needy?
Floyd Schwieger, a retired minister and board member of the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center in Lovell, Wyoming, supports the new law and the government's effort to reduce the horse population. Sending excess animals to slaughter is fine, he says, as long as it's done without cruelty.
"I would like to see the federal government simply have their own slaughterhouse," he said. The meat could "be given to the poor and needy people around the world, compliments of the United States government, as a means to help alleviate the suffering in the world."
Trina Bellak of the American Horse Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., proposes another solution.
Her organization is calling for an examination of 102 herd-management areas throughout the country where wild horses once roamed. If the land can still support the mustangs, she wants the thousands in captivity released back into the wild.
Management on the range, she said, is less expensive than a capture-and-removal program.
Bellak also wants a halt to government roundups and sales.
"If any of us [at the American Horse Defense Fund] thought that leaving the horses out there would be bad for them, then this would not be our mission," she said. "We're in this to try and make life better for the animals."
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