The American Wild Horse Campaign (AWHC) on Tuesday demanded President Trump intervene on the proposed Interior Department’s budget and save American Mustangs from being slaughtered by the Bureau of Land Management.
Suzanne Roy, Executive Director of the AWHC said the Bureau of Land Management requested Congress to allow the slaughter of over 46,000 captured mustangs and burros that Roy says is on the verge of extinction.
Roy said, “This lethal budget is wildly out of step with the wishes of the American people, and the American public will not stand for this travesty.”
The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) practice of removing federally-protected wild horses and burros from public lands by shooting the animals from helicopters was documented by the AWHC in 2014 when the organization announced on its website the BLM had “budgeted two $6 Million contracts for helicopter roundups in 2014 and $1.5 million for plans to sterilize the stallions and mares.”
NBC News reported in 2013 the agency’s roundup spread over 10 Western states.
Joan Guilfoyle, head of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, told NBC at the time that wild horse numbers increase two fold every four years and the population requires to be thinned for environmental purposes. “If we stopped gathering animals, the population would continue to grow and grow and grow and the rangelands would continue to be overgrazed,” Guilfoyle said.
“At the same time, the agency continues to claim – without scientific foundation – that there are three times more wild horses and burros on the range than the land can sustain. This assertion was called into question in 2013 by the National Academy of Sciences, which ‘could not identify a science-based’ rationale for the BLM’s imposed wild horse and burro population limits, which the agency misleadingly refers to as ‘Appropriate’ Management Levels,” AWHC said of the agency’s claims, adding that the BLM “currently maintains 46,000 captured wild horses and burros in government holding facilities.”