Wild horses adopted under a federal program go to slaughter
In a lifetime of working with horses, Gary Kidd, 73, had never adopted an untrained wild mustang before. But when the federal government started paying people $1,000 a horse to adopt them, he signed up for as many as he could get. So did his wife, two grown daughters and a son-in-law.
Kidd, who owns a small farm near Hope, Arkansas, said in a recent telephone interview that he was using the mustangs, which are protected under federal law, to breed colts and that they were happily eating green grass in his pasture.
In fact, by the time he spoke on the phone, the animals were long gone. Records show Kidd had sold them almost as soon as he legally could. He and his family received at least $20,000, and the mustangs ended up at a dusty Texas livestock auction frequented by slaughterhouse brokers known as kill buyers.
When asked about the sale, Kidd abruptly hung up.
The Bureau of Land Management, which is in charge of caring for the nation’s wild horses, created the $1,000-a-head Adoption Incentive Program in 2019 because it wanted to move a huge surplus of mustangs and burros out of government corrals and find them “good homes.” Thousands of firsttime adopters signed up, and the bureau hailed the program as a success.
But records show that instead of going to good homes, truckloads of horses were dumped at slaughter auctions as soon as their adopters got the federal money. A program intended to protect wild horses was instead subsidizing their path to destruction.
“This is the government laundering horses,” said Brieanah Schwartz, a lawyer for the advocacy group American Wild Horse Campaign,
which has tracked the program. “They call it adoptions, knowing the horses are going to slaughter. But this way the BLM won’t get its fingerprints on it.”
The bureau denies the allegations, noting that the government requires all adopters to sign affidavits promising not to resell the horses to slaughterhouses or their middlemen. But a spokesperson said the bureau had no authority to enforce those agreements or to track the horses once adopters had title to them.
People who dump mustangs at auctions, the spokesperson said, are free to adopt and get paid again.
It has been 50 years since Congress unanimously passed a law meant to protect wild horses and burros from wholesale roundup and slaughter and to ensure they had a permanent, sustainable place on public land in the West. But decades of missteps, systemic problems and spiraling costs have put both the horses and the western landscape at risk.
Wild horses once roamed North America in the millions, but as the open range disappeared in the early 20th century, they were nearly all hunted down and turned into fertilizer and dog food. When they were finally protected in 1971, there
were fewer than 20,000 left.
Once protected, though, the remnant herds started growing again — far faster than the government was prepared for. The bureau estimates that, left alone, wild-horse herds increase by about 20% a year.
The bureau has tried for decades to stabilize numbers by using helicopters to round up thousands of mustangs annually. But the bureau has never been able to find enough people willing to adopt the untamed broncos it removes. So surplus mustangs — about 3,500 a year — have gone instead into a network of government storage pastures and corrals known as the holding system.
There are now more than 51,000 animals in holding, eating up so much of the program’s budget — about $60 million a year — that the bureau has little left to manage mustangs in the wild.
“It’s completely unsustainable,” said Terry Messmer, a professor of wildlife resources at Utah State University who has studied the program history. “I don’t think anyone who passed this law would be happy with how things turned out 50 years later.”
The bureau declined to comment on the record for this article.