San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Adopted wild horses are going 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, Ark., 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 that 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 that they had a permanent, sustainable place on public land in the West.
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 percent 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.
Bureau leaders have repeatedly proposed culling the storage herds, but they have always been blocked by lawmakers.
Enter the Adoption Incentive Program, which is built on the idea that paying adopters $1,000 a head is far cheaper than the $24,000 average lifetime cost of keeping a horse in government hands.
The program nearly doubled the number of horses leaving the holding system, and the bureau called it “a win for all involved” that was helping “animals find homes with families who will care for and enjoy them for years to come.”
The bureau’s once-sleepy adoption events were transformed.
“It became a feeding frenzy. I have never seen anything like it,” said Carol Walker, a photographer who documents the wild herds of Wyoming.
In February, she arrived at an event in Rock Springs, Wyo., and found a line of trailers a half-mile long. When the gates opened, people rushed to sign up for adoptions without even inspecting the mustangs.
“Those people weren’t there because they cared about the horses,” Walker said. “They were there because they cared about the money.”
To be sure, tens of thousands of wild horses have been adopted over the years by people who kept and cared for them as the law intended.
The program has rules meant to discourage quick-buck seekers. Adopters are limited to four animals a year and do not get full payment or title papers for 12 months.
Even so, records show several instances where families like the Kidds banded together to get more than four horses. And numerous mustangs bearing the distinctive government brand began showing up at slaughter auctions after the one-year wait was up.
The bureau has refused to provide lists of adopters. But an informal network of wild-horse advocates has pieced together what is happening by using donated money to outbid kill buyers at auctions. That way, they spare mustangs from slaughter and obtain title papers that detail the horses’ ownership history.
Lonnie Krause, a rancher in Bison, South Dakota, adopted four horses in 2019, and so did his grandson. In an interview, he said he saw nothing wrong with sending the mustangs to auction and acknowledged that they would probably go to kill buyers.
“It’s economics,” he said. “I can make about $800 putting a calf on my land for a year. With the horses, I made $1,000, then turned around and sold them for $500.”
Krause said bureau employees had told him he was not breaking any rules. “Once you get title, they told me, there is no limitation; you can do whatever you want with them,” he said.
At the kill-buyer auctions, people who love wild horses are scrambling to respond.
One night last fall, Candace Ray, who runs a wild-horse rescue organization near Dallas called Evanescent Mustang Rescue, was clicking through photos on the website of a nearby auction when she spotted 24 young, untamed mustangs. Within hours she was rallying hundreds of donors on Facebook.
Ray cajoled a young couple who give riding lessons on their nearby farm, Cody and Shawnee Barham, to drive to the auction and do the bidding.
The Barhams kept bidding for hours. By midnight they had spent $16,000 in donations and owned 24 horses. When they got the title papers, the names of the adopters who sold the horses had been blacked out with marker. But holding the papers up to a light revealed the names and addresses of the Kidd family.
The Barhams brought the mustangs to their farm, opened the trailer doors and let them run. The couple plan to train the horses to accept a halter and then find people who will give them “forever homes.”