Report Blames U.S. Agency for Horse Slaughter

Because of mismanagement in the agency responsible for removing wild horses from ranges in the Western United States, the federal government sent thousands of wild horses to slaughterhouses in the mid-1980s, a congressional study group charged Monday.

In the report, the General Accounting Office faults the Bureau of Land Management for improperly managing overgrazed rangelands and inadequately protecting the wild horses removed from them.

Government policies “have resulted in either inhumane treatment and commercial exploitation of the horses,” the report charges, “or committed the government to long-term financial responsibility for the removed horses’ welfare.”

The Department of the Interior disputes the study’s findings, arguing that the bureau’s goal “has always been to find a good home for every horse.”

The Bush Administration has corrected many problems within the program, said Steven Goldstein, an Interior Department spokesman, and created a “kinder, gentler wild horse and burros program.”

In 1971, Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act in an effort to prevent overgrazing of rangeland and the starvation or exploitation of the horses that lived on the sparse grasslands of Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado and California.

The act authorized the reduction of the wild horse population to a level that the land could sustain and the placement of the removed horses with owners through Adopt-a-Horse programs.

However, the government discovered that the horse population was much larger than previously thought and had difficulty in placing all the removed horses with owners. In 1984, the Bureau of Land Management initiated new rules that allowed some individuals to acquire hundreds of horses considered unadoptable because of physical imperfections.

Many of those horses were subsequently sent to slaughterhouses to provide meat for dog food or European customers, the study charges. The mass adoption program was discontinued in 1987 when the abuses were discovered.