Letter to Sally Jewell, Secretary of the Interior, Department of the Interior and Neil Kornze, Director, Bureau of Land Management - National Wild Horse

Letter

Dear Secretary Jewell and Director Kornze:

We were shocked to hear that the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board recommended that the Department of Interior (DOI) consider euthanizing 45,000 wild horses or offering horses for sale without limitation. It is disgraceful that the Board, whose purpose is to provide sound advice on the management of wild horses, would even consider euthanizing these horses as a plausible management technique. We welcome recent statements by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that you will not euthanize or otherwise put the horses at risk of slaughter, and we encourage the agency to maintain this position and seek other herd management techniques.

For the past 20 years, BLM has relied on rounding up horses from the range as a primary population management strategy, and the agency now has more than 45,000 horses and burros in holding facilities as a result. Upon reviewing the BLM's Wild Horse and Burro Management program, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2013 asserted that roundups and removals contribute to high horse populations on the range. The NAS instead recommended that BLM increase the use of fertility control methods on the range. However, in fiscal year 2015, BLM only used fertility control on 469 wild horses -- less than .01% of the 56,000 horses on the range. By continuing to remove horses from the range to manage population, population growth rates are actually increasing through compensatory population growth from decreased competition for forage. Future removals are then necessary to maintain population levels.

Furthermore, following the Board's recommendation and offering horses for sale without restriction opens the door for the slaughter of wild horses -- a horrifically cruel practice that is opposed by a majority of Americans. Horse slaughter cannot be conducted in a humane manner. Horses are shipped for long periods of time without food, water, or rest in crowded trucks in which the animals are often seriously injured or killed in transit. Horses are skittish by nature due to their heightened fight or flight response, which makes accurate stunning difficult. As a result, horses often endure repeated blows and sometimes remain conscious during dismemberment; this is rarely a quick, painless death. Congress has stopped the slaughter of wild horses since 2009 by preventing the BLM from using federal funds to send any American wild horse to slaughter.

We strongly urge DOI to reject the Board's recommendations and hold true to your statement that these horses will not be euthanized or put at risk of slaughter. We urge the agency to follow NAS's recommendations to increase the use of immunocontraception -- a solution that benefits horses and taxpayers alike. We also request that the agency commit to a timeline for the expansion of immunocontraceptive use on rangelands in the West and report back to Congress on their progress.

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