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I’ve worked alongside horses all my life. I see each individual spirit in the way they walk, whether they meet your eyes or refuse to; I could tell one from another by the sound of their whinny or the scrape of their feet on the concrete. I see them less as pets or tools and more as coworkers or family members — loving them and hating them in turn, just like in human relationships.
But at the end of the day, I can speak, and they can’t. A horse could kill me if it has the mind to, but I’ll always be the one who can hold a gun.
As people, it’s our job to make complicated decisions about what’s right or wrong and what matters most to us. For the feral horses of North America, it is better to die than to live a life soaked with stress, unfamiliarity and pain.
Early horses native to this continent went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, over 10,000 years ago. Some of these horses managed to survive by migrating to other countries using the Bering Land Bridge and would be reintroduced to North America sometime in the 15th and 16th centuries via Spanish colonization.
Wild horse advocates cite the language of The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which states the free-roaming horses and burros of America are “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” I’d agree the image of the frontier, the dust-covered freedom and danger that characterizes the American dream is preserved in the tangled manes and scarred hides of the wild mustang herds out there today.
That image means something to me, and it about brings a tear to my eye. But it would do us all good to remember what else characterized the Old West: death, imperialism, unfairness and ravenous capitalism. The freedom we idealize was built by the very things that threaten wild horses today: commercial farming and ranching, private ownership of public land and the march of industrial progress. We can’t condemn these things while praising the Old West in the same breath.
Wild horses also compete for the same resources in many of the same areas as elk and bighorn sheep. This is not a crisis by any means, as elk and bighorn sheep are mixed foragers and can eat more varied material than horses, but it’s relevant enough to be part of the conservation conversation especially surrounding bighorn sheep.
Feral horses may also wander from public land onto private land owned by ranchers and intended for cattle grazing. Current laws prevent ranchers from capturing or killing these animals, even though they may take valuable grass and water resources from the cattle operation. Ranchers must call the Bureau of Land Management to remove the horses, which could take weeks.
Since 1971, wild horses and burros have been federally protected from “capture, branding, harassment or death,” and the last horse slaughter plant in the U.S. closed in 2007. As of 2022, the BLM’s calculated appropriate wild horse management number was 27,000 individuals. According to a study referenced in the journal of BioScience and co-authored by CSU research scientist Saeideh Esmaeili, the current population projection is 45,000 horses by 2030 if management practices remain the same.
For decades, the BLM has been rounding up thousands of wild horses via helicopter, loading them in trailers and shipping them to auctions in efforts to control populations. This is not new. There were two roundups in Colorado just this fall, near Meeker and the Sand Wash Basin. Once presented at auction, unadopted horses are cared for on the BLM’s — and therefore taxpayers’ — dime for the rest of their lives because euthanasia is outlawed.
Adoption works for a number of these horses, and some fertility control measures reduce reproduction rates, but that’s not enough. The BLM holds thousands of horses for years, eating up hundreds of millions of budgeted dollars. They’re also subject to years of stress, with new groups added all the time, family bands broken up and interaction with humans they’ve never met.
The New York Times recently published an article that claimed under President Donald Trump’s administration, the BLM uses a loophole in the antislaughter legislation that allows horses to be shipped to Canada and Mexico, where they can legally be killed. The horses rounded up by the BLM are sent to auctions where buyers agree not to sell them to third-party kill buyers.
This is, however, unenforceable. The article discusses a particular livestock trader from Ohio, who has acquired around 500 horses from the BLM since 2024. In interviews, he denies selling them to kill buyers, but the horses he buys are allegedly shipped off under mysterious circumstances to undisclosed, untraceable locations. According to the NYT, it’s likely they are shipped to Canada or Mexico to be killed, with the Ohioan trader allegedly profiting approximately $225 per head.
Trailers full of panicked, once-free horses, torn from their bands and homelands, are unloaded after days of travel, only to be shuffled through loud and terrifying slaughterhouses where they tremble in line, waiting to be killed. The smell of fear and sweat will sour their last breaths before they drop with a bang.
What if the BLM could euthanize them before any of that?
Since 1971, public opinion has put enough pressure on Washington, D.C. to prevent this. People love horses and the idyllic Old West — and nobody wants to look evil. It’s not a very American image to capture wild horses running free and shoot them, but this is the most painless and dignified management practice for the unadopted horses.
Horses are not classified as wildlife, and there are not enough large predators around to effectively control their population. The BLM captures them to protect rangelands and other wildlife, but preventing them from culling the horses they round up transfers the problem to a holding facility — a much less comfortable place.
I’ve had three horses throughout my life: Classy, Annie and Barbie. They took me to horse shows across state lines and made me the person I am today in so many ways. I loved them fiercely, which is why rather than send them to auction and risk a kill buyer or a cruel home, I would have chosen swift and dignified death by a practiced and educated hand for them every time.
Reach Kooper Hahn Shagena at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
