The Burns Amendment: the Slaughter of Wild Horses

• 2004 Burns Amendment

The Burns Amendment: Thousands of Wild Horses Threatened With Slaughter

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A rider surreptitiously included in the 2005 federal Appropriations Bill eviscerated federal protection for America’s wild horses. Over the week-end before Thanksgiving 2004, without any opportunity for review, Congress opened the door to the sale of America’s wild horses — recognized by a 1971 federal law as living symbols of our Nation's spirit — to be killed to supply horsemeat for human consumption abroad. The Bill was signed into law by President Bush on December 6, 2004.

The administration is pointing the finger at the tens of thousands of wild horses currently held in government pens. What they fail to mention is that these horses were unnecessarily removed from their rightful range at the behest of special interest groups who run private commercial operations on our public lands (cattle/oil/hunting). Click here to get the story behind the Burns Amendment.

Senator Conrad Burns (R-Montana) introduced the amendment. By a single stroke of the pen, without opportunity for public review or so much as a hearing, he took away thirty years of federal wild horse protection. In reaction to overwhelming negative press, he then claimed that horses sold pursuant to the new amendment would end up in good homes, not at slaughter. If it were true, the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) adoption program would have been a success years ago.

Who is going to buy thousands of horses that have been unsuccessfully offered for adoption, and for what purpose? In fact, while reviewing BLM’s proposed annual budget in April 2004, Senator Burns was quoted as saying "I think what we should do is put some language in this thing that allows the BLM to sell excess wild horses. I'd prefer to sell 'em to whomever. Maybe some of them will end up going to slaughter." Sure enough, a few months into implementation of Burns’ sale mandate, at least 41 wild horses sold by the BLM were already documented as having ended up at the slaughterplant.

Faced with public outcry, BLM amended its bill of sale to penalize the re-sale of horses to slaughter. This maneuver was exposed as mere window-dressing by none other than BLM’s own National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, who found not only that the bill of sale’s restrictions were unenforceable, but also that BLM had no legal authority to impose such restrictions in the first place. BLM then claimed to have worked on an arrangement with US-based slaughter plants whereby the plants would no longer have accepted BLM-branded horses. Yet, America’s wild horses are still being slaughtered. To make matters worse, while BLM has committed to not directly sending horses to slaughter, it is feared that private individuals may be shipping BLM-branded horses to Mexican slaughterhouses for a most barbaric ending.

Senator Burns knew very well that a provision that meant slaughter for thousands of wild horses would not survive public scrutiny and legislative review. That is why he stuck it in this 3,300-page Appropriations Bill hoping it would go unnoticed.

By legitimizing the sale of captured horses for slaughter, the Amendment is giving the Bureau of Land Management a lucrative outlet for rounded-up horses. Specifically:

1. It amends the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act to allow the sale of wild horses for processing into commercial products.

2. It adds a new subsection to the Act, creating a "horse sale" requirement that mandates that BLM sell " without limitation, at local sale yards or other convenient livestock selling facilities" all wild horses who are either over 10 years old, or who have been offered for adoption 3 times unsuccessfully. BLM is required to continue to sell horses until all these "excess animals" are disposed of, or AMLs (appropriate management levels) are reached in all herd management areas.

3. It exempts horses bought pursuant to the new "horse sale" program from the criminal provisions of the Act that make it a crime to process or permit to be processed into commercial products the remains of a wild horse or burro.

About 30,000 wild horses are currently held in BLM’s long-term holding facilities. Most of these horses end up in long-term holding presumably because they are older or deemed unadoptable; they should never have been taken off the range in the first place.

Help us fight this egregious attack on thirty years of federal wild horse protection.

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