What the document says“Congress must enact laws permitting the BLM to dispose humanely of these animals.”
The chapter states there are 95,000 wild horses and burros on nearly 32 million acres, triple what it says the range can support, that the population has more than doubled in ten years and grows at 10 to 15 percent annually, and that more than 47,000 already gathered are held in off-range corrals at a cost of nearly $50 million a year. It cites a 2019 joint policy of the American Association of Equine Practitioners and the American Veterinary Medical Association calling for further reducing overpopulation, endorsed by the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, and says the ASPCA and the Humane Society recognize that unchecked herd growth threatens the animals. It lists the BLM's 2020 approach, which includes expanded adoptions and sales of gathered horses, increased gathers and holding capacity, fertility control and contraceptive research, and says all of that will not be enough.
What the document actually says“Congress must enact laws permitting the BLM to dispose humanely of these animals.”
None of that will fix it. Congress must pass a law letting the agency put these animals down humanely.
About 95,000 wild horses and burros live on public land. The book says the land cannot feed them all. Some are caught and kept in pens. That costs about $50 million a year. The book says Congress should let the agency get rid of some of them.
“dispose humanely”The chapter does not define what disposing humanely would mean, and names no method. The words slaughter and euthanize appear nowhere in this chapter. Slaughter appears once in the whole book, on p.305, in a reference to the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act of 1978 in a passage about state meat inspection, unconnected to horses.
Widely reported as a proposal to sell wild horses for slaughter. The chapter does mention sales, but as a description of the BLM's existing 2020 approach, which it says is insufficient. Readers who take the sentence to mean killing point out that what currently stops the BLM from destroying healthy excess animals, or selling them without limitation, is a set of appropriations restrictions, so a law permitting disposal would have to displace them. Readers who reject that point out the chapter says neither, and cites veterinary and animal welfare bodies on overpopulation.
Making consolidated appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2026, and for other purposes
2026-01-23 · 140 Stat. 5
Public Law 119-74 acts on the same animals and runs the other way. It appropriates $144,000,000 for the wild horse and burro program, authorizes multiyear contracts and cooperative agreements for the long-term care and maintenance of excess wild horses and burros on private land, provides that amounts appropriated by the act shall not be available for the destruction of any healthy, unadopted wild horse or burro under the jurisdiction of the Secretary concerned or for a sale that results in the animal being processed into a commercial product, and bars a government agency receiving a transferred animal from euthanizing it except on a licensed veterinarian's recommendation in a case of severe injury, illness or advanced age. The passage asks Congress to enact laws permitting the Bureau of Land Management to dispose humanely of these animals. The fit breaks down in that these are conditions on one act's appropriations rather than an amendment to the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, and the act leaves the underlying statute untouched.
The 2026 spending law runs the other way on wild horses. It gives $144 million for the program and pays for long term care on private land. Its money may not be used to kill a healthy horse or burro. The passage asked Congress for power to put these animals down, and the older statute is untouched.