Under Trump, Protected Wild Horses Are Going to Slaughter. (New York Times)
We have to deal with the perverted reality of today, and ask ourselves: Since when did trump or any member of his cabal obey the law? If they can't obey the law, are they going to ignore and break the law? If they do that, won't they receive the same treatment any of us would receive if we broke the law? Answers to these three questions: never, of course and of course not. Welcome to America 2026.
“There are simple steps the bureau could take to end this, but they are turning a blind eye, and the only ones getting punished for what is going on are the horses,” said Clare Staples, seen in the third photo above.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
They once had run free through the desert mountains of the West, a multicolored band of 68 wild mustangs that had never been saddled or corralled.
Then the federal government rounded them up with helicopters, as it has with tens of thousands of other mustangs, in an attempt to control wild populations on public lands. The horses were held for years in a feed lot in Idaho while the government tried to find them what it called “loving homes.”
Abruptly this March, the government found a home. Whether it was loving didn’t seem to matter.
The horses were packed into echoing metal trailers and trucked 1,800 miles east to the pens of a hard-luck livestock trader in Ohio named Brandon Jones, who bought them for $25 each.
A day later, two double-decker cattle trucks pulled up at midnight, loaded the mustangs and quickly drove off into the night.
From there the mustangs disappeared. They never appeared at a public auction. The trader won’t say where they went. Wild horse advocates suspect the horses were shipped to slaughter.
But that’s not the government’s concern — it got what it wanted: two more trucks of wild horses off its books.
It wasn’t the first time, or the last. In the past year, the government has shipped the trader one truckload of mustangs after another. And not just him.
An examination of government records by The New York Times found that all over the country the Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses, is quietly selling thousands of horses to buyers like the one in Ohio. Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but the bureau’s actions create a loophole that enables people to get mustangs on the cheap and then quickly resell them to be exported alive, processed into cuts of meat and sold abroad.
Livestock inspection records show mustangs sold by the government soon ended up on trucks bound for slaughter plants in Canada.
The U.S. government’s sales of wild horses were once rare, but started to rise after President Trump took office. In 2025, they more than doubled to 3,700 horses, according to bureau records.
The government can spend more than $3,000 to capture a mustang and bring it to market, but sells each for as little as $25. A horse can fetch up to $750 at a slaughter plant. The potential for profit keeps buyers coming.
By selling mustangs at a huge loss, animal welfare organizations say, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses is, instead, subsidizing their destruction.
“The B.L.M. is saying to the public that slaughter is off the table, but they’re doing it in plain sight using a third party,” said Clare Staples, who runs a wild horse sanctuary in Oregon called Skydog Ranch. “There are simple steps the bureau could take to end this, but they are turning a blind eye. And the only ones getting punished for what is going on are the horses.”
While the bureau can’t kill wild horses, it can use a series of bureaucratic maneuvers and financial transactions to transform them on paper into domestic livestock, stripping their legal protections.
Here’s how it works.
First the bureau has to show a wild horse can’t be adopted. It does this by posting hundreds of horses at a time on its online adoption site. After a horse has three one-week listings with no takers, the law permits the government to designate it as unadoptable.
Then it can be put up for sale.
That’s an important legal distinction because a wild horse that is adopted retains its federal protections. One that is sold loses those protections immediately.
