Help Stop the Inhumane Roundups of America’s Wild Horses

The Bureau of Land Management’s (B.L.M.) cruel and unnecessary annual wild horse roundups for 2024 are now underway and as always horses are dying as the result of this misguided program.

Unless we act now more horses will die, more young foals will be cruelly separated from their mothers and beloved herds that bring tourists to the west and joy to locals will be erased from the lands they have roamed for centuries.

In December the B.L.M. released its Wild Horse and Burro Gather and Fertility Control Schedule for 2024 which outlines plans to round up over 20,000 wild horses and burros this year with a goal of permanently removing more than 19,000 of them from public lands.

There are currently 60,000 wild horses and burros living in the B.L.M.’s overcrowded holding facilities. This year’s roundups will see thousands more imprisoned in these centers and will push the number of horses in inhumane confinement to nearly 80,000 individuals.

These facilities cannot keep pace with the B.L.M.’s increasing captures and have been associated with mass preventable deaths and widespread animal welfare violations such as inadequate vaccinations, insufficient access to hay, and understaffing, according to Animal Welfare Institute.

Every year the B.L.M. conducts these cruel roundups of thousands of wild horses across the western states to keep their populations unnaturally low, even though America’s wild horses have been a federally protected species since 1971.

During these population control roundups, terrified horses running for their lives are often separated from their family groups, many foals die from exhaustion, and other horses are injured and euthanized on site. Of the horses that do survive, some are put up for adoption, but the vast majority are kept in barren holding facilities for the rest of their lives while, tragically, others wind up sent to slaughter.

The 60,000 wild horses that are being kept in these long-term holding sites around the country are living in crowded, squalid conditions. These wild majestic animals have had their freedom stolen from them and exchanged for a life of confinement and misery and the addition of 20,000 more horses to this system will only make a terrible situation worse.

Unnecessary And Cruel

The B.L.M. claims that these roundups are necessary to protect the land from degradation and to protect horses from suffering due to overpopulation. THIS IS A LIE. These horses are eliminated so that sheep and cattle ranchers can pay tiny fees to rent public lands to graze their livestock. According to scientists, these roundups do nothing to limit the population growth of wild horse herds as the birth rate among the surviving horses inevitably goes up when there is less competition for forage. Proven humane alternatives for population control are also already available in the form of a fertility-control vaccine given to female horses. Wild horses are being tortured and killed for no other reason than to make room for more and more ranchers to use public lands, and we, the taxpayers, are funding this outrage.

These horses are victims of the monopolistic power of the meat industry and the cowardice of government officials who will not do the right thing and stand up to this cruel and sadistic lobby.

Take Action Now

Thousands of horses across the west are slated to meet this tragic fate every year. Please join us in urging Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to stop these round-ups and work with the American Wild Horse Campaign to find sustainable solutions to protect these treasured and legally protected animals.