Investigation shuts down Bureau of Land Management’s Adoption Incentive Program

KDNK | By Amy Hadden Marsh

Published March 30, 2025 at 7:36 PM MDT

In early March, 2025, a District Court judge in Colorado overturned the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) controversial Adoption Incentive Program that paid people to adopt wild horses and burros. Many of the adopted animals ended up going to kill pens, headed for slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico, while the adopters pocketed thousands of dollars.

American Wild Horse Conservation (AWHC), a national advocacy group, has been investigating the program since 2020 and led the charge to stop it. Amelia Perrin, AWHC’s senior communication manager, led the investigation. She spoke with KDNK’s Amy Hadden Marsh about the details.

KDNK: The District Court of Colorado just overturned the Bureau of Land Management's Adoption Incentive Program on March 3rd. Tell us what is or was the Adoption Incentive Program?

Amelia Perrin: The Adoption Incentive Program was a program implemented in 2019 that pays individuals $1,000 to adopt a wild, unhandled horse or burro. Each person can adopt up to four animals per year and there's no limit on how many times you can participate in this program. AWHC knew that the AIP was going to be a disaster for wild horses and burros because any time you mix animals and money, the animals always lose.

So in 2020, at the one-year mark of the Adoption Incentive Program, we launched an investigation into reports of an influx of wild horses and burros into what are called “kill pens”. These “kill pens” are livestock auctions where horses are sold and if they're not sold into the private market, they are exported to Mexico or Canada for slaughter.

What we found is that people are adopting the maximum number of horses [four] under the AIP, pocketing that $4,000 and then flipping those horses into these slaughter auctions, essentially turning the animals into commodities and lining their own pockets with taxpayer incentives.

KDNK: What was it about the AIP that initially drew your attention?

AP: A lot of our rescue partners started reporting an influx of wild horses and burros in these kill pens. They're unhandled. They were young - those are both hallmarks of the Adoption Incentive Program because the incentive can only be paid out to wild horses, not trained horses. So we started seeing these really young wild horses coming in groups into kill pens. Me and a group of volunteers started tracking the horses and the kill pens. Every BLM horse is identified by a brand on the left side of its neck. So, the kill pens would post pictures of these horses on Facebook. We would snag a screenshot of the horse, any information that the kill pen posted and we would read the brand. It's an alpha-numerical code that unlocks information about where they're adopted, where the horse is from, when they were rounded up, all of that. We would then file a Freedom of Information Act request to get the horse’s adoption records and the horse’s adoption incentive paperwork. Then we started just getting these records back and connecting all these people that were working together to maximize the incentives and flip horses to slaughter.

We have instances of people adopting wild horses, getting that incentive payment [and] just days later, their horses would end up in kill pens and then the BLM's own records would show that week, that month, even days later, they would go back to the BLM, adopt a new set of horses and then bring them back [to the kill pens]. We saw that this was happening three or four times over the course of the AIP. Even worse than that, we started connecting families and groups of related individuals. We tracked down one group that adopted at least 82 horses. They brought in $82,000 of taxpayer funds. My team and I found about 40 of their animals in kill pens. So, what our investigation [found] is 2100 horses and burros in kill pens. It's 2000 wild horses and burros in kill pens! Of those, we were able to identify 855 brands that we were able to file a [Freedom of Information Act request] on, and 70 percent came back as Adoption Incentive Program. It's very obvious what this program was doing and this is coming from the federal government's own records. We brought it to the BLM. We participated in collaborative working groups with the agency. We sent our reports to them. We sent the New York Times article that was based on our investigation to [the BLM]. Unfortunately, they continued to wash their hands of this program.

KDNK: They didn't do anything?

AP: They enacted a set of reforms [but] these reforms did not address the core issue of the Adoption Incentive Program, which is the cash.

KDNK: I found it interesting that the judge took a look at how Congress has not funded slaughter or funded the killing of wild horses for a while now. So this AIP program is actually funding slaughter in a roundabout way, or maybe not so roundabout. So that's part of where the decision to stop the program came from, is that correct?

AP: There's a congressional prohibition on slaughtering wild horses specifically, and this program was in direct contravention of that prohibition. So the judge pointed to the fact that the horses ending up in slaughter is fairly traceable to BLM actions. I think [that acknowledgement] was a pretty important thing that came out of the decision and something that we haven't really seen before. It was really good to see that he was noting, you know, the New York Times article, the investigation that we ran, the outrage that it launched in Congress and just showing that there's a link here between BLM's actions, or inability to act, and slaughter.

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