AWHC Responds to House Interior Appropriations Bill

WASHINGTON, DC (July 6, 2020) - The House Interior Appropriations subcommittee has rejected the President’s budget request for $15.3 million in additional funding for the Wild Horse and Burro Program. The bill also continues to prohibit the BLM and the Forest Service from slaughtering wild horses and burros. That’s the good news.

The bad news is the draft bill would result in Congress handing the BLM $42 million in additional taxpayer funds over 2019 budget levels with no hard requirements to prevent the agency from spending all the funds to roundup and stockpile wild horses and to surgically sterilize them.

These are the first installments on the BLM’s multi-billion dollar proposal to cull wild horse populations back to extinction levels, a plan that will push the program off the fiscal cliff, inevitably resulting in the mass slaughter of America’s national icons.

We’ll continue to encourage the House and the Senate to incorporate language requested in both chambers to rein in BLM spending on cruel roundups and surgical sterilization and require the implementation of scientifically-recommended fertility control to humanely manage wild herds.

Finally, we're still waiting on the report language to determine whether the language (requiring BLM to spend ten percent of its budget on humane fertility control and prohibiting the use of surgical sterilization of wild horses on the range) requested by various members of Congress was accepted.

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The American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Campaign) is the nation’s leading wild horse protection organization, with more than 700,000 supporters and followers nationwide. AWHC is dedicated to preserving the American wild horse in viable, free-roaming herds for generations to come, as part of our national heritage.