Senate Proposes $14 Million Increase to BLM Wild Horse & Burro Budget

AWHC Criticizes Appropriations Committee for Funding Mass Roundup Program While Ignoring Humane Alternatives

WASHINGTON, DC (Nov. 10, 2020) – Today, the nation’s leading wild horse protection organization, the American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Campaign), expressed disappointment with the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee’s decision to increase the Fiscal Year 2021 Interior appropriations for the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Program. In a report delivered to Congress in May, the agency stated its intention to use the funding to round up as many as 20,000 federally-protected wild horses and burros annually from Western public lands, placing them into taxpayer-funded holding corrals, costing $1 billion over the next five years.

The Committee expressed approval of the BLM’s plan by urging the agency to secure more taxpayer-subsidized off-range holding facilities to match the Bureau’s aggressive plan for increased roundups and removals. The Senate bill carries over the $21 million controversial budget increase Congress already awarded the Wild Horse and Burro Program last fiscal year and adds an additional $14.2 million.

In contrast, this past July, the U.S. House approved a bipartisan wild horse protection amendment to its appropriations bill that directs BLM to use at least $11 million of its annual operating budget for its Wild Horse and Burro Program on the humane and proven safe fertility control vaccine, PZP. The amendment aligns with scientific recommendations and previous guidance from Congress urging the BLM to increase the use of PZP fertility control as a step toward moving away from the current inhumane and unsustainable roundup and stockpiling program.

“The Senate Appropriations Committee is throwing even more money at the BLM’s unsustainable program without any requirements to change the broken management system,” said Suzanne Roy, Executive Director of the AWHC. “The House has sent the BLM a strong bipartisan directive to quit tossing away hard-earned tax dollars on brutal helicopter roundups and holding corrals and begin implementing PZP birth control -- the Senate should join them.”

The BLM currently spends 71% of its budget to round up and remove horses from public lands, with zero percent allocated to implement humane management of horses on the range to slow the population with birth control. As currently written, nothing in the Senate bill would prevent the BLM from spending the entire newly allocated $116 million to round up and warehouse wild horses, continuing the “business as usual” practices that the National Academy of Science called “expensive and unproductive for the BLM and the public it serves.”

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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.