The Omnibus Bill: Key Provisions for Wild Horses and Burros

In a significant legislative victory, the Omnibus Bill has secured crucial funding for the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Program. This bill, passed with bipartisan support, includes measures to prevent the slaughter and mass sterilization of wild horses, ensuring their protection on public lands.

(February 15, 2019) In what might be considered a Valentine’s Day miracle, the House passed a spending package Thursday night which included funding for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Department of the Interior, completing congressional action to avert a government shutdown with barely a day to spare. Earlier in the day, the Senate passed the $333 billion fiscal 2019 package by an 83-16 vote. President Trump has indicated that he will sign the measure into law before Friday at midnight when funding for multiple federal agencies runs out once again.

Passage of the spending bill, in which funding for the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program was included, came after a four-and-a-half month delay completing fiscal 2019 appropriations. The program was allocated $80.5 million, roughly $5 million more than in 2018. American Wild Horse Conservation (formerly American Wild Horse Campaign) and other wild horse advocates achieved several significant victories in the legislation, once again ensuring riders that prohibit slaughter of healthy horses and sale for commercial use were included, as well as stopping a provision in the original House version that funded a program of mass surgical sterilization of wild horses and which sought to create single-sex, non-reproducing herds—the very opposite of wild, free-roaming mustangs.

American Wild Horse Conservation's position that the plan was profoundly inhumane and contrary to the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act’s intent to preserve the wild nature of mustangs on the western range was shared by champions in the Senate like Chairman Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Ranking Member Tom Udall (D-NM), and Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) who helped remove the House language. Our team worked all year to ensure congressional support to remove the provision and we’re grateful that our allies in the House and Senate ultimately agreed with our stance. In this year's bill, however, Congress continues to consider the western range “over-populated” with wild horses and requested BLM report back with a strategy to control mustang populations by, "researching and developing appropriate, humane protocols for fertility control methods, including sterilization," within 180 days. While we have and will continue to support fertility control methods like PZP, we cannot accept any program that included sterilization of the type BLM has proposed for wild horses on the range.

The fight against BLM’s ongoing plans to institute a cruel, ineffective, dangerous, and wildly expensive program of wild horse surgical sterilization will be the focus of our work on Capitol Hill over the next several months as they continue work on the 2020 funding bills. We will also be working to ensure BLM makes a bona fide effort to utilize PZP, which they have yet to do in more than a token manner; and address the BLM’s unscientifically low population limits imposed on mustang and burro herds so that the majority of forage in designated habitat areas can be given away to privately owned livestock. We can only continue to achieve these victories over well-funded special interests with your grassroots activism and energy—each call you make to Congress, each email, does more than $1000s of astroturf spending by those who would remove every wild horse from the range for their personal benefit.

So please, keep those calls coming and get involved when it’s needed most by signing up to help AWHC in our critical mission to protect wild horses across the west.