New Provision Would Allow Slaughtering of Wild Horses

Here are some more victims of the omnibus spending bill.

ASHINGTON, Nov. 24 - In a reversal of three decades of government policy that protected all wild horses, a provision approved by Congress last weekend would allow some of them to be sold to slaughterhouses.

The provision, attached to an omnibus spending bill by Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana and chairman of the appropriations subcommittee with responsibility for the Interior Department, requires the sale of wild horses that have been rounded up and are more than 10 years old or have been unsuccessfully offered for adoption three times. The bill is awaiting final action.

The new language appears to override an existing requirement that those buying horses for adoption care for them for a year before assuming ownership, a hedge against horses being sold for slaughter. Now, the prospective law says, unwanted or old horses "shall be made available for sale without limitation."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/25/national/25horses.html

This was apparently a goody for some ranching interests.

Animal rights activists and horse lovers in particular have been vocal in their support for wild horses. Putting it in the spending bill was a good way to avoid outraged letters from little girls while keeping the cattle ranchers who resent anything grazing on their taxpayer subsidized public land grazing allocations happy.

Admittedly there are problems with wild horse overpopulation in some areas but this is an emotional debate and probably more of the sort of thing we can expect on the environmental front from our Congress Crittes.