PETITION TARGETS: U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Congressional Leadership
Bloody legs, broken limbs, and painful deaths: These are the gruesome results of the cruel roundups Lady Freethinker has documented over the past few years. Terrified by the roar of the helicopters chasing them from their home, horses are separated from their families, and endure trauma and deadly injuries.
These cruel roundups continue to devastate wild horses and burros living in the western U.S., who, if they survive the initial roundup, are shipped off to suffer in a system of long-term confinement.
Year after year, LFT’s dedicated field observers have witnessed the atrocities committed on behalf of the federal government to gather these innocent horses and remove them from the wild. Our observers have documented terrorized wild horses with torn, bloody legs being driven to exhaustion by deafening low-flying helicopters.
At one Wyoming roundup, 13 horses died in just 15 days, according to the daily gather reports. A 4-year-old mare broke her neck while being forced into a trailer; another mare died from a brain aneurysm; three horses died from “capture myopathy” — or from stress of being captured — while struggling in a holding corral; and two young horses died after breaking their necks in a holding corral. Six more were euthanized.
While the BLM’s reports cite “pre-existing conditions” – including blindness, fractures, club feet, poor body condition, and bad or no teeth – as the cause for most of the killings, the majority of wild horses died specifically from acute or gather-related injuries, according to the gather reports.
Here are some of the victims, according to BLM daily gather reports:
- a foal killed for a broken leg as a result of being kicked in holding
- a foal killed reportedly for dehydration and diarrhea
- a 3-month-old filly killed for a leg deformity
- a 1-year-old sorrel killed for a “pre-existing” shoulder fracture
- a 3-year-old stallion who broke his neck
- a 3-year-old mare who suffered from a traumatic head injury
While the BLM says that helicopters are a humane way to manage wild horse removals, the constant slew of victims every year — and Lady Freethinker’s own observations over years of witnessing the horrors — show they are cruel, violent, and unacceptable.
Lady Freethinker/Scott Henderson
The BLM must stop relying on outdated, inhumane methods that put lives at risk and fail to offer a true long-term solution.
Wild horse experts from several advocacy groups say a more effective – and less deadly – approach would involve fertility control via humane darting that would allow wild horses to remain on the range, while also contributing to the thriving ecological balance the BLM is required to maintain.
That alternative also would save U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars spent each year to hold tens of thousands of wild horses in long-term holding facilities.
Captured wild horses also sometimes meet grisly ends, with the BLM’s Adoption Incentive Program exposed by The New York Times as knowingly handing over the protected animals to individuals with a history of selling horses to slaughterhouses.
It’s time to end the cruelty.
Sign our petition urging officials to end deadly helicopter gathers and mandate humane fertility control instead, to allow America’s iconic wild horses to remain at home, free on the range.
