This New York Times investigative Article by Dave Phillips is going quite viral. Below link will let you read it for free.
While it may be un-surprising to horse advocates, many americans new to the issue are shocked. It is hard to understand that this could really be happening at the hands of, or at the very least blind eyes of, the very agencies who are charged with wild horse protection. (the BLM and the Forest Service)
However, it's true. We, SRWHMG, know it firsthand all too well. We go to those auctions where you see formerly glorious wild and free horses, terrorized, while they run them through the sale and later stuff them on the slaughtertrucks. If that's hard to hear, imagine being there, knowing what they are going through, and not being able to save them all.
While the Salt River wild horses will continue to run wild and free in the Tonto National Forest, we currently still have a lawsuit against the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest for the way they handled the zeroing out of the Alpine wild horse herd. Approximately 600 of them were sold at auctions, where we had to bid against multiple kill buyers, just so we could place them in sanctuaries all over the country. (Which the Forest Service themselves should have and could have done.) We managed to save 422 of them, but it cost us and our donors dearly, and we are still wondering about the ones we documented in the forest, that never actually showed up in the auctions put on by Rail Lazy H.
Currently, that same Apache Sitgreaves Forest Service is trying to do the same thing with the Heber wild horses. There is a lawsuit underway about that currently, (by ISPMB) so a judge will get to decide. We do not believe, and we hope the USFS will not get away with the loopholes that circumvent the wild free roaming horse and burro act.
To us, it's just incredibly sad that these agencies can stoop so low. Especially because there is no reason for it, because THERE ARE BETTER WAYS. More sustainable, more affordable and more humane ways of lowering a population. We know, because thats what we do, every day. We've prevented more than 1000 births of Salt River wild horses, and with that we believe we've prevented more than 1000 deaths of Salt River wild horses, while at the same time affording the rest of the herd the legal right to continue to roam free. All that, can be done on a much larger scale across America as well.
#managewildhorseshumanely
Here is the beginning of the very viral New York Times Article, exposing how the BLM is using loopholes to "get rid" of as many wild horses as possible. Thank you for sharing:
= > "They once had run free through the desert mountains of the West, a multicolored band of 68 wild mustangs that had never been saddled or corralled.
Then the federal government rounded them up with helicopters, as it has with tens of thousands of other mustangs, in an attempt to control wild populations on public lands. The horses were held for years in a feed lot in Idaho while the government tried to find them what it called “loving homes.”
Abruptly this March, the government found a home. Whether it was loving didn’t seem to matter.
The horses were packed into echoing metal trailers and trucked 1,800 miles east to the pens of a hard-luck livestock trader in Ohio named Brandon Jones, who bought them for $25 each.
A day later, two double-decker cattle trucks pulled up at midnight, loaded the mustangs and quickly drove off into the night.
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nytimes.com/2026/08/20/us/tr…
