The American West's population of wild horses is set to be culled after a House Committee on Tuesday night authorized the culling, or euthanizing, of thousands of wild horses and burros that roam public land.
The House Appropriations Committee removed some language in the Interior Department’s budget that would have kept healthy animals from being destroyed. Instead, the department will now be allowed to euthanize the animals if they are not adopted.
Only about 2,500 wild horses and burros are adopted each year, and 67,000 wild horses now roam the lands.
“The bottom line is this: The horses are starving. They’re destroying the range. They’re crowding out the deer and the elk because we cannot manage them,” amendment author Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah said, USA Today reported.
Director of the American Wild Horse Campaign Suzanne Roy strongly opposed the measure.
“Let’s be clear: the House Appropriations Committee members just signed a death warrant for America’s mustangs and it will lead to the wholesale slaughter of these irreplaceable national treasures,” she said, according to USA Today.
The committee also for the first time refused to ban horse meat inspections by the Agriculture Department, but the implications of this rule change are unclear since no licensed slaughterhouses for horse meat currently exist in America, First Coast News reported.
Twitter was outraged at the thought of culling and killing the wild horses.
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