Did Rep. Mark Amodei vote to allow wild horses to be slaughtered?

• Short answer: Did Rep. Amodei vote in a way that could lead to large numbers of wild horses and burros being killed? Yes. But slaughtered? Well, that depends on whether your definition of “slaughtered” is limited to butchering livestock for market. That would remain banned by Amodei's vote. Also, he doesn’t believe widespread killing will happen. Rather, he says, the threat is intended to get some horse advocates to support fertility efforts that would help wild horses and burros stay at sustainable levels on federal lands.

Background

The advocacy group American Wild Horse Campaign sent out a press release last month about a vote on the Interior Department budget for funding the Bureau of Land Management. It was headlined “House Appropriations Committee Issues Death Warrant to 92,000 American Wild Horses.”

The press release went on to say: “The amendment, put forth by Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) and passed on a voice vote, allows for the destruction of healthy wild horses and burros that Interior Department bureaucrats deem to be surplus. The removal of the protections would result in wild herds across the West being slaughtered on a mass scale. Captured wild horses and burros in government holding facilities would also be subject to being killed en masse.”

Amodei spokeswoman Logan Ramsey responded by email to the RGJ, “This amendment includes language expressly prohibiting the slaughter of wild horses and burros on federal lands.”

She cited a U.S. Department of Agriculture description of slaughter as “butchering livestock for market,” as well as other common definitions.

Asked to explain this difference in interpretation, Suzanne Roy – executive director of the American Wild Horse Campaign – said by email, “The Interior appropriations bill usually contains two provisions related to wild horses. The first prohibits BLM from destroying healthy horses and burros. The second prohibits BLM from selling horses to anyone who intends to sell them for slaughter.

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“The Stewart amendment, which Amodei supported, stripped the bill of the first prohibition. Without that, the BLM will be allowed to destroy excess horses for whom an adoption demand does not exist – that would apply to horses in holding and those considered (wrongly) to be excess on the range.”

Asked if excess horses and burros on federal lands could be killed, as long as they are not used for commercial production or human consumption, Rep. Stewart’s spokeswoman Daryn Frischknect said: “Yes, the amendment will allow that, as long as all other federal laws and regulations related to wild horses and burros are followed.”

During an interview Aug. 21 with the RGJ Editorial Board, Amodei agreed that the amendment could allow thousands of wild horses and burros to be killed, although he added that the process is so bureaucratically onerous, he doubts it will happen.

The crux of the matter for the congressman involves rising populations of horses and burros, without natural predators, causing damage to the Great Basin ecosystem – and this, he says, hurts the animals and the natural resources.

Dean Bolstad, division chief of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, said by email, “Most wild horse and burro herds on public lands are already chronically overpopulated, which leads to an increased risk of starvation, more damage to habitat on public lands, and large numbers of animals moving onto private property and highways in search of food and water. By enabling the BLM to use all tools provided for in the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, we can better protect our nation’s wild horses and burros living on the range, as well as the habitat on which they, and many other species, depend.”

One of those tools available to the BLM is “euthanasia.” In general, euthanasia is defined as “the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals (such as persons or domestic animals) in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy.”

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Currently, the BLM is allowed to implement this type of euthanasia on wild horses and burros deemed sick, starving or too old. This new Stewart amendment would bring back another type of “euthanasia” mentioned in the 1971 federal act – one of the “tools” alluded to by Bolstad: killing excess horses and burros “for which an adoption demand by qualified individuals does not exist.”

Rep. Amodei said he doesn’t want that to happen but there may be no choice if current population trends continue.

“I don’t have the luxury of allowing one species to basically go unchecked on the resource of the Great Basin ecosystem,” he said, adding that far more wild horses and burros are being born each year than are being adopted out and dying naturally.

If this continues, “then guess what?” he said. “The resource is going to continue to be overrun. [The vote] is a way for me to send a message to those [horse advocacy] folks that if you take fertility away from us, then what have you left us?”

He mentioned a case where some wild horse advocates used the courts to shut down fertility tests being done in Oregon.

“If we really don’t want to kill ’em – which by the way, I agree with – then we need to get seriously behind this whole birth control thing,” Rep. Amodei said, “so we can reduce those reproduction rates so they are in line with something the ecosystem can support.”

See video of Rep. Amodei talking to the RGJ Editorial Board below. The part about horses starts around the 31-minute mark.