All righty Texans, prepare to get your dusters in a bundle. We all knew that the Bush administration, despite the photo-op Crawford “ranch,” doesn’t exactly champion federal protection for wildlife. But the mythological irony reached monumental proportions last month when the Cowboy President signed into law the federal appropriations bill that included a last-minute amendment ending three decades of protection for wild horses. That’s right: not salamanders, not acres and acres of featureless Alaskan tundra, but wild freakin’ horses. And we’re not talking the kind of protection-gutting that simply opens habitat to drilling or development, and passes for innocuous to those who prefer not to look too hard. No, siree. Instead, the amendment (initially authored by Montana Republican Sen. Conrad Burns) opens the possibility, forbidden since 1971, that America’s wild horses will be eaten. And eaten, most likely, by the French.
Most of the United States’ 37,000 wild horses roam Bureau of Land Management land, which is also leased out to ranchers. Because the horses compete with cattle for food and water, but do not vote or donate to political campaigns, every so often the BLM thins the horse herd. In previous years, that meant finding them adoptive homes, which had to meet certain criteria for the horses’ care. But under the new language, anyone can buy the extra horses at auction, including meat producers who want to slaughter them for sale in European countries like Belgium and France, where folks think they taste good, and where their fat is considered an unparalleled medium in which to deep-fry potatoes.
Pass the Freedom Fries. In the meantime, horse advocates hope the publicity on the wild horses will help get some movement on a long-stalled bill like the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act. The act would outlaw slaughter of both wild and domestic horses, the latter of which has been going on for years and, despite a legislative challenge last session and a pending federal court decision to shut down the slaughterhouses, occurs in exactly one state: Texas. Yee-haw.
This article appears in 2004.