Protect Wild Horses — Keep Slaughter Protections in the Budget

Hundreds of America's wild horses have been sold to slaughter, and Congress needs to act now to make sure it never happens again. The New York Times just reported that Ohio livestock trader Brandon Jones acquired roughly 500 wild horses from the Bureau of Land Management and funneled many of them into the slaughter pipeline. In 2025 alone, about 3,700 wild horses were sold — more than double prior years. This is a betrayal of the law, the public, and the animals themselves. What makes this worse is that the Trump administration's FY26 and FY27 budget requests proposed eliminating the appropriations riders that exist specifically to prevent this. Those riders have held the line year after year. If they are stripped out, there is nothing standing between these animals and the kill buyers who profit from their deaths. Wild horses shipped to slaughter travel over 24 hours without food, water, or rest in overcrowded trucks — it is brutal, and it is preventable. Defend those appropriations riders. Support a permanent ban on the export and slaughter of American horses and burros. These animals live on public lands that belong to all of us — not to be sold off and destroyed. There is no partisan divide here, no powerful industry to protect. Just a clear moral obligation to honor the law and keep these horses alive.