The New York Times reports that a rule change under the Trump administration lets the Bureau of Land Management sell federally protected wild mustangs cheaply, effectively stripping them of long-standing safeguards and clearing a path to slaughter. The Times says the bureau’s actions create a legal loophole that enables purchasers to quickly resell mustangs for export alive, where they can be processed into meat and sold abroad. The article recounts mustangs packed into metal trailers and trucked 1,800 miles east to an Ohio livestock trader named Brandon Jones, after which the horses disappeared. The Times frames the policy as a reversal of prior protections that made slaughtering wild horses illegal, because the new sale pathway circumvents those prohibitions. If carried out at scale, the policy could move large numbers of federally managed mustangs from public lands into commercial slaughter channels abroad.
