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NYT: Administration exploiting loophole to sell protected wild horses

animalsAug 22, 2026582,472

The New York Times reported the administration is using a legal loophole to strip federal protections from wild mustangs and sell them cheaply, creating a pathway for buyers to resell the animals for export and slaughter. The NYT account says horses have been sold for as little as $25 a head; one post describes 68 mustangs held for years being sold at $25 each to an Ohio trader and loaded onto double-decker trucks at midnight. The Bureau of Land Management oversees mustang roundups across 10 Western states and currently houses about 60,000 horses at a federal cost of roughly $100 million a year, while some gatherings in Colorado slated about 1,000 captures. Advocates and reporting warn that removing protections through the sales lets purchasers legally export live horses to be processed into cuts of meat for foreign markets. Activists have pushed petitions and some officials have acted locally; Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs halted removal of the Salt River herd through 2027 while researchers study the animals. The NYT investigation ties the sales practice to a broader federal push to reduce herd sizes and the fiscal and logistical strain of long-term holding.

Carl Quintanilla
@carlquintanilla.bsky.social

NYT: “.. Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but the [Bureau of Land Management’s] actions create a loophole that enables people to get mustangs on the cheap and then quickly resell them to be exported alive, processed into cuts of meat and sold abroad.” www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/u...

146045d ago
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