Probe: 1,800 wild horses sent to slaughterhouse instead of pasture

The government’s largest sale of wild horses was to a rancher who sent almost 1,800 mustangs to slaughterhouses across the Mexican border and lied to federal officials, a new report concludes, finding lapses with a federal program that’s supposed to find the animals safe homes.

The Colorado rancher and livestock hauler admitted to investigators from the Interior Department’s Inspector General’s Office that “probably close to all” of the horses were resold for slaughter and that he assumed they would be killed.

There was “only one place to go … to the kill plant,” Tom Davis of La Jara, Colo., told investigators, whose findings confirmed long-standing fears of animal welfare groups, wild-horse activists and officials with the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, which manages thousands of horses that roam wild in the West.

“Managers … failed to enforce {Bureau of Land Management} policy of limiting the sales of horses and ensuring that the horses went to good homes,” said the report, released late last month.

Read more: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/probe-wild-horses-sent-to-slaughterhouse-instead-of-pasture/article_51916b8c-2614-50ba-9ed0-13ed1d6df94e.html#user-comment-area