The New York Times reports:

They once had run free through the desert mountains of the West, a multicolored band of 68 wild mustangs that had never been saddled or corralled.

Then the federal government rounded them up with helicopters, as it has with tens of thousands of other mustangs, in an attempt to control wild populations on public lands. The horses were held for years in a feed lot in Idaho while the government tried to find them what it called “loving homes.”

Abruptly this March, the government found a home. Whether it was loving didn’t seem to matter.

The horses were packed into echoing metal trailers and trucked 1,800 miles east to the pens of a hard-luck livestock trader in Ohio named Brandon Jones, who bought them for $25 each.

A day later, two double-decker cattle trucks pulled up at midnight, loaded the mustangs and quickly drove off into the night.
From there the mustangs disappeared. They never appeared at a public auction. The trader won’t say where they went. Wild horse advocates suspect the horses were shipped to slaughter.

But that’s not the government’s concern — it got what it wanted: two more trucks of wild horses off its books.

It wasn’t the first time, or the last. In the past year, the government has shipped the trader one truckload of mustangs after another. And not just him.

An examination of government records by The New York Times found that all over the country the Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses, is quietly selling thousands of horses to buyers like the one in Ohio. Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but the bureau’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. [Continue reading…]