It sounds like nightmarish fiction, but it's the grim reality:
wild horses are being rounded up in the United States and then sold to slaughter -- some of them destined for human consumption.How can the U.S. government be letting this happen to innocent, wild animals? These horses should be protected as a symbol of freedom and the country's wild landscape.
Instead, they are being traumatically chased and rounded up by helicopters, then kept in nightmarish facilities, possibly for the rest of their lives.
They are also often taken from these facilities -- either under the guise of adoption, or sent away if they are deemed "excess" -- only to then be slaughtered for profit.Sign the petition and demand that the United States Congress pass the recently reintroduced Save America's Forgotten Equines (SAFE) Act!The SAFE Act would explicitly prohibit the slaughter of horses in the U.S. as well as ban their export for slaughter abroad.
And it couldn't be passed soon enough.
Our wild horses are suffering.During the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) roundups,
horses are chased relentlessly by deafening helicopters. Terrified, these horses run for miles,
often suffering painful injuries and becoming separated from their families.The government facilities that these horses -- currently over 66,000 horses, to be exact -- are notorious for being
overcrowded, traumatic, and hotbeds for disease and neglect. From these facilities, horses are often 'adopted' as a front, when really they are being taken to slaughter, their meat sold to make a profit. Or,
if they are deemed too old or unadoptable, horses are sold to kill buyers. While the consumption of horse meat is illegal in the United States, the practice is still very much alive in foreign markets -- including in Canada and Mexico, the United States' closest neighbors, which also process these products for even more countries.
Every year, tens of thousands of horses are exported to Canada and Mexico for slaughter.Making it explicitly illegal to slaughter a horse, or export it for slaughter, would go a long way in ending this cruel, terrifying pipeline that is devastating the nation's iconic wildlife.Sign the petition and demand that Congress pass the SAFE Act and save the country's beautiful, wild horses!