SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KABC) -- Animal rights activists are outraged over the U.S. Forest Service rounding up some 1,000 wild horses in Northern California, many of which could be sold to a distant slaughterhouse.The roundup of the horses began Tuesday and is set to last through the month of October.The captured horses are from a herd in the Devil's Garden Plateau Wild Horse Territory inside the Modoc National Forest, the Sacramento Bee reported.Forest officials say nearly 4,000 wild horses live there, but the area is supposed to have just 400. The animals enjoy a range of more than 250,000 acres within the national forest.The American Wild Horse Campaign says the government is "exploiting a legal loophole" that will result in the slaughter of the animals.The horses will be made available for adoption but after a 30-day period all horses 10 years and older - an estimated 300 animals - will be made available for sale without limitations for $1 each, "allowing kill buyers to purchase a truckload of 36 horses once a week until they are gone," the AWHC said.<doc-sep>Depending on who you ask, the wild horses of the Devil’s Garden Plateau, in the northeastern corner of California, are a magnificent part of the state’s natural heritage or an invasive blight on a fragile landscape. “These are living symbols of the historical pioneering spirit of the west,” said Suzanne Roy, campaign director for the American Wild Horse Campaign. “They’re living icons, symbols of freedom.” According to the U.S. Forest Service, however, they’re also a pest. This week, the Forest Service began a roundup of 1,000 mustangs in the 470 square-mile Devil’s Garden region of the Modoc National Forest, which is a designated wild horse territory. Wild horse advocates fear that hundreds of these horses could end up in Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses. The roundup, or, in the language of the Forest Service, the “gather,” involves buzzing the landscape with helicopters to flush bands of terrified mustangs out of the trees, corralling them together, and pushing them into the wide end of a funnel-shaped enclosure. There, a wrangler sends a trained “Judas horse” galloping down the enclosure, leading the other horses in a stampede down to the narrow end of the funnel as the gates are locked behind them. Once they’re trapped in the pen, the stallions are separated from the mares, and the mares from their foals. That moment, said Roy, is “the end of their family and their freedom.” According to the Forest Service’s plan for reducing the mustang population, the younger captured horses will be put up for adoption. Horses older than 10 years will be put up for adoption and for sale. For a period of 30 days, these older animals, expected to number about 300, will be sold to buyers who are prohibited from selling them off for slaughter. After that period however, the remaining senior mustangs will be sold for $1 each, up to 36 a week per buyer, “without limitations” — meaning that they can be sold to buyers who may transport the horses to Mexico or Canada and sell them to slaughterhouses. The last horse slaughterhouse in the United States closed in 2007. Opposition to horse slaughter in the United States is overwhelming. For years, Congress has prohibited the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the vast majority of public lands serving as wild horse habitat in the United States, from selling mustangs to buyers who will in turn resell them for slaughter. The prohibition has been routinely included as a rider in Congress’s annual appropriations for the Interior Department, which includes the BLM. The Forest Service, however, is part of the Agriculture Department, which is subject to no such restriction. Under previous administrations, the Forest Service has abided by the prohibition anyway, recognizing that Congress intended to ban the sale of mustangs for slaughter generally, not just by the BLM. Under the Trump administration, which has proposed eliminating the rider in next year’s budget, that pattern has begun to change. Unlike most mustang territories, the Devil’s Garden is mostly managed by the Forest Service, with only a small portion managed by the BLM. As the lead agency there, the Forest Service has not been willing to bar sales of senior horses to buyers who intend to resell them for slaughter. “We would love to adopt all these horses out,” said Amanda McAdams, the Forest Supervisor for the region. “These are really pretty marketable horses — strong and sturdy.” But, she continued, “as a last resort, we’re considering selling horses without limitations.” By sending wild horses into the slaughter pipeline, the Forest Service hopes to avoid expenses the BLM incurs by caring for mustangs removed from the range, but not placed in private adoption. According to the BLM, these costs account for two-thirds of its Wild Horse and Burro Program budget. “What we’re really dealing with is managing the taxpayer money in a fiscally responsible way,” said McAdams. “Selling without limitations keeps us from putting them in long-term storage where we’ll be paying for them for the rest of their lives.” At the same time, selling horses for slaughter will allow the Forest Service to rapidly depopulate the landscape, allowing it to rebound from impacts that the agency attributes to the horses’ overuse.<doc-sep>(CNN) — On Wednesday, officials will begin rounding up 1,000 wild horses from federal land in Northern California and putting them up for sale and adoption. Pregnant and younger horses will likely be adopted, federal officials say, but older horses will be sent to another corral where they could be sold for as little as $1 each to ranchers, horse trainers and other buyers – including those who might ship them to slaughterhouses. And this has animal advocacy groups concerned. Why are these horses being rounded up? The horses live on Devil’s Garden Plateau, a protected territory inside Modoc National Forest near the Oregon border. It’s home to the largest herd of wild horses in the country managed by the US Forest Service. Last month, federal officials said they’ve exceeded their limit for how many horses the area can hold. “Our territory is supposed to have 206 to 402 animals, we have almost 4,000 horses,” Modoc National Forest Supervisor Amanda McAdams said in a statement. The plateau is 258,000 acres, but McAdams said there’s not nearly enough vegetation and water to support all the horses. The horses have been feeding on limited foliage and drinking up most of the water supply, leaving little behind for other wild animals. “Reducing the population will allow range and riparian ecological conditions to recover, while also supporting herd health by reducing competition for limited food, water and habitat,” the Forest Service said in a press release. The government says that housing the horses long-term is too expensive, leaving adoption or sale as the most feasible option. What will happen to the horses? Of the 1,000 horses, about 700 are pregnant mares or under the age of 10 and will be sent to a Bureau of Land Management facility for adoption. Horses over the age of 10 will be sent to a temporary holding facility. The older horses will be made available for 30 days to be adopted for $125 apiece. Once the 30 days are up, those horses will be available for sale, with few limitations. Buyers can purchase up to 36 horses for as little as $1 each. “This allows trainers who are willing to train large quantities of horses a business opportunity. Several trainers have already stepped up committing to some of these horses,” the Modoc National Forest said in a news release. “Horses can also be sold to sanctuaries, become ranch stock horses, packing horses, or to buyers that may send them to slaughter,” the agency said. A 1971 federal law charged the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management with managing wild horses. For years, the Bureau of Land Management has prohibited the sale of healthy horses to slaughterhouses. But the Forest Service is regulated by the US Department of Agriculture, which has no such prohibitions. That’s why the American Wild Horse Campaign (AWHC) is calling foul about where these horses might end up. “It’s a sad irony that the first federally protected wild horses in decades to be purposefully sold by the government for slaughter will come from California – a state where the cruel practice of horse slaughter has been banned since the 1990s,” said Suzanne Roy, executive director of the AWHC. Why might they be shipped out of the country? The last horse slaughterhouses in the United States closed in 2007, and eating horse meat is widely frowned upon in the United States. But it’s less taboo in China and some European countries. The AWHC accuses the Forest Service of “exploiting a legal loophole” which could allow unsuspecting people to sell horses to middlemen who would then ship truckloads of the animals to Canada and Mexico for slaughter. “Tens of thousands (of horses) are shipped to Mexico and Canada annually, where they are killed under barbaric conditions so their meat can continue to satisfy the palates of overseas diners in countries such as Italy, France, Belgium and Japan,” another animal rights group, the Animal Welfare Institute, said in a statement. The AWHC has urged the Forest Service to reduce the wild horse herds in incremental steps, where the “humane placement of horses can be assured.” But government officials say such small gathers won’t be enough to cull the herds to sustainable levels. “With a population growth rate of 20-25%, 800-1,000 wild horses will be born on the Devil’s Garden this year, making these small removals negligible,” said Laura Snell, a Modoc County farm adviser.<doc-sep>
Federal officials were set to begin rounding up about 1,000 wild horses from land in northern California to be put up for adoption and sale on Wednesday — but some could end up in slaughterhouses, animal advocates warned. The horses will be taken from the Devil’s Garden Plateau Wild Horse Territory in the Modoc National Forest in Northern California starting Wednesday, according to the U.S. Forest Service, which manages the land. The Forest Service has said the area should have up to about 400 adult wild horses under its management plan, but currently the area has almost 4,000. Animal rights advocates said the move to sell the horses put them at risk of being sold to "kill buyers" who would ship them abroad to slaughter plants to produce horse meat. "There's a risk whenever you sell these horses that you're selling it to someone with nefarious intentions," D.J. Schubert, a wildlife biologist with the advocacy group Animal Welfare Institute, said Tuesday. "That is not an appropriate fate for protected wild horses." Schubert also criticized the tactic of rounding up horse, saying the process can be "quite brutal" on the animals and was shown to actually increase the reproductive rate of the horses that remain. "There's plenty of evidence of horses being severely injured to the point of having to be euthanized as a result of these roundups," he said. He said a more humane way of managing horse populations was through the use of immunocontraception technology that would reduce the reproductive rate in the horses and lead to population decline. The American Wild Horse Campaign also denounced the plans to sell some of the horses, saying in a statement that the Forest Service was “exploiting a legal loophole to sell an estimated 300 wild horses ‘without restriction,’ allowing kill buyers to purchase a truckload of 36 horses once a week until they are gone.” “It’s a sad irony that the first federally protected wild horses in decades to be purposefully sold by the government for slaughter will come from California — a state where the cruel practice of horse slaughter has been banned since the 1990s,” Suzanne Roy, executive director of the American Wild Horse Campaign, said in the statement. The Forest Service has said reducing the adult horse population will allow certain ecological conditions to recover, “while also supporting herd health by reducing competition for limited food, water and habitat.” Younger horses under 10 are more likely to be adopted, the Forest Service said, while horses older than 10 who are not adopted will be put up for sale in November. The American Wild Horse Campaign said the Forest Service will round up about 700 younger mustangs for adoption, but roughly 300 older horses will be made available for sale after 30 days. The Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that manages the majority of America's wild horses and burros, is prohibited from selling the animals for slaughter, the Forest Service is technically not bound by the same condition. Still, there is nothing requiring the service to make the horses available for sale either, Schubert said. "The law allows it but it doesn't require it, they have the direction to do what's right, to do what's humane." he said.