I could hardly get through this article it made me so furious. Every single person involved should be indicted for fraud. If there was any other legal punishment I could think of they should have that too. I hate them with a passion:
In a lifetime of working with horses, Gary Kidd, 73, had never adopted an untrained wild mustang before. But when the federal government started paying people $1,000 a horse to adopt them, he signed up for as many as he could get. So did his wife, two grown daughters and a son-in-law.
Mr. Kidd, who owns a small farm near Hope, Ark., said in a recent telephone interview that he was using the mustangs, which are protected under federal law, to breed colts and that they were happily eating green grass in his pasture.
In fact, by the time he spoke on the phone, the animals were long gone. Records show that Mr. Kidd had sold them almost as soon as he legally could. He and his family received at least $20,000, and the mustangs ended up at a dusty Texas livestock auction frequented by slaughterhouse brokers known as kill buyers.
When asked about the sale, Mr. Kidd abruptly hung up.
The Bureau of Land Management, which is in charge of caring for the nation’s wild horses, created the $1,000-a-head Adoption Incentive Program in 2019 because it wanted to move a huge surplus of mustangs and burros out of government corrals and find them “good homes.” Thousands of first-time adopters signed up, and the bureau hailed the program as a success.
But records show that instead of going to good homes, truckloads of horses were dumped at slaughter auctions as soon as their adopters got the federal money. A program intended to protect wild horses was instead subsidizing their path to destruction.
“This is the government laundering horses,” said Brieanah Schwartz, a lawyer for the advocacy group American Wild Horse Campaign, which has tracked the program. “They call it adoptions, knowing the horses are going to slaughter. But this way the B.L.M. won’t get its fingerprints on it.”
The bureau denies the allegations, noting that the government requires all adopters to sign affidavits promising not to resell the horses to slaughterhouses or their middlemen. But a spokesman said the bureau had no authority to enforce those agreements or to track the horses once adopters have title to them.
People who dump mustangs at auctions, the spokesman said, are free to adopt and get paid again
He knew what he was doing. He lied about it. And, by the way, any BLM employees who knowingly participated in this grotesque slaughter? They should be indicted too if they are shown to have participated.
The human species is so flawed, I think we probably deserve to go extinct.
Update: The Trump administration acting director of the BLM, William Pendley (a real piece of work) had this to say in an interview when asked what he thought was the greatest threat to pubic lands:
“I’ll get really in the weeds. I think the biggest issue I see is the wild horse and burro issue. We have 88,000 wild horses and burros on our Western federal lands. They are causing havoc on the lands.”
They knew. They encouraged it.