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Why Did the Government Sell Hundreds of Wild Horses to a Horse Slaughter Proponent?

It sounds like something from a century or two ago: a government agency has sold nearly two thousand wild horses to a known proponent of slaughtering horses for meat, which is still illegal in the United States. Of those horses, around 1,000 have...
Tom Davis by David Phillips, via Pro Publica

It sounds like something from a century or two ago: a government agency has sold nearly two thousand wild horses to a known proponent of slaughtering horses for meat, which is still illegal in the United States. Of those horses, around 1,000 have disappeared, with their purchaser refusing to show documentation of where they ended up.

Spend enough time in a city and you might forget that much of the U.S. is still as rural as it’s ever been. In fact, you might be surprised to know that we’ve got around 37,000 wild horses still running about America’s heartland. Actually, there are a lot more than that, which is why the Bureau of Land Management annually rounds up thousands of individuals to keep wild populations at manageable levels. The BLM now has more than 47,000 horses in government-funded feedlots, all of which are waiting to be adopted or bought by private individuals. Still, it’s a far cry from the millions of horses that used to roam the Wild West, but the population has been steady since slaughtering horses was banned in the 70s.

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One of those individuals is Colorado livestock hauler Tom Davis, who is the subject of an excellent, ongoing series of investigations by Pro Publica. Since 2008, Davis has purchased some 70 percent of the horses sold by the BLM, which adds up to about 1,700 individuals. Davis has been such a prolific buyer that the BLM has actively sought him out to buy horses, sometimes sight unseen for as little as $10 a head.

According to a previous report, Davis has brand inspection documents — which ID livestock by recording their specific branding marks — for 765 of the horses he’s bought. For the other 1,000 or so, Davis has said that he found them “good homes,” but refused to show any documentation proving it. Because Davis is such a vocal proponent of horse slaughter that doesn’t shy away from saying horse meat is tasty, horse advocates are worried he shipped those horses off to Mexican slaughterhouses.

According to Pro Publica, the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Brand Inspection Division has investigated Davis, who apparently was very candid about sending horses across state lines without documentation. Because it involves so many horses, the case is a huge deal, and has already been turned over for prosecution.

Now, Davis is obviously against the horse slaughter ban, and may have a bone to pick with interstate livestock regulations, but the issue here is larger than that. If Davis scored hundreds of horses on the cheap with the intent to slaughter them, he profited from an act that was illegal from the fore. Yet while Davis is the focus of the Pro Publica investigation, the BLM also needs to be taken to task.

If Davis took 70 percent of the BLM’s horses, that either means that there isn’t a huge market for wild horses, or that the BLM isn’t doing a great job of getting their stock into private hands. In either case, providing land and feed for 47,000 horses can’t be cheap, and if the BLM is feeling pressure to get rid of horses however it can, a longer-term management solution needs to be found. (I’m sure Davis would argue that we should be slaughtering them again, but that’s how the wild horse population dropped from seven figures to five in the first place.)

But that doesn’t discount the fact that the BLM actively sought out a buyer who’s never hidden his disdain for documentation or his interest in rebooting the horse slaughtering industry. At this point, with nearly a thousand of the BLM’s — and thus the American public’s — horses gone missing, and quite possibly illegally killed, the BLM needs to explain why it fostered such a close relationship with Davis when he’s far from the only horse trader in the country. Because as long as horse slaughtering is illegal, it’s unjust for a government agency tasked with managing wild horses to give sweetheart deals to a guy who ends up shipping them off to slaughter anyway.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.