In 1950, a woman named Velma Johnson was driving behind a truck and noticed a trail of blood leaking from the back. She followed the truck to a horse slaughter plant where they unloaded the mustangs. Horses had been packed in so tightly that one colt had fallen and been trampled to death. Several horses were bleeding from buckshot wounds, and the stallion was blind because his eyes had been shot out. Some horse’s legs ended in a bloody stump from running for miles over hard ground.

Determined to help save mustangs from such an end, she started a grassroots campaign that resulted in banning motorized vehicles and aircraft to round up mustangs in 1959. Many local ranchers supported her. In Hope Ryden’s book, “America’s Last Wild Horses”, Johnson is questioned about the mustanger’s practices, “…the old-time ranchers… they might try to catch a mustang to break out, but they’ll run it on horseback, you can be sure, and if they catch one, they’re darn proud of themselves. But chasing them by air-- NO!”.

It was not until 1971, however, that mustangs gained legal protection, due to public outcry. More people wrote to congress about wild horse protection than any other issue in US history except for the Vietnam war. The Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 made it illegal to harass or kill mustangs, and officially declared the mustang a national treasure.

Recently, in 2005, the law was changed to allow rounded-up mustangs to be slaughtered. Senator Conrad Burns entered a rider into the 3,300-pg federal budget, and apparently no one read through it. After it was signed, a few horse groups found out about it, and since that time several wild horses have ended up in slaughter plants and much controversy over the mustang‘s management has erupted. Many horse lovers became outraged and have been trying to reverse the Burns amendment. I know enough about the horse slaughter industry to know that it is often inhumane-- however I honestly don’t have a problem with excess horses being sold to private individuals, whether they choose to slaughter them or not. I am anti-slaughter for various reasons, but what bothers me far more is the way the horses are managed; in herd sizes so small that they threaten the animals’ genetic viability. Gus Conthran, an equine geneticists, determined that the minimum number of horses in a herd area should be 150 head (“Management“). When a herd becomes smaller, it threatens the genetic viability. Many people take issue with how the BLM has managed the horses. For example, in 2006 they actually proposed removing horses from their Pyror Mountain range, and then later bringing in additional mustangs from other parts of the country for added genetic viability. This idea was criticized because it would dilute this uniquely Spanish herd. Equine geneticists like Phillip Sponenberg argue for the protection of the purity of the few remaining Spanish mustang herds, since most mustangs today are not purely Spanish, but rather a mixture of horses turned loose by ranchers, soldiers, cowboys, and Indians. If horses were classified as Native, it might ensure greater protection and better management than we see today.

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