The federal government has been quietly feeding federally protected mustangs into a wild horse slaughter pipeline, selling them for as little as $25 each to buyers who ship them across the border to be killed, according to a New York Times investigation published Thursday.
The Times reviewed government records and found that the Bureau of Land Management, the agency inside the Interior Department that manages federal public land and is legally required to protect wild horses, has more than doubled its horse sales since Trump took office. More than 3,700 mustangs have been sold off under the current administration. A significant number of them landed in kill pens, the livestock auctions that funnel animals to slaughter plants outside the country.
Here is how the loophole works, because the details matter more than the outrage. Wild horses on public land have been federally protected since 1971, when Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. Killing them is against the law. But in 2004, Congress attached an amendment to a spending bill creating what is called sale authority, which lets the agency sell horses it labels as excess. The moment a horse is sold, it loses its federal protection and becomes ordinary private livestock. Slaughtering horses for meat is illegal inside the United States, so the buyer does not have to break a single law here. He loads the animals into a trailer and drives them to Canada or Mexico, where horse slaughter is legal, and the meat is sold into markets in Europe and Asia.
That is the entire trick. The wild horse slaughter does not technically happen on American soil, and the government does not technically kill anything. It just sells the animal to someone who will.
The money is where this stops making sense as policy. The government spends up to $3,000 to capture one mustang, using helicopters to chase herds across open range and drive them into pens. It then sells that same animal for as little as $25. The buyer can make up to $750 per horse at a slaughter plant.
Taxpayers cover the expensive part, and someone else collects the check when the horse dies.
The Times followed one group of 68 mustangs to show what that looks like in practice. They were a multicolored band that had never been saddled or corralled, running loose in the desert mountains of the West until the government rounded them up by helicopter. They sat for years in a feedlot in Idaho while the agency searched for what it called loving homes. In March, they were packed into metal trailers and hauled 1,800 miles east to Ohio, where a livestock trader named Brandon Jones bought all 68 of them at $25 a head.
The scale behind those 68 horses is the reason the wild horse slaughter question keeps coming back. About 73,000 wild horses roam protected public land. The agency removes roughly 9,500 of them every year. Half go up for adoption. The rest go into what the government calls the holding system, a network of corrals and pastures that now warehouses 58,000 animals at a cost of about $100 million a year. More mustangs currently live in government pens than run free anywhere in the country.
That $100 million bill is the pressure behind every decision here. The agency has gone as far as pitching the purchase of a gas chamber to kill horses outright and bring the holding costs down. Congress blocked it, largely out of concern about how the public would react.
Trump has pushed to make killing the horses legal outright rather than doing it through a side door. Project 2025, the policy blueprint the Heritage Foundation assembled for a second Trump term, called on Congress to give the agency authority to humanely dispose of excess wild horses and burros. His fiscal 2026 budget proposal attempted to strip out the longstanding language that bars using federal money to kill protected horses or sell them for slaughter, while also cutting the wild horse program by 25 percent, from $143 million to $106 million. Senate appropriators rejected that and kept the protections in the bill. The sales continued anyway, which is the part advocates keep pointing to.
Clare Staples, who runs a wild horse sanctuary, told the Times that the agency tells the public that slaughter is off the table while “doing it in plain sight,” and that the horses are the only ones paying a price for it.
The Bureau of Land Management responded with a statement saying it remains committed to placing animals in good homes, protecting their welfare, and meeting its legal obligations to the public.
None of this is brand new, which is part of why it has been able to run so long without a real reckoning. Wild horse slaughter has been documented before through the agency’s adoption programs, where titled horses turned up at auction within days of being adopted, sometimes within 24 hours, with no real consequences for the people flipping them. In 2025 alone, more than 24,000 American horses, wild and domestic, were exported to be slaughtered, roughly 4,000 more than the year before. A federal bill called the SAFE Act would ban shipping American horses out of the country to be killed and close the loophole entirely. It was left out of the 2026 Farm Bill and has never made it through Congress.
The mustang sits on state quarters and in car commercials and all over the branding of the American West. The living version is being sold for the price of two movie tickets and driven to a kill floor in another country.
