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<\/span><\/p>\nThe Bureau of Land Management doesn\u2019t plan to follow an advisory board\u2019s recommendation to euthanize about 45,000 wild horses and burros that are currently in holding facilities, the agency said Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite the recommendation, the BLM will not euthanize or sell without limitation any healthy animals,\u201d agency spokeswoman Courtney Whiteman told The Huffington Post in an email.\u00a0The BLM will issue a \u201cformal response\u201d at the next board meeting in spring 2017, she added.<\/p>\n
Animal rights groups,\u00a0including\u00a0the Humane Society of the United States<\/a> andIn Defense of Animals<\/a>, condemned the recommendation the advisory group made last week,\u00a0and said that accepting it would betray the BLM\u2019s responsibility to the horses.<\/p>\n \u201cThey have a commitment to these animals,\u201d Gillian Lyons, the HSUS\u2019s Wild Horse and Burro Program manager, told HuffPost. \u201cThey took them off the range.\u201d<\/p>\n Although some news outlets\u00a0stated that the BLM<\/a> or the \u201cgovernment<\/a>\u201d voted to euthanize the horses, this wasn\u2019t true true. The\u00a0National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board<\/a>, an independent body that advises the BLM on matters pertaining to wild equines, made the recommendation.<\/p>\n Even if the BLM had accepted the plan, it would have taken some time for it to be implemented. The 2016 Interior Appropriations Bill<\/a> prohibits using federal funds to send horses to slaughter or to euthanize healthy animals \u2014 meaning the language would have to be changed in the next bill for the recommendation to actually go through.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So many animals are in holding facilities because the BLM periodicallyrounds up wild horses and burros to remove them<\/a>\u00a0from public lands. The agency says this is to curb overpopulation<\/a> and protect the environment<\/a>, but critics accuse it of catering to the whims of cattle ranchers <\/a>who want rangelands for themselves.<\/p>\n There were 44,111 wild horses and 1,080 burros in BLM holding facilities in July, according to the agency\u2019s data.<\/a> (By comparison, the agency estimated in March there were about 70,000 free-roaming horses and burros across 10 western states.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Equine behaviorist Sue McDonnell, who sits on the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board and voted for the euthanasia recommendation, said many of the horses are stuck in facilities that are inadequate for long-term care. She emphasized that she was speaking as an individual, not on behalf of the board.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not a reasonable quality of existence they\u2019re in,\u201d she told HuffPost. \u201cThey\u2019re basically in dry lot pens, there\u2019s no natural vegetation. It\u2019s not the way anyone would keep their horses, you know. Those are the horses right now.\u201d<\/p>\n These facilities are dubbed \u201cshort-term corrals,\u201d but McDonnell said that in most cases they are \u201cnot short-term.\u201d\u00a0However, she praised BLM\u2019s efforts to house some horses on large pastures or in\u00a0ecosanctuaries<\/a>\u00a0that tourists can visit.\u00a0According to the July data,<\/a>\u00a0about 562 horses were in ecosanctuaries and 31,000 were in \u201clong-term pastures.\u201d About 13,000 horses and burros were in short-term corral<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The BLM \u201cadopts\u201d out horses<\/a>, but there just isn\u2019t enough demand for the large number that the agency has.\u00a0The board\u2019s new recommendation, McDonnell said, also included a suggestion to remove some of the red tape involved in the adoption process to encourage more people to take in the animals.\u00a0(The BLM maintains that its policy is not to sell to \u201ckill buyers\u201d that send horses to slaughter, although they were documented in recent years doing exactly that.<\/a>)<\/p>\n McDonnell said she considers the recommendation to be less of a demand for euthanasia, and more of a cry for help because the horses are in a desperate situation.<\/p>\n Criticisms of how the BLM manages wild horses will likely remain. Numerous animal welfare groups have vehemently opposed BLM\u2019s roundup-and-remove strategy<\/a>, which involves chasing down animals with helicopters \u2014 sometimes leading to horse injuries or deaths\u00a0\u2014 and often separating strongly bonded social groups.<\/p>\n That said, even the HSUS concedes<\/a> that having too many horses under the wrong conditions can lead to problems. Horse overgrazing can quickly deplete the food supply, especially in drier areas, and\u00a0make way for invasive plant species<\/a> that provide poor nutrition and destroy native vegetation.<\/p>\n Some advocates, including Lyons, argue in favor of implementing widespread fertility control \u2014 specifically, a vaccination known as PZP.<\/a><\/p>\n PZP faces some criticism \u2014 both from skeptics like McDonnell, who cited the difficult logistics of administering it to far-reaching, hard-to-access horse populations, and advocates who\u00a0believe the drug could be harmful<\/a>. However,\u00a0it has garnered the support of the National Academy of Sciences, which referred to it as one of the\u00a0most promising fertility-control methods available<\/a>\u00a0in a 2013 report.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/img.huffingtonpost.com\/asset\/scalefit_630_noupscale\/57d8787d1300002b0039bcd5.jpeg?cache=qw3whkg1ao\")
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