Under the Trump administration, the federal government is sending wild horses straight into the meat grinder.

An investigation by the New York Times found that the Bureau of Land Management is rounding up thousands of these free-roaming animals and selling them to private buyers for pennies on the dollars, who then sell the horses to slaughterhouses at a huge profit. 

Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but the investigation found that the agency is exploiting a legal loophole to offload the animals so it can save it millions of dollars it’d have to spend taking care of them.

“The BLM is saying to the public that slaughter is off the table, but they’re doing it in plain sight using a third party,” Clare Staples, who runs an Oregon wild horse sanctuary called Skydog Ranch, told the NYT. “There are simple steps the bureau could take to end this, but they are turning a blind eye. And the only ones getting punished for what is going on are the horses.”

The government has sold wild horses in the past, but the practice has gone into overdrive during the Trump administration. In 2025, sales doubled to more than 3,700 horses, the NYT found in bureau records. As the reporting notes, Project 2025, the conservative policy paper that has served as the playbook for Trump’s second term, lays out a plan for killing horses to cut government costs.

Read More