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.

Buyers stand to make a healthy chunk of change. It can cost the government up to $3,000 to capture each mustang — which sometimes requires the use of helicopters — and then bring one to market, but it only sells each horse for as little as $25. The buyers can then sell the horses for up to $750 each at a slaughter plant, making it a surprisingly lucrative investment.

To facilitate this practice without breaking any laws, the BLM first needs to put the horse up for adoption. When it fails to be adopted through an online marketplace after three weeks, the horse can legally be put up for sale. An adopted wild horse, crucially, receives special government protections, but a sold one doesn’t.

Because a buyer legally can’t slaughter a horse or “knowingly” sell it to anyone who intends to, they then resell the horse to a middleman, who is under no obligation stopping them from selling the horse to slaughter. 

The investigation found that the 3,700 horses that the BLM sold last year ended up on trucks bound for slaughter plants in Canada. By off-loading the thousands of horses, according to the NYT, the agency estimated that it saved around $56 million.

One of the BLM’s missions is to protect wild horse populations. But by rounding them up and selling them at such low cost, it’s essentially accelerating their annihilation, experts say.

“The BLM is using sales in a way that was never intended by the law to send young, healthy wild horses into the slaughter pipeline,” Patricia Miller, the director of American Wild Horse Conservation, told the NYT.

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