Euthanizing wild horses

After surviving the ice age, the industrial revolution and the slaughterhouse, America's wild horse population is facing a new threat: the U.S. government. The Bureau of Land Management announced this week that it is considering euthanizing wild horses to curb the population on the range and in federal holding facilities. There are an estimated 33,000 wild horses living in 10 Western states, and another 30,000 living in government corrals. The BLM is billing euthanasia as a way to cope with looming budget cuts, while still maintaining the mustang as a living symbol of the American West. But critics say that the herds have already been thinned to the edge of extinction with periodic roundups and auctions. A century ago, there were around 2 million wild horses roaming the West; now the BLM wants to cut that population to 27,000. In "Mustang," her new history of the wild horse in North America, Deanne Stillman explores why America is destroying the horse it rode in on.
Deanne Stillman: It's shocking. Then again, there's been a move to dismantle the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, which enshrines mustangs as a protected symbol of freedom, since it passed in 1971. And the move is reaching its peak under the Bush administration. For the past eight years, the president has wrapped himself in the flag and now, three days before the Fourth of July, his administration announces plans to exterminate our greatest icon—the very horse we rode in on.
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