Cowboy culture is a huge part of the American identity with horses being at the forefront of that idea so it’s disgusting how under President Donald Trump wild horses are being slaughtered in mass.
In an article Aug. 20, The New York Times reported how the Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses, is quietly selling thousands of mustangs for as little as $25 each to buyers with no history in the wild horse world.
One man in Ohio has bought roughly 500 horses from the government in the past year alone. Trucks have been seen leaving his property at midnight, and the horses are not seen again.
Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but according to the article, the bureau’s actions created a loophole that enables people to get wild horses for cheap and then quickly resell them to be exported alive and then killed and processed into meat and sold abroad.
As a Texas native, I’ve grown up around horses. I was barely a year old the first time I was sat on a saddle on the back of my little pony Pee-Wee.
I’ve been stepped on, slobbered on and I’ve raked countless amounts of stalls and yet I find comfort in horses while many people complain about their smell at rodeos.
Working with horses is in my blood. My grandparents were ranchers, and they taught me how to be a hard worker but most importantly, they taught me compassion for all animals big and small.
So naturally after reading this article, I felt every negative emotion known to man. I became so angry all I could do was sob uncontrollably for 20 minutes before deciding to write this piece.
My grandpa worked on a horse racing ranch in Oklahoma for most of my childhood. On this ranch was a horse named Brick. Brick was a grandson of the famous racehorse Secretariat, and he had the nepotism attitude you would expect from a stud of his lineage.
We as kids were always told to never turn our back to him because he would take that as a chance to bite us, which he had done many times to my grandpa. But as long as you faced him head-on, he was incredibly kind. His soft nose and scratchable ears made it impossible not to pet him. He was spunky and sassy, but nonetheless, he was lovable.
All horses deserve to be loved, not to be shipped off to slaughterhouses and their meat to be sold internationally. Horses are so intelligent, both mentally and emotionally. Sure, some horses can have an attitude, but deep down they are good.
According to the NYT article, the government’s sales of wild horses were rare but started to rise after Trump took office and in 2025 the sales more than doubled to 3,700 horses.
Now, horses might not be everyone, and that’s OK, but we can’t deny that our public lands are under attack. Between the wall being built in the Big Bend National Park and now the rounding up of thousands of mustangs that roam public lands, we must fight to protect what little we can.
There is a reason why these wild horses are lawfully protected. They belong to public lands. They deserve to live.
