Washington, DC (March 3, 2010) – Today, as the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hears testimony from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, In Defense of Animals (IDA) and thousands of taxpayers call on Senators to deny the tax-wasting proposed budget submitted by the Department of Interior (DOI) for its Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Wild Horse & Burro Program.

At 10 a.m. (Energy Committee Hearing Room – SD-366) DOI Secretary Salazar is scheduled to testify and justify his budget which includes doubling the appropriations for the Wild Horse & Burro Program from 2010. In addition to an operational budget increase of $12 million, Secretary Salazar is seeking an additional $42.5 million to purchase private land to act as a holding facility for wild horses removed from already owned public lands.

Last year, Secretary Salazar acknowledged that current BLM practices – including its so-called “management” of wild horses and burros by rounding up and removing them from their natural Western ranges – as “unsustainable” yet to date no changes have been implemented.  Secretary Salazar talks about change – but has done nothing to change the agency’s broken, never-ending cycle of rounding up wild horses and stockpiling them in taxpayer-funded holding facilities.

IDA maintains that allocating additional funds to this poorly managed program without serious requirements for reform would be fiscally irresponsible. In FY 2010, Congress increased the BLM’s wild horse management budget by 30 percent. At that time, the Senate Appropriations Committee noted that the current program was unsustainable and directed the agency to change course.

“Instead of implementing humane and cost-effective on-the-range management approaches, the BLM instead used the additional funds obtained last year to continue business as usual, rounding up even more horses, with 12,000 targeted for removal from the West this year alone,” said William J. Spriggs, lead counsel on the pending wild horse lawsuit against DOI and BLM filed by the international law firm Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney on behalf of IDA, renowned ecologist Craig Downer and popular children’s author Terri Farley.  “Now the Secretary is asking for more money for this ill-conceived program and he plans to incur even more costs to taxpayers for his proposed ‘preserve’ in the Midwest or East that is not only fiscally irresponsible but will harm the horses it purports to help.”

“The use of tax dollars to purchase private lands in the Midwest or East to house horses taken from public lands in the West makes no fiscal sense,” said Eric Kleiman, Research Director, In Defense of Animals. “Since privately owned livestock are allocated a far greater share of BLM lands than wild horses, why not let ranchers graze their cattle on private lands in the Midwest and free up publicly-owned resources for wild horses to remain on their natural Western ranges?”

Recently the BLM concluded the largest roundup of wild horses in recent years capturing 1,922 horses in the Calico Mountain Complex in northwestern Nevada; the roundup has to date killed more than 68 horses and caused more than 35 heavily pregnant mares to spontaneous abort.  That roundup proceeded despite a December 23, 2009 ruling by federal court Judge Paul Friedman in the lawsuit filed by Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney questioning the legality of the BLM’s long-term holding facilities and suggesting that the BLM postpone the Calico roundup.

Wild horses comprise a minute fraction (0.5 percent) of grazing animals on public lands, where they are outnumbered by cattle at least 200 to 1. The BLM has recently increased cattle grazing allotments in areas where wild horses are being removed. Currently the BLM manages more than 256 million acres of public lands of which cattle grazing is allowed on 160 million acres; wild horses are only allowed on 26.6 million acres this land, which must be shared with cattle.