WILD HORSE MEDICINE

I was practically born on the back of a horse and have had horses in my life for as long as I can remember. Today I look out at a pasture full of them, including several BLM mustangs, and over the years I have rescued perfectly sound, beautiful young horses from kill pens. Horses that had absolutely nothing wrong with them except that somewhere along the way they became unwanted, inconvenient or worth more moving through the slaughter pipeline than standing in someone’s pasture. I know these beautiful spirits. I know their intelligence, sensitivity and extraordinary capacity to trust us, even after we have failed them. So my concern about what is happening to America’s wild horses isn’t political or theoretical.

I read the recent New York Times piece about BLM wild horses going to slaughter “under Trump”. It’s outrageous that the media so rarely reports plainly anymore. Even real injustices are packaged into political narratives designed to steer our anger toward a chosen enemy and each other, while obscuring the systems, policies and institutions actually responsible.

The wild-horse crisis is a perfect example.

The horses are being herded physically, while the public is being herded psychologically. They are driven into traps, removed from public lands, warehoused, sold and pushed through a system that has operated for decades. Meanwhile, we are handed a headline telling us exactly who to blame, exactly what emotion to feel and exactly how far we are supposed to look.

That is not journalism. That is narrative management.

And then, of course, there is the media. Because apparently we cannot even talk about wild horses without being herded back into our designated political corrals. We have a well-documented history in this country of intelligence agencies cultivating relationships with journalists and attempting to influence information and public opinion, what most people now loosely refer to as Operation Mockingbird. Whatever name we give its modern descendants, the pattern should at least be familiar by now: take something real, attach it to the most divisive political frame available, and watch the public turn on each other instead of examining the institutions responsible. Left against right. Trump against anti-Trump. Pick a team, pick an enemy, stay angry, and for heaven’s sake don’t look behind the curtain. Whether that division is being deliberately engineered in every instance or simply exploited because outrage sells, the result is remarkably convenient: a population fighting horizontally while very little scrutiny travels vertically toward the agencies, policies, corporations and entrenched systems where accountability actually belongs.

This problem did not begin with one president, one party or one administration. The Bureau of Land Management has been rounding up wild horses for decades. Helicopter gathers are not new nor are long-term holding facilities. Bulk sales, questionable buyers and horses entering slaughter pipelines are not new. The policies that made these outcomes possible were created, expanded and tolerated across multiple administrations.

So when the media reduces the entire issue to “wild horses going to slaughter under Trump,” it is not giving the public the full truth. It is selecting a political frame and using a real injustice as ammunition.

That does not mean current officials should escape scrutiny. If horses are being sold in bulk to buyers with connections to slaughter pipelines, those sales must be investigated. If BLM officials ignore obvious warning signs, they must be held accountable. If the government cannot track these animals from removal to final placement, then the system is not merely flawed. It is negligent. And if anyone is profiting from a pipeline that ends with American horses being slaughtered across the border, expose them.

The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 was supposed to protect these animals. Yet decades of policy decisions have created a system in which wild horses are removed from the range in enormous numbers, held at taxpayer expense and placed into a chain of custody that can ultimately lead to auctions, kill buyers and slaughter.

In 2004, Congress amended the law to allow certain older horses and horses that had been unsuccessfully offered for adoption multiple times to be sold “without limitation.” That language created a dangerous opening. Once the government transfers ownership without maintaining meaningful oversight, the animals can disappear into a private market where accountability becomes nearly impossible.

That is not a minor technicality. It is a direct pathway to abuse.

Between 2008 and 2012, BLM sold 1,794 wild horses and burros to one Colorado livestock buyer. A Department of the Interior Inspector General investigation found that most of those animals ended up going to slaughter.

The Adoption Incentive Program, launched in 2019, offered adopters up to $1,000 to take a wild horse or burro. The program was promoted as a way to increase adoptions, but reporting later showed that some people accepted the money, obtained title to the animals and then moved them through livestock auctions where kill buyers operate. That is a loophole with a government check attached.

But the media’s obsession with assigning the entire problem to one political figure is not accountability. It is evasion. It allows every other administration, agency, contractor, buyer and policy architect to step out of the frame. It turns a decades-long institutional failure into a convenient partisan morality play. One side screams that Trump is killing the horses. The other side dismisses the story as political propaganda. Both sides retreat to their teams while the system continues operating.

That is the trick. The public is encouraged to fight over the headline so nobody follows the chain of responsibility. Division created, hatred orchestrated.

Who authorized the gather? Who approved the sale? Who purchased the horses? Who received title? Where did the animals go? Who profited? Who was warned? Who ignored the warnings? Where is the documentation? Where is the chain of custody? Those are the questions that matter.

Wild horses are being removed from public lands in enormous numbers under Bureau of Land Management policies that define how many animals the agency believes the land can sustain. At the same time, those public lands are used for livestock grazing, mining, energy development and other commercial interests. That conflict deserves far more scrutiny than it receives.

The government claims there are too many horses, yet the public is rarely given a transparent accounting of how population limits are calculated, whose interests influence those limits or how much public land is allocated to commercial use compared with wild-horse habitat.

Helicopters continue to chase wild horses into traps. Tens of thousands of horses and burros are maintained in off-range holding facilities at enormous taxpayer expense. Fertility control and humane on-range management have not been implemented at the scale necessary to reduce removals. And once the government takes custody of an animal, it should be legally and morally responsible for ensuring that animal does not vanish into the slaughter pipeline.

The SAFE Act — the Save America’s Forgotten Equines Act addresses a major part of this problem. It would prohibit the slaughter of American horses for human consumption and prohibit knowingly transporting, buying, selling or donating horses for that purpose.

The bill has bipartisan support. Republicans and Democrats support it. The horses, apparently, are the only ones in Washington refusing to participate in the political identity crisis.

The SAFE Act matters because even though horse-slaughter plants are not currently operating in the United States, American horses can still be moved through auctions, brokers and kill pens and transported across the border for slaughter. That pipeline must be closed. Not discussed endlessly or studied until the animals are gone. Closed.

Congress should pass the SAFE Act. The public should demand it. BLM should be forced to disclose every bulk sale, every buyer, every transfer and every final destination. The agency should be required to maintain a verifiable chain of custody for every wild horse and burro removed from public land.

Where’s the transparency from BLM? We need to demand accountability for bulk sales. Demand independent investigations. Demand accurate population data. Demand a full accounting of public-land use. Demand humane, effective fertility-control programs. Demand an explanation for why taxpayers are spending enormous sums to maintain a system that repeatedly produces indefensible outcomes. And do not allow a politically engineered headline to convince you that this began with Trump.

It did not.

The system was broken before Trump. It was broken during Biden and Obama. It was broken during Trump’s first administration. If the underlying policies remain unchanged, it will still be broken after the next president takes office. That is the truth the headline is designed to hide.

Perhaps that is part of the lesson the horses are bringing us.

In this Year of the Horse, I keep sensing something deeper than politics. Horses are perceptive and responsive to what is real. They notice tension before we acknowledge it. They respond to fear, dishonesty and instability long before people are willing to name what is happening.

Maybe these wild horses are asking us to develop that same discernment.

Pause and look beneath the headline. Follow the policy, the money, the chain of custody. Identify who benefits, who is protected and who is being sacrificed. Then take responsibility for the information we consume and the conclusions we repeat.

They are being herded physically, while we are being herded psychologically.

That is the mirror.

Their story shows us what happens when freedom is taken away and living beings are reduced to numbers inside a powerful system. It also shows how easily we participate in our own manipulation when we react before investigating, choose sides before understanding and allow someone else to define the enemy for us. This is where a little “truther” instinct is useful. Not the lazy belief that everything is fake, but the refusal to accept the first official story as the complete story.

Go one layer deeper. Ask what was omitted. Ask who benefits from the framing. Ask why the public is being directed toward one villain while the larger system remains untouched. Disclosure is not just about dramatic revelations. Sometimes disclosure is the moment people recognize that the story they were handed was deliberately incomplete.

This story is incomplete.

The horses deserve better than becoming another weapon in the endless Trump-versus-no-Trump circus. They deserve better than political slogans, bureaucratic excuses and media narratives designed to generate outrage without producing accountability. They deserve people willing to look directly at what has been happening to them for decades—and unwilling to look away.

That is the medicine they are offering. But medicine only works if we are willing to take it.

Stop accepting the packaged story and letting political operatives choose your enemy. Stop confusing outrage with action. Follow the evidence. Demand the records. Name the institutions. Expose the pipeline. Pass the law. Hold every responsible person accountable, regardless of party. That's how we get things done. TOGETHER!

The horses are not asking us to pick a side.

They are forcing us to see the system.