Wild Horses Protected with Passage of ROAM Act

Washington, D.C., July 17th – Congressman Jim Moran, Virginia Democrat, praised today’s passage of the "Restore Our American Mustangs" (ROAM) Act, H.R. 1018, legislation that will protect wild horses and burros from commercial sale and slaughter, while at the same time implementing proactive solutions to manage them in ways that will save millions in tax dollars. The bill passed this afternoon on a 239-185 vote.

“Horses are an inspiration, a symbol of America and the wide open spaces that dominate so much of the country,” said Moran. “The House has voted three times on this issue, its past time it becomes law. Congress has the ways and the means to humanely reduce our wild horse population without resorting to slaughter and this legislation makes that happen.”

The bill, if adopted by the Senate and signed by the President, directs the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to use fertility control more widely, allowing the agency to let horses to occupy more of the public lands they once inhabited.

In addition to prioritizing on-the-range management over roundups, the ROAM Act prevents the commercial sale and slaughter of wild horses, as well as the wholesale killing of healthy wild horses. Last summer, in response to self-inflicted financial problems and mismanagement, the BLM announced that it would consider killing 30,000 healthy wild horses and burros in federal holding centers across the United States rather than implementing common sense, cost-saving management methods.

The ROAM Act allows horses to occupy lands that they formerly occupied, allowing the BLM to find additional, suitable acreage for these animals. Further, it requires consistency and accuracy in the management of wild horse and burro herds, and creates sanctuaries for wild horse and burro populations on public lands. Other management tools contained in H.R. 1018 – more aggressive adoptions, contraception and other management efficiencies – provide long-term savings.

For more than 30 years, wild horses and burros had been protected from commercial sale and slaughter since the passage of the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. A midnight maneuver by former Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., however, gutted these longstanding protections. In the 110th Congress, similar legislation passed the U.S. House of Representatives by more than a two-to-one margin with a vote of 277 to 137. 

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