After BLM sent a press release yesterday trying to spin the “Sale Program” in a positive light, many of you are asking: The Appropriations bill is set to extend the prohibition against sales without limits, something the Presidential Budget Request omitted. Is this a runaround the law? (BLM Press Release can be found at the bottom of this page)

It is time to close the loophole for good. 

You can sign onto our letter HERE. 

BLM’s new push to “highlight” individual and group sales of wild horses and burros raises serious questions about whether the agency is functionally running around the law and policy limits that were put in place after past sale scandals.​ 

The law, “no sale without limits”

The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was gutted in 2004 by the so‑called “Burns Amendment,” which ordered BLM to sell certain “excess” horses and burros “without limitation,” including age‑10+ animals (or any staff deem “unadoptable” at any age using their “discretion”) and those passed over for adoption three times.​
After public outcry and investigative reporting exposed truckload sales to slaughter‑linked buyers, Congress began using annual appropriations to bar BLM from using funds to kill healthy horses or sell them for slaughter, effectively re‑imposing limits that the Burns language tried to erase.

Beautiful red curly stud from Fish Creek that we watched grow into a band stallion, had no fan club. He was castrated and sent into the oblivion of a system of holding where he could slip to slaughter through “Sale Authority.”

How the sale program became a slaughter pipeline

Wild Horse Education has documented how “sale authority” became a pipeline to slaughter, not a pathway to legitimate homes.​ BLM spent years selling wild horses “by the truckload, sight unseen, for $10.00 each” to middlemen and “brokers” that are, in practical terms, kill buyers, even while insisting it does not “sell to slaughter” in a narrow, technical sense.

In one major scandal, 1,700 wild horses were sold to a single buyer, Tom Davis, with taxpayers even footing the transport bill, and many of those horses ended up in the slaughter pipeline.

These cases helped force BLM to admit problems with the sale program but did not lead to meaningful accountability or structural reform of the pipeline that sale authority created.

The “4 horse limit” and the truckload loophole

In response to the Davis scandal, BLM changed policy in January 2013, stating that an individual could buy no more than four sale horses within a six‑month period and that buyers must provide their own transport.​ However, that the fine print allows BLM to override that “4 horse limit” at the discretion of the Secretary, preserving the ability to move far larger numbers when it suits the agency and its favored buyers. While Congress has barred BLM from directly shipping “truckloads” to kill buyers, the agency can still move horses into the hands of known brokers, where titled animals lose federal protection and can be legally sold into the slaughter system.​

In practice, the “4 horse limit” functions more as a cap on ordinary members of the public, while exceptions and bulk arrangements have historically been made for buyers with the capacity to move entire truckloads, including those with known kill‑buyer connections.

It is notable that BLM changed the language in their new press release from the standard “4 horses or burros per year” to “4 horses/burros every 6 months” without any public input.

BLM’s sales push and the question of evasion

BLM’s new announcement “highlighting” individual and group sales of wild horses and burros comes in the shadow of this history, and it must be read against an existing record where sale authority has repeatedly funneled animals into slaughter channels.

When an agency expands and promotes a program that is structurally vulnerable to abuse—while relying on discretionary loopholes to go beyond public‑facing limits—it invites the charge that it is running around the spirit of “no sale without limits,” even if it technically observes appropriations language on paper.

The use of “group sales” language is especially troubling because past bulk sales “by the truckload” are exactly what investigations and subsequent policy were supposed to end. If BLM now scales up group sales under the same legal architecture that previously delivered 1,700 horses to one buyer, the agency risks recreating the very conditions Congress tried to constrain through appropriations riders.

The “Sale Program” has hit record numbers over the last few years as the public focused on the now defunct Adoption Incentive Program (AIP) that was essentially a program that subsidized those intent on selling their horses or burros to slaughter. 

Adobe Town wild horses rounded up in 2025. How many have already hit the sale market?

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What this signals for the entire program

By expanding and normalizing sales instead of fixing on‑range management, fertility control, and transparency, BLM shifts the program’s center of gravity away from protection and toward disposal.

This trajectory feeds a larger fear among advocates: that the endgame is not reform but dissolution of the Wild Horse and Burro program as a genuine protection framework. Is privatization, creating a subsidy for permittees to “manage” wild horses and burros, on the horizon?

BLM has been using the closing of prison programs to drive sales as they refuse to renew contracts. Will BLM stop renewing all holding facility contracts as they shift toward on-range privatization? That is our real fear. (We are gearing up to fight privatization on the legal front.)

If sale expansion, weakened practical limits, and chronic removal of horses from their ranges continue, the “modernized” program that emerges could be one where the law’s promise—protection from “capture, branding, harassment and death”—has been hollowed out, leaving only a paper statute and a pipeline that quietly moves America’s wild horses off the land and into oblivion.

The “sale authority” pen, Axtell, Utah

​We are watching the situation closely and have discussed reintroduction of the Rahall Amendment from the 109th Congress (the year after the Burns Amendment). It would simply undo the damage to the original law.

For over 20 years Congress has simply “defunded” specific provisions instead of simply invalidating them under law repeating a debate that wastes time and money. BLM has shown time and again that they simply do not care if a wild horse or burro goes to slaughter as long as they can continue to funnel them out of the system. Even when they are fully aware that their actions are landing record numbers into the slaughter pipeline, they have the audacity to repeatedly call it “successfully placing into good homes.”

It is time to close the loophole for good. 

You can sign onto our letter HERE. 

Every mile we travel to cover roundups or assess a herd, every court case we bring, every win, every action we take is only possible because of your support. Thank you for standing with us as we strive for justice, mercy and freedom.

BLM press release (done after the public found out they are selling horses and burros in bulk for as little as $1. each.

BLM highlights individual and group sales of wild horses and burros