Four Victories for America's Wild Horses! 1. Battling for Wyoming's wild herds Return to Freedom and our co-plaintiffs, Front Range Equine Rescue and photographers Angelique Rea and Meg Frederick, were among those that prevailed in federal appeals court rulings in July affecting wild horse Herd Management Areas in Southwest Wyoming. The court found that the Bureau of Land Management violated the law when it decided to take away 2 million acres from wild herds. The ruling also delayed a planned helicopter roundup. What’s next: Prepare to face off with the BLM in District Court, where a judge must determine a legal remedy. 2. Ensuring protections against lethal management The president’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal left out standard protections that bar the BLM from using the killing of healthy wild horses as a management option. It also called for a 25% funding cut that would have placed the lives of 63,000 captive wild horses at even greater risk. RTF and other organizations successfully lobbied House and Senate Subcommittees that included the protective language in their Interior appropriations bills. Both kept wild horse funding flat even as many federal programs are being slashed. What’s next: Call on Congress to pressure the BLM to stop stalling the use of proven, safe and humane fertility control that can replace capture and removal as the agency’s main management tool. 3. Keeping horse slaughterhouses closed During the first half of 2025, 9,246 American horses were shipped to Mexico or Canada for slaughter— a 19% increase from the same period last year. RTF and its colleagues successfully advocated for the inclusion of Agriculture appropriations bill language stopping the U.S. Department of Agriculture from using tax dollars to hire horsemeat inspectors. The addition of such language to funding bills has created a year-to-year ban that has kept new horse slaughterhouses in the United States from opening since 2007, when the last one closed. What’s next: Advocate for passage of the bipartisan Save America’s Forgotten Equines (SAFE) Act. The bill would place a lasting ban on horse slaughter and close the foreign slaughter pipeline currently has 151 House cosponsors. 4. Preventing the sale of public lands A provision in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a Fiscal Year 2025 budget reconciliation bill, would have forced federal agencies to sell off up to 3.3 million acres of our shared public land. Millions of acres of public land could have been on the chopping block — including land set aside for wild horses and burros. Public blowback resulted in the provision being scrapped before the bill passed. What’s next: Continued vigilance regarding efforts to sell off public land. Opposing a planned repeal of the 2001 Roadless Rule, which protects 60 million acres of public land from development. | 
