Feds trampled by costs of caring for wild horses

What has been largely overlooked, however, is that BLM has for years been breaking the very federal act that mandates the roundups in the first place. And that violation—however understandable it may be—has caused the agency’s costs of managing the herds to skyrocket. The Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 requires the BLM to manage the numbers of wild horses on lands where they’ve historically lived. Part of that management is to keep the herds at a population level that doesn’t threaten their habitat. The agency estimates there are currently 38,000 animals running wild in 10 Western states, about 12,000 more than their ecosystems can sustain. Groups such as the ASPCA, Texas’s Hearts and Horses and Colorado’s The Cloud Foundation call the roundups—known as “gathers” by the BLM—cruel and inhumane. That’s because of the agency’s use of low-flying helicopters to exhaust the horses so that they can be easily corralled and captured. The technique is said to stress and panic the animals, which may be injured in the process of capture. Excess animals are captured and offered to the public through adoptions. According to the 1971 law, the agency is required to euthanize or sell without limitation unadoptable animals. But the prospect of killing perfectly healthy horses, or selling them to owners who might resell them to foreign slaughterhouses, is such an unpopular concept that BLM has refused to consider the options; indeed, at various times, Congress has even forbade the agency from using appropriated funds for such measures...more

BLM is violating the law, as they freely admit and as documented in a GAO report:

The requirements to euthanize excess animals or sell them without limitation “still exist in law,” said BLM spokesman Tom Gorey, “but we’ve made it clear that those options are not on the table.” That puts BLM in violation of the law, Gorey said. “Or a more gentle description is ‘noncompliance.’” The GAO report, published in 2008, offers a frank reason for why: “Various BLM officials at different levels of responsibility also told us that the agency has not complied with these provisions because doing so would cause an immediate threat to the careers of any officials involved, due to the anticipated negative reaction of the public and Congress.”...

Another example of the Ruling Class violating the law while holding private citizens accountable for every move they make.