THE SET-UP: The US government’s “once rare” sales of wild horses “more than doubled to 3,700 horses” during the first year of Trump’s second term. That’s according to a New York Times report on the “loophole” Trump’s regime is using to sell wild horses that’ve been rounded-up by men in helicopters and stored in Bureau of Land Management (BLM) facilities until they can be rehomed and/or adopted.
At least, that what they’re supposed to do with the horses.
Instead, horses are being sold to “hard-luck livestock” traders like Brandon Jones. He’s buying ‘em for twenty-five bucks apiece. He quickly turns around and sells them for a profit to … well, he wouldn’t tell reporter Dave Phillipps, but it’s well-established that horses sold to traders like Jones for a pittance invariably end up in slaughterhouses north and south of the border. That’s despite the fact that it is illegal for the US government to sell them to slaughterhouses.
But they can sell them to people who resell them to slaughterhouses.
That’s the “loophole.”
It’s based on a convenient, disingenuous misreading of the letter of the law that utterly disregards the spirit of the law. The spirit of the law is clear—the American people don’t like the idea of iconic wild horses being slaughtered for human or animal consumption. They don’t really like the idea of horsemeat, period. That’s why BLM is forbidden from selling them to slaughterhouses. But the apparatchiks now running all the Federal agencies were put there to find and/or create “loopholes” through reinterpretation of existing statutes and rules, and through widespread regulatory indifference.
In the case of the wild horses, they’re relying on a technicality … they are not *directly* selling the horses to slaughterhouses. It doesn’t matter that they, Philipps and anyone who knows anything about this story knows full-well that the horses are being flipped to slaughterhouses.
Interestingly enough, culling the wild horses was recommended in the Project 2025 “blueprint” for Trump’s second term. But, Philipps noted, even the architects of that reactionary plan said that Congress “must enact laws permitting the B.L.M. to dispose humanely of these animals.”
That’s “must enact laws” … not “must use a disingenuous reading of the law” to ignore it. But disingenuous readings are the Trump Regime’s specialty. That’s how they are gutting the Endangered Species Act … just reinterpret “harm” to only include the physical body of a protected species, but not the ecosystems they depend upon to live. And you have to wonder how this callow brand of revisionism is being used at all the agencies. - jp
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