To everyone who loves the American mustang, including the ones who voted for the man in this letter,
You already know what a wild horse means. You’ve seen one running loose on a ridge, or you’ve just seen the calendar photo and felt something anyway. Congress felt it too, once, badly enough to write it into law: wild horses and burros, the statute says, are “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West,” and they “enrich the lives of the American people.” That is not an activist’s language. That is the United States Code, at 16 U.S.C. § 1331.
This letter grants you something first. Donald Trump talks about wildlife more than most presidents do, and he talks about it like it matters to him. For years he has posted about eagles falling out of the sky and whales dying “in numbers never seen before,” always blaming wind turbines. Whatever else is true about that habit, it isn’t the voice of a man who doesn’t care about animals. Hold onto that. It’s about to get harder to square.
What he says he’s defending
In January he posted three times in one morning: an eagle “going down,” birds “killed by the millions,” and this:
“Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!”
One of the dead-bird photos he shared wasn’t even an eagle. It was a falcon, photographed in Israel in 2017. He’s been saying versions of this since at least 2020, when he told a national debate audience wind power “kills all the birds,” and since 2023 he’s separately claimed offshore turbines are driving whales “batty” and killing them at rates never seen before.
Some of the bird claim is real, at a much smaller scale than “millions”: wildlife regulators did fine a wind company thousands of dollars in 2025 after two bald eagles were found dead near its turbines, one in Nebraska, one in Illinois. That’s a real enforcement action for two real dead eagles, and it’s worth taking at face value. But the whale claim isn’t backed by anyone whose job it is to know. A Duke University marine biologist who sits on the federal Marine Mammal Commission said flatly there is no scientific evidence that wind turbines or wind surveys have caused any whale deaths at all. NOAA’s own reviews of the strandings he’s pointed to found other causes: ship strikes, entanglement, disease.
Overstated, in other words. But sincere-sounding overstatement, the kind a lot of people who love animals fall into.
The horses, meanwhile
Now hold that image next to this one.
Wild horse protection was never a partisan project. Richard Nixon signed it into law in December 1971, after it passed both chambers of Congress without a single no vote. The push behind it came from a Nevada ranch secretary named Velma Bronn Johnston, known to the country as “Wild Horse Annie,” whose campaign against helicopter roundups generated one of the largest volumes of citizen mail Congress had ever gotten, a lot of it from schoolkids writing letters for class. That’s the coalition that built this protection: a working woman, a Republican president, a unanimous Congress, and a wave of kids who’d never voted in their lives.
The law has a hole in it now. A 2004 rider lets the Bureau of Land Management sell any mustang over 10 years old, or one passed over for adoption three times, “without limitation.” The moment it’s sold that way, its federal protection is gone for good. The New York Times reported on August 20, 2026, that this hole has become a working pipeline: buyers pick up mustangs cheap through the BLM’s own sale program, then some resell them, informally, into export channels that end at slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada, the only place left it’s legal to do to an American mustang what’s been illegal to do to it here since 2007. The Times’s reporting centers on an Ohio livestock trader who picked up roughly 500 BLM mustangs and appears, per the paper, to have moved a lot of them that way. Roughly 3,700 wild horses went through the sale program in 2025 alone, more than double the prior pace. And the government’s own numbers make it worse, not better: it costs the BLM around $3,000 to capture a single mustang by helicopter. It has then sold horses out of that same program for as little as $25 apiece.
BLM says none of it is true. Asked directly by the fact-checking outlet Snopes, a BLM spokesperson stated on August 24, 2026, that the bureau does not sell or send wild horses or burros to slaughter, and that anyone violating the terms of a sale is taken seriously. Every buyer signs a promise, in writing, not to do exactly what the Times says is happening. Snopes checked the Times’s reporting on its own and rated the current claim unrated: not proven, not false, because nobody has produced the paperwork tracing one specific government horse all the way to one specific slaughterhouse under this administration yet. That gap is real, and it belongs here plainly instead of papered over.
Here’s what isn’t in doubt, because it already happened once and someone admitted it. A 2015 federal investigation caught a buyer confessing that most of the 1,700 wild horses he bought from BLM between 2008 and 2012, under a different president, went to slaughter anyway. The loophole doesn’t check party registration. It just needs someone willing to use it, and a 2008 government report already found BLM avoided the humane alternative mostly because it worried what the public would think.
That isn’t a rogue field office. It’s policy the administration has asked for twice. Its first budget tried to cut the wild horse program by a quarter and open the door to killing or unrestricted sale of an estimated 64,000 horses and burros sitting in government holding pens, the same animals the roundups exist to “manage.” The program’s own numbers show where the money already goes: it was holding 58,000 formerly wild horses in pens and pastures as of this spring, and spent over $100 million, two-thirds of the entire program’s budget, just keeping them fed last year. The cheaper, non-lethal fix, fertility control, got 921 treatments that same year, while another 7,853 horses were pulled off the range and added to the pile. Here’s the part worth sitting with: the House Appropriations Committee, controlled by the president’s own party, said no to the cuts. In July 2025 that Republican-led committee wrote the protections back in, funded the program at $144 million, and barred BLM from euthanizing healthy horses. In April 2026, the administration tried again, proposing to strip the same congressional slaughter prohibition a second time. As of this writing, that fight isn’t over.
There’s a bill sitting in Congress that would close the loophole outright: the SAFE Act, which has drawn cosponsors from both parties in the past and gone nowhere. It’s still sitting there.
What to do with this
Nobody needs to tell you the eagle posts and the horse paperwork can’t both be sincere. You can see that yourself, and you don’t have to stop caring what happens to eagles to notice it. A Truth Social post costs nothing and proves nothing. A helicopter roundup, a $3,000 capture, a $25 sale, and a truck heading for the border is a budget line with your tax dollars in it, and it happened whether or not anyone posted about it.
If the mustang means what Congress said it means in 1971, then find out where your own representative stands on the SAFE Act and on next year’s Interior appropriations bill, and say so, the same way the letter-writing kids did seventy years ago. That committee held the line once already. It can be asked to do it again.
— Someone who read the budget line
Sources and scope
Everything above comes from named outlets, one federal statute, and BLM’s own program data, linked where each claim actually happens rather than dumped in a list at the end. The Times investigation this leans on is paywalled; what’s here is drawn from advocacy-group summaries and from Snopes’s own excerpts of the Times text, not a full read of the original. Snopes rated the current slaughter claim unrated. That’s in the letter too, right next to BLM’s denial, because leaving either one out would make the case look cleaner than it actually is right now.
