Progress for Wild Horses: U.S. House Passes $11 Million for Humane Management

The United States House of Representatives has passed the Fiscal Year 2026 Interior Appropriations bill with critical provisions aimed at protecting America’s wild horses and burros and advancing more humane management practices. The bill allocates up to $11 million of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Program budget for ethical, science-based fertility control using immunocontraceptive vaccines. Importantly, it removes previous references to risky and inhumane permanent sterilization methods that have caused serious harm to horses in the past.

The legislation also bars the BLM from euthanizing healthy wild horses and burros and maintains the longstanding prohibition on sending wild horses to slaughter. These safeguards took on renewed urgency following the Trump Administration’s controversial Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal, which would have slashed funding for the Wild Horse and Burro Program and eliminated protections against horse slaughter, putting tens of thousands of animals at risk.

American Wild Horse Conservation (AWHC) welcomed the bill’s passage, with Board Chair Patricia Miller stating: “This funding represents a meaningful step toward humane, science-based wild horse management. Congress is signaling that there’s a better way forward—one that prioritizes proven fertility control solutions over costly roundups that remove wild horses from public lands.”

For decades, the BLM’s cruel and unnecessary helicopter roundups have resulted in horses being chased to exhaustion, foals being separated from their mothers, and thousands of animals dying or disappearing into a broken system of long-term confinement. Today, over 60,000 wild horses and burros languish in overcrowded holding facilities, where documented animal welfare violations include inadequate veterinary care, insufficient food, and preventable deaths. These roundups do nothing to control population growth and instead fuel a costly cycle of capture and confinement, largely to make room for livestock grazing on public lands.

While this legislation will not immediately end the BLM’s destructive roundup program, expanding the use of humane fertility control has the potential to finally break this cycle and move toward long-term, cruelty-free management. This approach would allow wild horses to remain with their families, roam the lands they have inhabited for generations, and live free from the terror of helicopter chases and a lifetime behind fences.

The bill will now head to the U.S. Senate, where advocates will urge Senators to pass this crucial legislation so it can move one step closer to becoming law.