Grand Junction, Colorado - The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) thought offering $1,000 for people to adopt wild mustangs would take care of the growing population. It turns out that many are turned around and sold to slaughterhouses as soon as possible.

Animal rights activists have been in an uproar since the New York Times uncovered that the government has been turning a blind eye to wild mustangs that allegedly were "sent to loving homes" being sold to butchers by their new owners.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has seen almost its entire budget eaten up as it tries to manage wild mustang populations that grow by 20% each year. The mustangs compete for grass with stock from cattle ranches and contribute to significant depletion of resources and habitat destruction, according to the BLM.

As the lifetime cost to care for each horse amounted to about $24,000 tax dollars, the BLM came up with an adoption program in 2019 that paid people $1,000 up to four times a year to adopt one of the tens of thousands of horses currently being held in their system.

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Without further ado, thousands of adopters signed up. There were no checks to verify that adopters had requisite facilities to care for the horses.

Records obtained by the New York Times prove that entire truckloads of horses were dumped at slaughter auctions shortly after the adopters received the federal money.

The BLM explicitly bans this kind of barbaric practice: "The bill of sale, among other things, states that the buyer agrees not to process any of the sold horses or burros into commercial products, or to knowingly sell or transfer ownership to any person or organization whose intent is to commercially process the animals."

But a spokesperson said that the agency has no authority to enforce this agreement or to check on the horses once they are placed in their new homes.

Slaughterhouses report that numerous mustangs have been delivered to them by adopters since the grant program began, and the horses are recognizable by their distinctive government branding.

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Animal rights activists are now trying to buy the mustangs from the slaughterhouses, because despite the criticism, the cruel system continues.

One alternative that the government has been trying out is using helicopters to shoot darts filled with a vaccine that functions as birth control into brood mares out on the plains. The strategy is promising, but doesn't yet fix the situation for the over 60,000 mustangs in government holding.