In addition to (rightly) ridiculing Dr. Anthony Fauci, Tucker Carlson also raised the issue of slaughtering wild horses on his Fox News show tonight. During his segment he described an adoption program the Bureau of Land Management started in order to help manage the wild horse population. Carlson then interviewed wild horse photographer and advocate Carol Walker on his show in which she essentially accused the Bureau of Land Management as not being engaged to save wild horses at all.

Unfortunately, Carlson’s interview with Walker only tells half the story. Wild Horses are beautiful creatures but they are also subject to the limits of nature. During November of last year, The Washington Post published an excellent article describing the conflict over the creatures in the Western United States that has been going on for quite a while.

Essentially, The Post article points out, not only are ranchers and animal rights activists locked in a fierce conflict over what to do with wild horses, but the article describes in detail the issues ranchers and other proponents of them face when trying to come up with solutions. The wild horse’s populations are growing and slaughtering them in addition to establishing preserves for the horses are the best solutions to address the issue.

The horses aren’t being slaughtered or at times subjected to hunts out of a lack of care or compassion but as a means of preserving them. If there are too many wild horses, they will run out of places to graze and that means many will die of starvation. With elevated wild horse populations it also means cattle ranchers have reduced areas for their stock to feed risking the lives of their livestock.

Animal rights groups, however, vehemently oppose any means of trying to manage the wild horse populations since they obviously prefer the lives of the animals over humans. Simultaneously, The Post‘s article points out, the BLM has never been given the responsibility to manage an animal species before and wild horses and burros are now subject to their jurisdiction on federal lands. Consequently, the BLM is caught between wanting to control the wild horses but are subject to the whims of which political group shouts the loudest.

While Tucker Carlson’s show is primarily an opinion program, he is still a journalist and, hopefully, will interview someone on the other side of the wild horse issue to give the other perspective. It is abundantly clear the animal rights groups who claim to be protecting wild horses are, in fact, weaponizing them to use against cattle ranchers in order to undermine the human consumption of meat and that should be of concern to everyone

PHOTO CREDIT: Semi-feral Exmoor ponies. Though popularly called “wild” horses, feral and semi-feral horses had ancestors that were domesticated. By Marilyn Peddle – originally posted to Flickr as Exmoor ponies, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7781557