Myth that “We can save them all” without contracepting problematic populations both dumps dead dogs in ditches & feeds wild horses to the meat trade
FORTUNA, California; POTEAU, Oklahoma & WAUSEON, Ohio––One might observe that the Miranda’s Rescue saga playing since April 2026 in northern California and the Bureau of Land Management equines-sold-to-slaughter horse opera exposed on August 20, 2026 by Dave Philipps of the New York Times are really just variants on the same dog-and-pony show, starring different species but the same unrealistic public expectations.
Both cases feature “we can save them all” animal warehousing strategies colliding with the reality that only intensive, effective birth control strategies aimed at reducing “them all” to a tiny fraction of the present numbers of dogs and horses in need of rehoming can actually make saving “them all” a possibility.
Hay & fixing the problem cost about the same
That will cost money, and that ain’t hay, currently running at $170 to $250 a ton on nationwide average.
Another way to look at that is that fixing a big pit female bull or a mustang filly costs about the same as producing a ton of horseshit, but currently the preference of organized animal advocacy, and of animal advocacy donors, appears to lean toward the latter.
Miranda’s Rescue, readers will recall, purported to be a haven for unadoptable dogs, mostly pit bulls, somehow able to rehome them by the hundreds from a location along the so-called Lost Coast of northern California, just around the corner from the middle of nowhere.
“In June 2026,” summarized Matthew Gafni for the San Francisco Chronicle, “Humboldt County sheriff’s investigators served a search warrant on Miranda’s Rescue,” after ANIMALS 24-7 published two exposés in the preceding week describing neighbor Jennifer Raymond’s years of effort to expose the place, “and found 117 intact dog remains, 29 canine skulls, 91 pet tracking microchips and 661 dog collars while excavating the property.”
Miranda’s Rescue was small-time compared to the BLM wild horse racket
“Shannon Miranda, who runs the rescue, told investigators he routinely shot to death as many as 10 dogs a month that he deemed ‘unadoptable,’ according to court records, ” Gafni wrote.
“Miranda has not been arrested or charged.”
Meanwhile, Gafni continued, “Over the past six years, Oakland shelters sent 827 dogs to Miranda’s Rescue, paying the nonprofit $376,000 in transfer fees which were ostensibly to cover the long-term costs to care for each dog. Dozens of public facilities across California and beyond transferred dogs to Miranda to avoid euthanasia and give them another chance at adoption.”
(See How did Miranda’s Rescue manage to disappear so many dogs for so long?)
But Miranda’s Rescue was almost small-time compared to what happened to as yet untold thousands of wild horses.
“Multi-colored band of 68 wild mustangs”
Dave Philipps of the New York Times, visiting both Poteau, Oklahoma, and Wauseon, Ohio, to get the whole manure scoop, traced the fate of “a multi-colored band of 68 wild mustangs” who ” had never been saddled or corralled,” but “had run free through the desert mountains of the West” until “the federal government rounded them up with helicopters, as it has with tens of thousands of other mustangs, in an attempt to control wild populations on public lands.
“The horses were held for years in a feed lot in Idaho,” Philipps wrote, “while the government tried to find them what it called ‘loving homes.’”
In March 2026, however, “The horses were packed into echoing metal trailers and trucked 1,800 miles east to the pens of a hard-luck livestock trader in Ohio named Brandon Jones.”
Jones 35, of Wauseon, Ohio, bought the horses for $25 each, Philipps reported.
“The mustangs disappeared”
“A day later,” Philipps continued, “two double-decker cattle trucks pulled up at midnight, loaded the mustangs, and quickly drove off into the night.
“From there the mustangs disappeared. They never appeared at a public auction. The trader won’t say where they went. Wild horse advocates suspect the horses were shipped to slaughter.”
The bottom line, Philipps found, is that “All over the country the Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses, is quietly selling thousands of horses to buyers like the one in Ohio.
“Slaughtering wild horses is illegal,” Philipps acknowledged, “but the bureau’s actions create a loophole that enables people to get mustangs on the cheap and then quickly resell them to be exported alive, processed into cuts of meat and sold abroad.
“Wild horse sales rose after Trump took office”
“The U.S. government’s sales of wild horses were once rare,” Philipps explained, “but started to rise after President Donald Trump took office. In 2025, they more than doubled to 3,700 horses, according to bureau records.
Brandon Jones, who has purchased “about 500 horses,” according to Philipps’ examination of public records, “said he was able to resell the horses quickly though he didn’t advertise online or even post a FOR SALE sign at his corral. He would not say where the horses went and denied selling any to slaughter.”
Currently, Philipps reported, “About 73,000 wild horses roam federal public lands in the West, where they are protected from hunting or capture. For decades, in an attempt to keep the population sustainable, the bureau has rounded up 9,500 on average each year and offered them for adoption. But it finds adopters for only about half.
“The holding system”
“The rest go into a labyrinth of feedlots and pastures that the bureau calls ‘the holding system.’ The system now stores 58,000 wild horses at an annual cost of $100 million. Caring for them eats up most of the bureau’s $142 million wild horse budget.
“Over the years,” Philipps recounted, “bureau leaders have floated various lethal proposals for reducing the herds, including using sharp shooters, selling horses directly to slaughterhouses and building a gas chamber. But Congress — aware that the public wants mustangs protected — has barred the bureau from spending any money to kill healthy wild horses.
“The recent surge in sales,” Philipps continued, “is not the first time the Trump administration has taken actions that indirectly enable horses to be sent to slaughter. During Trump’s first term, a program that paid people $1,000 to adopt a wild horse had similar results.”
This has been by strategic design.
Heritage Foundation want to kill wild horses
“Project 2025, a policy paper by the Heritage Foundation that in many ways has acted as a blueprint for the second Trump administration,” Philipps narrated, “argued that the bureau needs to be able cut costs by killing horses and said that Congress ‘must enact laws permitting the B.L.M. to dispose humanely of these animals.’”
Then Philipps got around to the nub of the problem.
“For 20 years,” Philipps mentioned, the Bureau of Land Management “has had access to inexpensive fertility control drugs delivered by dart gun. They have been used effectively to control a few wild herds, and the government’s own experts have repeatedly urged the bureau to use them more widely.”
“But because the bureau is spending so much on storage,” Philipps alleged, “it has little left to make the changes that would save it from storing more.”
(Merritt Clifton collage)
Opposition to contraception
Philipps did not mention the adamant opposition of some advocacy groups, notably Friends of Animals and Protect Mustangs, to contracepting wild horses.
Friends of Animals in particular has often stopped or delayed contraceptive projects with lawsuits.
(See BLM to gather 575 Nevada wild horses, thanks to Friends of Animals’ “victory”, and Suspension of PZP test means more people could eat a horse.)
Instead of contracepting wild horses, Philipps outlined, the Bureau of Land Management uses “a series of bureaucratic maneuvers and financial transactions to transform them on paper into domestic livestock, stripping their legal protections.
“First the bureau has to show a wild horse can’t be adopted. It does this by posting hundreds of horses at a time on its online adoption site. After a horse has three one-week listings with no takers, the law permits the government to designate the horse as unadoptable.”
Then the horse can be put up for sale, “an important legal distinction,” Philipps explained, “because a wild horse who is adopted retains federal protection,” whereas a wild horse who is sold “loses protection immediately.”
Selling horses in 2025 saved BLM $56 million
“A sold horse still can’t be legally killed — at least not yet,” Philipps continued, since buyers have to sign a contract pledging that they will not “knowingly” resell wild horses to slaughter.
“But if the buyer resells to a middleman without asking questions, the buyer is safe from prosecution,” Philipps said.
Selling 3,700 wild horses in 2025 saved the Bureau of Land Management about $56 million, Philipps estimated.
“While quietly selling truckloads of horses to private traders,” Philipps noted, the Bureau of Land Management “plasters its website with photos of loving owners hugging and kissing their mustangs.”
Posting “happy endings”
That sounds a lot like how Shannon Miranda managed the Miranda’s Rescue website and Facebook page, posting many purported happy endings while more than 700 dogs transferred to Miranda’s Rescue disappeared and are still missing.
“Brandon Jones appeared out of nowhere in the wild horse world last spring,” Philipps wrote, “and quickly became the Bureau of Land Management’s biggest buyer, bureau records show.
“He got his start in mustangs after two of his previous livestock auction businesses folded, leaving a string of debts.”
When Philipps visited Jones’ facility near Wauseon, Ohio, 31 miles west of Toledo, Jones claimed, “I’m not dealing with traders. I’m dealing with a farmer, come up the road, who wants to buy a horse.”
“Knew the current price of horse meat”
Responded Philipps, “Shown photos and video of the trucks of horses that left his property at midnight — taken by a local wild horse lover and shared with The Times — he questioned whether it had happened.”
Backtracking Jones’ dealings with the Bureau of Land Management, Philipps learned that his application to buy wild horses for a year “sat at the bureau with no action. Then, in March 2025, a federal court ordered an end to one of the bureau’s leading ways of offloading horses — the program that paid adopters $1,000 per horse.
“A few weeks later, Jones’s application was approved.”
Jones, “Over the course of discussing his business,” Philipps observed, “he did not mention any training or the challenges of finding owners for wild mustangs, but he spoke about five of the region’s slaughter traders, whom he knew by name, and the current price of horse meat.
Others flipping sale horses too
“Other people all over the country,” Philipps charged, “are flipping sale horses at a smaller scale,” as ANIMALS 24-7 has several times previously exposed.
(See Alleged “horses for ransom” brokers busted in Louisiana.)
In April 2026, Philipps narrated, the Bureau of Land Management held a two-day “adoption event” in Poteau, Oklahoma.
“The brands of at least 55 of the mustangs sold at the Oklahoma event,” Philipps charged, “showed up a few days later in Kansas and Texas, where the horses had been resold to large livestock auctions frequented by slaughter buyers, according to sales records gathered by wild horse protection groups.
“The pattern has repeated at more than a dozen events,” Philipps alleged. “Wild horse organizations say they have documented more than 250 mustangs who were bought from the bureau and quickly dumped in the past 12 months, but said they have most likely missed many more.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Where in Canada?
Philipps and the horse protection organizations he used as sources believe most of the missing horses are trucked to slaughter in Canada.
One problem with that theory is that the Bouvry Exports horse slaughterhouse in Fort MacLeod, Alberta, by far the closest to the Bureau of Land Management wild horse storage facilities, closed at the end of April 2026.
(See Risk of horse slaughter resuming in U.S. offsets Bouvry closure in Alberta.)
That leaves only Viande Richelieu, in Massueville, Quebec, still slaughtering horses, more than a thousand miles farther east than was Fort Macleod.
“Until June 2026, when exports were stopped amid concerns over a New World screwworm outbreak, [horses for slaughter] also went to Mexico,” Philipps mentioned.
Flown to Japan?
So where are all the former Bureau of Land Management wild horses going?
One possibility might be Japan. About 11,000 horses have been flown from Canada to Japan for slaughter since 2021.
“The government committed to banning the export of horses for slaughter back in 2021,” says an Animal Justice web page addressing the issue, but “legislation has still not passed to ban this practice.”
None of this is any surprise to ANIMALS 24-7, having headlined on November 9, 2016, after Donald Trump was elected for his first term as U.S. president, Trump election puts 45,000 wild horses at risk––and much, much more.
(Beth Clifton photo/ collage)
Why did it take so long for mass media to notice?
ANIMALS 24-7 noted then “the virtual certainty that a Trump administration will work to reopen horse slaughter in the U.S., to dispose of the [then] 45,000 wild horses who have been removed as ‘surplus’ from Bureau of Land Management grazing land and have not been adopted.
“The BLM National Wild Horse & Burro Advisory Board in September 2016 recommended that the horses now in holding facilities be killed,” ANIMALS 24-7 mentioned.
The only surprise at all about the Trump administration wild horse policy is why it took so long for major mass media to notice.
(Beth Clifton photo/collage)
Dave Philipps noticed, and––though he normally covers military affairs––produced a major exposé. But where was everyone else with media credentials and a camera?
Probably, ANIMALS 24-7 suspects, where they were while pushing fairy tales about Miranda’s Rescue miraculously finding homes for cast-off pit bulls.
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