The Arizona Department of Agriculture Tuesday awarded a contract to a nonprofit group to manage the Salt River wild horses in the Tonto National Forest.
State legislation passed in 2016 led to the contract with the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group.
Simone Netherlands, president of the organization, said absent an agreement, the horses would have been rounded up and sent to slaughter houses. “When they go to auction, they end up being funneled to Mexico and Canada where they are very inhumanely slaughtered," she said. "And then they end up exporting that meat where it’s actually used for human consumption.”
According to Netherlands, her organization will now humanely control the population of horses by darting animals with the birth control vaccine, Porcine Zona Pellucida (PZP).
Congress passed a federal law in 1971 which was aimed at the management and protection of wild horses, but the Salt River Horse Herd was not included in that legislation.
