FURIOUS activists have leapt to the defence of the wild mustang, the quintessential symbol of the American West which has roamed free from the threat of hunters for a generation, after the US Government lifted a ban on its slaughter.

After farmers and ranchers complained that the wild horses were destroying cattle grazing lands, the US Congress repealed in December a 34-year-old prohibition on killing them. Now pressure groups, dismayed at the prospect of the beasts being turned into horsemeat, are lobbying to restore the hunting ban.

“It’s an atrocity,” said Betty Kelly, a founder of Wild Horse Spirit, an advocacy group in Nevada. “They really don’t care about these horses. It is really a slap in the face for the American people.”

The new law, which was attached to a general spending bill by a Republican congressman, allows for the sale for slaughter of horses older than 10 years, and unwanted mustangs that remain unadopted after three consecutive offerings. Currently mustangs are rounded up every few years under a government-run programme in order to reduce the wild population, estimated at 33,000 across ten western states. Before the new law, they had to be placed with new owners. Animal rights groups claim about 8,900 horses and burros (donkeys) could be subject to slaughter.

Officials with the US Bureau of Land Management, which is responsible for rounding up the mustangs, said that the agency was working hard to find homes for all the horses now subject to slaughter. “We realise it is a challenge, but we think there are owners out there that would provide the kind of care we are looking for,” said Tom Gorey, a spokesman.

Farmers’ interests versus mustang protection has been a troublesome issue for US politicians since the 1950s, when Nevada’s Velma Johnson — also known as Wild Horse Annie — rounded up hundreds of children to help to persuade Congress, in 1959, to ban the use of motor vehicles to hunt mustangs. Congress later passed the Wild Horse and Burro Protection Act, in 1971. Aides to Conrad Burns, the congressman who successfully pushed for the ban to be lifted, said they had been fielding angry calls from across America.

“People have this Hollywood image of Black Beauty running free suddenly being rounded up by helicopter and marched to the slaughterhouse,” a spokesman for Mr Burns told The Washington Post. “That is absolutely not what is going on here. We are faced with them either starving to death or being kept in feedlot-like conditions. That’s not them being free.”

A Democrat congressman, Nick Rahall from West Virginia, introduced a Bill to Congress last month that would ban the sale and slaughter of wild horses, and prohibit human consumption of horesmeat. Its chances are not good.

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