Utah and U-S officials say swollen populations of federally protected wild horses roaming 10 western states are starved and damaging rangelands.
Members of Utah's congressional delegation and a U.S. Interior Department official speaking at the National Horse and Burro Summit in Salt Lake City all described an unsustainable population of wild horses that's nearly three times the size that federal officials think the rangeland can support.
Horse-protection groups who weren't allowed into the Utah State University-hosted event protested outside the downtown hotel where it was held, calling it a ``slaughter summit'' that's kowtowing to livestock interests, promoting increased roundups and slaughter of wild horses from California to Colorado without public input.
A report made public last week noted that the U-S Bureau of Land Management removed nearly 135-thousand horses from the range between 2000 and 2016 but the population on the range doubled and the number of horses in holding facilities increased seven-fold.
