The $25 Horse

What The Times Found

The Bureau of Land Management sold 6,331 wild horses and burros over a 19-month stretch running from October 2024 into 2026, per Skydog Sanctuary's count of the underlying Times reporting -- with 3,700 sold in 2025 alone, more than double the pace of prior years. Nearly 4,600 of them, 72%, went for $25 or less. More than half were between one and four years old -- prime adoption age, sold instead of placed. Livestock inspection records show mustangs carrying distinctive BLM freeze brands showing up at commercial auctions in Kansas and Texas frequented by slaughter buyers, and from there crossing into Canadian slaughterhouses. At least 55 branded horses were traced that way in the reporting alone.

The mechanism is not exotic. A wild horse that is adopted keeps federal protection against slaughter for a minimum of one year. A horse that is sold loses that protection the moment the sale clears. If the buyer turns around and sells to a middleman who has no contract with BLM, that middleman owes the government nothing and can sell the horse into the slaughter pipeline with no paper trail back to Washington. BLM's own program did the only thing it had to do to make that legal: sell instead of adopt.

Update, August 22, 2026 — The Law That Actually Applies

The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act itself does not prohibit what happened here. Its sale-authority provision, added in 2005, is explicit: an excess animal sold under §1333(e) "shall no longer be considered to be a wild free-roaming horse or burro for purposes of this Act" — and the Act's own criminal slaughter-processing ban carries a built-in exception for exactly that scenario, "except as provided in section 1333(e)." A horse sold this way is written out of its own protections the moment the sale clears. That is not a workaround BLM invented; it is what Congress wrote, on the books since 2005.

The relevant restriction sits somewhere else entirely: a separate appropriations rider, renewed annually and distinct from the 1971 Act, that bars BLM from spending its funds to kill healthy horses or sell them without limits in a way that enables slaughter. For fiscal year 2026 — the exact window this dispatch covers — the Trump administration's own budget request proposed eliminating that rider outright. Congress didn't go along with it: the House passed its FY26 appropriations bill in January keeping the ban, and the Senate Appropriations Committee did the same the previous summer, both rejecting the administration's ask.

So BLM ran this sale program through a year in which its own department's budget request was actively trying to kill the funding restriction that governs exactly this kind of sale, while Congress was actively fighting to keep it in place. That tension is real and documented. Whether BLM's actual conduct crossed the rider's specific line — a sale structured in a way that enabled slaughter, as opposed to a sale that simply carried no legal requirement to prevent it — is not established by anything here or in the original reporting. That remains open.

BLM's public position, for the record, has not changed: the agency says it does not sell or send wild horses to slaughter, and that its sale-authority policy explicitly prohibits transferring an animal to anyone who intends to process it for commercial products, with violations "referred to law enforcement" and carrying potential criminal fines and imprisonment. The Times' reporting is what put that claim under real pressure for the first time in years.

The Buyer With Two Files Open at Once

The Times' central buyer is Brandon Jones, an Ohio livestock trader operating as Jones Livestock out of Wauseon, who acquired 496 wild horses from BLM over the space of a year, largely at the $25 minimum. Jones denied selling any to slaughter when the Times asked, said he resold in small numbers to what he called good owners, and declined to say where the rest went.

What the Times' framing leaves out, and what a direct USDA records pull adds: Jones and his co-operator Cassandra Chapman were already under a live federal enforcement action while this was happening. USDA filed a Packers and Stockyards Act complaint against Jones Livestock on March 6, 2025 -- squarely inside the window the mustang sales were accelerating -- alleging the operation had failed to pay on time for 496 head of livestock worth $336,388 in late 2022, kept inadequate records, and issued checks the bank wouldn't honor. USDA signed a consent cease-and-desist order March 13, 2026. Payments were eventually made in full.

The 2022 nonpayment case covered exactly 496 head. Jones's mustang haul, a different animal, a different set of years, also comes to 496. This Old Goat checked hard for a real connection between those two counts and found none -- it is a genuine coincidence, not a hidden total, and it should be read as one.

Strip the coincidence out and what's left is still worth stating plainly: BLM approved a nearly-500-horse allocation to an operator who was, for most of that same window, the subject of an open federal complaint over failing to pay livestock sellers on time. Whether BLM's vetting process checks for that kind of thing at all is an open question this Old Goat could not answer from public records alone.

The Man Who's Done This Before

The Times reporting, as read by this Old Goat, places Fred Bauer -- an established Ohio kill-buyer -- in the chain shortly after Jones received a batch of mares, with border-inspection photography reportedly showing BLM-branded horses in his trailers. This Old Goat could not independently locate the specific quote attributed to Bauer in the Times' reporting, or an independent confirmation that the horses in his trailers were specifically Jones's; that claim rests on the original NYT investigation as read by this Old Goat, not on a source this Old Goat pulled itself, and is labeled REPORTED rather than DOCUMENTED below.

What is independently documented, from FOIA-based reporting by the horse-welfare investigator Animals' Angels, is that Bauer doesn't need Jones to be in the slaughter business. Bauer Farms of La Rue, Ohio buys close to 7,000 horses a year, is the largest buyer at Ohio's Sugarcreek sale, and ships hundreds of horses a month directly to the Viande Richelieu plant in Quebec -- a real, ongoing, independently sourced pipeline that predates the current controversy entirely. USDA's own enforcement history on Bauer includes multiple violations for shipping foals, "downers," and blind horses, with at least one $1,300 fine for shipping a blind horse to slaughter. As of 2024, official records list Bauer Farms as one of exactly three entities shipping U.S. horses into Canada for slaughter, alongside Pennsylvania's Rotz Livestock and Michigan's James Dutton.

The Canadian end of that pipeline just consolidated. Bouvry Exports' Fort Macleod, Alberta plant -- long the largest horse slaughterhouse in Canada -- shut down for good in mid-2025, confirmed publicly this past May. Bouvry's Quebec operation, run under the Viande Richelieu name, is now the only place in Canada that slaughters horses for meat. Whatever volume BLM's sale program is feeding into Canada now runs through fewer doors than it did two years ago -- and Bauer's documented, years-long relationship with that Quebec plant means the infrastructure to receive it was already standing before anyone had heard of Brandon Jones.

Paid Twice, Regardless of Where the Horse Ends Up

The part of this story with the cleanest paper trail is also the part that gets the least attention: the federal contracting economy built around removing horses from the range in the first place, which gets paid whether a given horse is adopted, warehoused for a decade, or ends up on a truck to Quebec.

Those four contractors total $83.3 million in documented federal awards. The figures come from American Wild Horse Conservation's contracting analysis; this Old Goat spot-checked the largest, Cattoor, directly against USAspending's own award data and found it consistent, including an active 2026 contract to gather roughly 2,000 horses out of Nevada's Callaghan Complex using drive-trapping -- the same basic mechanism that fed the sale program the Times investigated. None of these four contractors' incentives depend in any way on what happens to a horse after BLM takes custody. They are paid to remove it from the range and, in Broken Arrow's case, to hold it. The economics of the roundup are completely decoupled from the economics -- and the ethics -- of the sale.

The Other Beneficiary Nobody's Watching

There is a second, quieter constituency that benefits every time a horse comes off public land, whether it's adopted, sold at $25, or shipped to Quebec: the livestock operators permitted to graze the same allotments. BLM's own published numbers for the Twin Peaks Herd Management Area in California and Nevada show the split plainly -- 27,160 animal-unit-months of forage allocated to permitted cattle and sheep, versus 5,808 to 9,792 AUMs for the wild horses and burros actually native to the land, roughly an 82/18 split in favor of livestock. A BLM planning document for a separate Utah project states outright that reducing wild-horse presence would improve forage availability for permitted grazing. This Old Goat found no evidence tying a specific rancher to Jones's specific horses -- that link doesn't exist in the record -- but as a structural matter, every horse BLM removes is forage freed up for someone else's cattle, and that incentive sits underneath the entire program regardless of who buys any individual animal.