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WASHINGTON - Thousands of wild horses that run free across 10 Western states will be stripped of federal protection enjoyed for more than three decades under a provision slipped into a spending bill headed for the president's desk.

"We've now gone back to the days when horses can be sent to slaughter indiscriminately and in massive numbers," said Mike Markarian, president of The Fund for Animals. "It's a huge setback for horses."

Montana Republican Sen. Conrad Burns added language to a spending bill funding the bulk of domestic programs that requires the Bureau of Land Management to sell horses that are more than 10 years old or have not been adopted in three attempts.

The 33-line provision undoes protections Congress granted the horses in 1971, as it identified the animals as icons of the untamed West.

Current BLM rules require adopted horses to be kept for a year before they can be sold to slaughter and allows an individual to adopt four horses at a time, limits meant to deter the animals from being adopted and slaughtered for profit.

Burns' language would allow buyers to buy old or unadopted animals and sell them immediately for slaughter.

"We anticipate that this could result in thousands of horses being sent to slaughter for commercial profit," Markarian said.

Burns, who was a fast-talking auctioneer in Montana before he was elected to the Senate, defended the measure, saying it forces the BLM to get serious about its adoption program.

Former BLM Director Pat Shea, now a Salt Lake City attorney, said he had pushed for population control for the horses, gelding stallions and sterilizing the mares to keep herds in check, but he was met with resistance from cowboys and animal rights advocates and the problem grew unchecked.

"They're such healthy animals that they live beyond their normal lifetime, so you have 30-, 35-year-old horses with U.S. taxpayers paying for them," Shea said. "So I think Burns, after the 2004 elections, decided that this is the time to go ahead and whack 'em."

"These animals live in poor conditions that often lead to their deaths, and without proper management this will continue to happen," Burns said in a statement. There are more than 14,000 horses in BLM corrals, including 700 in two Utah facilities.

"While their sale is a last resort, it is our hope that bringing this problem to light will motivate the federal agencies and horse advocates alike, and offer new opportunities to find these animals proper, caring homes," Burns said. Money from the sales would go to support adoption programs.

BLM spokeswoman Celia Boddington said the Interior Department did not ask for the changes. Once President Bush signs the bill, it will take the department several months to implement the changes.

"We're not going to speculate at this stage on the number of horses it might affect and we're certainly going to continue with the adoption program," she said.

There are an estimated 37,135 wild horses and burros roaming the West, including 2,745 in Utah. But the herds have come into conflict with cattle herds that graze on the federal lands and compete for forage.

The National Cattlemans Beef Association supported the Burns provision, said association spokeswoman Karen Batra.

"The alternative would be more wild horses and burros starving to death and being abandoned out on the Western plains," Batra said.

The BLM has set goals to reduce horse populations to 28,650 through roundups and adoptions. But adoptions have not kept pace with the roundups, forcing the BLM to care for 14,000-plus horses.

Six years of drought have forced the BLM to round up more horses than usual, but at the same time adoptions have been down for the past several years, said Gus Warr, wild horse and burro specialist in the Utah BLM office.

"The money that is sent to us to run this program is not being spent . . . managing animals on the range," Warr said. "Instead it's going to the feeding and holding of these animals in holding corrals."

There are about 700 wild horses in holding corrals in Utah, Warr said. About 400 are in Herriman and another 300 are in a short-term facility near Delta, although a third of those will be bound for Oklahoma and Kansas today.

Even with the current protections, about 600 horses are sold to slaughter annually. The meat is generally sold in Europe and Japan. For the six months ending in August, 285 wild horses were processed legally at U.S. slaughterhouses.

But the Burns provision makes selling wild horses to slaughter more profitable, said Howard Crystal, a Washington attorney for animal welfare groups that sued the government over its management of the herds.

Markarian said his group hopes to capitalize on a "groundswell of outrage" resulting from the change, and will try to fix it when Congress returns next year.