Equine Advocacy

Dancer’s Legacy Foundation works to promote responsible solutions to preventing and stopping horse abuse.

It is our belief that the horse industry is strengthened by keeping horses healthy and in safe situations as this industry relies on horses for its multi-billion dollar a year revenue. Horses are revered in history throughout the world. America relied on horses (and other equines) for transport during its settlement period and as work partners when the nation was primarily agricultural and horses were used on family farms and ranches. Today horses play a key role in sport and recreation, pleasure, work, and as companion animals. They are not raised as a food animal and should not be part of a slaughter industry.

Horse slaughter is one of the most significant areas of horse abuse in the United States.

Approximately one-percent of the horse population ends up in the slaughter pipeline each year. These horses have other safe and humane options which everyone in the horse industry should work to provide. The idea that horses are disposable items like trash should be abolished. America’s horses are not raised for food. Over the course of their lifetimes they are given numerous substances in the form of medications or other health care products which are banned for use in food animals. The horrific cruelty involved with killing horses for human consumption usually begins long before a horse reaches a kill box at a slaughter plant. There are many false statements about horse slaughter including it’s a way to be rid of old sick horses. The truth is the majority of horses are in good condition and average ages heading to slaughter range from 3 to 7 years. Dancer’s Legacy Foundation is committed to responsibly ending horse slaughter and providing support when possible to efforts which keep horses out of this gruesome trade.

Wild horses and burros are part of a national crisis where they are systematically being eliminated from public lands designated to them by law.

For decades, the 1971 Wild Horses and Burros Act of 1971 has been eroded with amendments to cut protections intended to keep mustangs and burros safe on taxpayer funded public lands as part of a shared use policy. Powerful and wealthy special interests have pressured government agencies charged with managing wild horses and burros to decrease their land usage, round them up annually, and even provide means for them to ship to slaughter which has been fought against by advocates. While some progress with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service has been made, the overall program for wild horses and burros has been one of gross mismanagement and resulted in injury, suffering and death to many of these wild equines. Dancer’s Legacy Foundation is committed to doing what it can to assist with practical, creative and humane solutions to protecting wild horses and burros where they belong, on public lands allocated to them by law.