Wyoming lawmakers have drafted a resolution asking Congress to strip away long-standing protections for wild horses and burros. If it succeeds, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) could kill healthy horses that haven’t been adopted. Private landowners could chase horses down with helicopters and trucks to capture or kill them. And federal money would flow again to horse-meat inspections, opening the door to slaughtering horses for food in the U.S.

The resolution is coming out of the Wyoming Legislature’s Select Federal Natural Resource Management Committee and will be considered during next year’s legislative session. Committee leaders have even talked about recruiting other Western states to join the push.

For more than 50 years, federal law has barred the government from killing healthy, unadopted wild horses. When Congress passed that law, it called these animals “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West,” according to the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. Horse slaughter for human food has also been effectively blocked in the U.S. since Congress stopped paying for the inspectors needed to sell horse meat.

The frustrations behind this resolution are real. The BLM estimates Wyoming has about 7,100 wild horses, far above the agency’s population target, and there’s no set deadline for the BLM to remove horses that wander onto private land. But there are fixes that don’t end with killing horses or sending them to slaughter: faster response times for landowners, more adoptions, and humane population control on the range.

Wyoming’s wild horses are part of the story of the American West. They shouldn’t be hunted from the air or sold as meat. The committee should drop this resolution, and Congress should keep the protections that bar killing healthy wild horses.

Sign the petition to protect Wyoming’s wild horses from slaughter before this resolution reaches next year’s legislative session.