Ranchers may be hesitant to adopt older wild horses, as they have been asked to do by a ranchers' group and a federal agency, because of unclear laws on what they can ultimately do with the horses.

Niels Hansen, a Rawlins rancher and chairman of the Wyoming State Grazing Board, said laws are "ambiguous," and it appears ranchers' hands may be tied as to what they can do with any wild horses they buy.

"It's so tough that I have no interest in it," he said.

Last week the Public Lands Council - a ranchers' group - and the Bureau of Land Management sent out 15,000 letters to ranchers who use BLM lands in the West to consider adopting some of the older wild horses now in BLM holding facilities. The BLM says if these horses, numbering about 7,000, are moved, it will make room for more horses to be rounded up from ranges.

The letters are the latest development in the long-running debate over wild horses on public lands in the West. Wild horse advocates say the BLM has failed for decades to protect and preserve America's wild horse herds, while ranchers and some others say overpopulation of wild horses is damaging rangelands.

Pat Fazio, statewide coordinator for the Wyoming Animal Network, questioned why ranchers would want to adopt horses.

"These are the very people that wanted them off the land, and now they want them back?" she said.

A central question in the debate is whether wild horses can be sold to slaughter for human consumption.

In December 2004, Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., established the now-called "Burns amendment" that allows horses 10 years old or older, or those that have been unsuccessfully put up for adoption three times by the BLM, to be sent to slaughter. Animals rights groups and horse advocates balked, and the BLM stopped the sale of horses to slaughter last year.

In November, Congress passed legislation making it illegal to send wild horses to slaughter for human consumption. It did so by shutting down funding for horse inspectors as of March 10 - a move that would prevent slaughterhouses from slaughtering horses because the animals were not inspected.

But last week, the USDA put forth a plan under which slaughterhouses could have their animals checked before slaughter through a "fee-for-service" system. That would allow exporters to meet federal requirements that apply to meat sold for human consumption.

As soon as the USDA put forth the plan, animal rights groups sued to block it, calling it a "scheme" that circumvents Congress's intention. They also say it violates the Federal Meat Inspection Act's requirement that the agency, not private parties, pay the cost of inspection in order to ensure that inspectors are not beholden to the industries they are hired to monitor.

Fazio said it is unclear how much teeth a law revoking funding for slaughterhouse inspectors will give to prevent the slaughter of wild horses.

"What we're worried about is that slaughter has stopped for a while, but we don't know," she said. "How do we know people aren't sending them to slaughter? How do the slaughter plants know?"

She said appealing to ranchers to buy wild horses sounds "ironic and contradictory," but said it is a pilot project.

"It seems like the BLM can't wait to get rid of these animals," she said.

Hansen said he doesn't see a problem with selling old, unusable horses to slaughterhouses. He also said if he were to buy horses from the BLM under this program - the agency is seeking $10 per horse - and then sold them to someone else who then sent them to slaughter, he might be liable.

"I don't know how to get around this and how to protect myself," he said.

Environmental reporter Whitney Royster can be reached at (307) 734-0260 or at royster@tribcsp.com.