On Trump’s damage to animals and the environment [letter] | Letters To The Editor

The New York Times recently published a bombshell article detailing the Trump administration’s responsibility for the ongoing sale of wild horses to third-party vendors, potentially avoiding legal repercussions for what may befall the animals from that point on, including their possible slaughter.

The population of nearly 73,000 wild horses has seen the number of horses sold more than double since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, leaving no question who’s behind what the article uncovered as $25-a-horse sales ending with some of the mustangs being trucked to Canadian slaughterhouses.

Trump’s environmental priorities have never been a mystery, with his administration’s stance efficiently summed up by its dismantling of nearly 100 environmental rules and its 2019 rewrites of the Endangered Species Act, weakening protections for threatened species and making it easier to undertake activities that could harm those species.

Trump’s environmental policies directly contradict the values of his predecessors who enacted various protections for wildlife, most famously Theodore Roosevelt’s creation of 51 bird reserves, but also including Ulysses Grant (Yellowstone National Park Protection Act), Richard Nixon (creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and signing of the Endangered Species Act of 1973) and Jimmy Carter (Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act), among others.

In my view, this is a direct disservice to the American people and a slap in the face to Congress, using intermediaries to subvert the protections implemented to prevent this very outcome. It’s an addition to the long list of environmental harms Trump has spurred, and yet another blatantly disturbing piece of evidence that America deserves better.

Helen Brubaker

Akron