Just six months ago, Congress agreed to let the Bureau of Land Management sell some of the 22,000-plus wild horses and burros in its care in the West. Now, that agreement is in danger of falling apart, thanks to a move in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Senate still can undo the damage, and it should.

The West’s so-called ”wild” horses and burros aren’t really wild at all. In fact, they’re feral – long ago domesticated, their ancestors were allowed to roam free. Not native to the region, they face few of the natural controls on their population a native species would have, and their numbers have grown dramatically over the years. There are so many, in fact, the fragile deserts where they roam cannot sustain them without damage.

The bureau rounds up as many as 10,000 animals a year and puts them up for adoption. Those who agree to take the animals on must care for them but may not sell them. In the end, only about 6,000 to 7,000 actually find homes each year, and the government must take care of the rest. Currently, it is housing, feeding and providing medical treatment for about 22,500, and that number continues to grow.

The sale ban, a part of the original law that gave the animals protection back in 1971, was aimed at preventing the animals from being sold for food, both human and pet. Americans, who don’t routinely eat horsemeat, were appalled at the notion that the animals were being shipped to Europe to wind up on French dinner tables. They were no happier to think that Fido was dining on horsemeat.

The law approved last year continued the ban on the sale of horses for food, but did allow them to be sold rather than adopted if they were older than 10 years and had been passed up for adoption three times. The BLM halted sales last month after it discovered 41 animals had, in fact, been slaughtered.

That fact, understandably, has upset some people. But Congress should allow sales to continue anyway. The agency already has too little money to accomplish the tasks with which it has been charged, and caring for a growing number of horses is an expensive proposition. The funding bill that includes the sales ban now moves on to the Senate, where, perhaps, more reasoned thinking will prevail.