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Bureau of Land Management: We Won’t Euthanize 45,000 Wild Horses
By: Chicago Tonight; Evan Garcia | September 15, 2016
The Bureau of Land Management said Thursday it will not follow a controversial recommendation made last week by an independent board to euthanize or sell more than 45,000 wild horses and burros, including 179 being held in Illinois.
Instead of following the advisory board’s recommendation, Lutterman said the BLM will continue utilizing and experimenting with different fertility controls, including a birth control vaccine administered to mares via dart every year.
The Bureau of Land Management said Thursday it will not follow a controversial recommendation made last week by an independent board to euthanize or sell more than 45,000 wild horses and burros, including 179 being held in Illinois.
Instead of following the advisory board’s recommendation, Lutterman said the BLM will continue utilizing and experimenting with different fertility controls, including a birth control vaccine administered to mares via dart every year.
That said, the fight is far from over. We must NOT let up on the Pressure and Lose the Momentum we had going.
As you will see in reading the articles below. And at the bottom of the page, there are actions to take to help Our Horses have More Land to Graze on and a more Fair and Balanced Ratio in Public Land Usage.
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Wild Horse Roundups
“The roundups are devastating for the wild horses, being terrorized by helicopters and stampeded for miles,” said Suzanne Roy, director of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign, one of several groups fighting the roundup program. “It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work. It costs taxpayers money. It costs horses their freedom, sometimes their lives. It’s insanity.”
The BLM, which is responsible for protecting wild horses under federal law rejects that charge, insisting the roundups are “necessary and justified.” But BLM records show the agency has considered slaughter as a way to solve the problem. In October 2012, the idea was floated again by BLM advisory board member Jim Stephenson at meeting in Salt Lake City: “The only real solution to this is to have a slaughter market,” he said. Ranchers like Tolbert support the idea and say it would save taxpayers millions of dollars. “Let ‘em go to slaughterhouse,” he said. “What value are they now? ... They’re a drain. They’re a negative.”
Filmmaker Ginger Kathrens, who has produced documentaries about wild horses, said, “The BLM would like to see wild horses gone, because with no wild horses, end of problem. ... Wild horses will be managed to extinction.”
The BLM says there are currently 7,831 "excess" mustangs and that the "appropriate management level," the number of wild horses which can be supported in official herd areas, should be only 23,622.
Roy and other advocates insist wild horse overpopulation is a “myth propagated by the BLM and the livestock industry.” “The reality is that there are a small number of wild horses out there, fewer than 32,000, and there are millions of cattle and sheep,” she said. “We don’t have an overpopulation of wild horses. We have an overpopulation of livestock on our public lands.” Roy’s group recently analyzed how the government allocated forage in 50 herd management areas where there have been roundups in the past three years. It found 82.5 percent was allocated to livestock; 17.5 percent to wild horses.
“It’s my observation that the government continually violates the provision of the act that requires humane handling of these animals,” said Laura Leigh of the advocacy group Wild Horse Education. Leigh has taken BLM to court four times and has won two temporary restraining orders in lawsuits she has filed against the roundups. “I feel that removing wild horses by helicopter stampede is inherently inhumane.” Leigh says she has spent about 500 days observing roundups, living out of her truck, documenting injuries and even deaths with her cameras. One of Leigh’s videos has been seen more than 2 million times on YouTube. “I’ve seen broken legs,” Leigh said, standing outside a BLM holding facility in northern Nevada. “I’ve seen legs ripped up by barbed wire. I’ve seen horses kicked in the head. I’ve seen animals dragged by the neck with a rope. I’ve seen a helicopter hit horses.”
Full Article
“The roundups are devastating for the wild horses, being terrorized by helicopters and stampeded for miles,” said Suzanne Roy, director of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign, one of several groups fighting the roundup program. “It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work. It costs taxpayers money. It costs horses their freedom, sometimes their lives. It’s insanity.”
The BLM, which is responsible for protecting wild horses under federal law rejects that charge, insisting the roundups are “necessary and justified.” But BLM records show the agency has considered slaughter as a way to solve the problem. In October 2012, the idea was floated again by BLM advisory board member Jim Stephenson at meeting in Salt Lake City: “The only real solution to this is to have a slaughter market,” he said. Ranchers like Tolbert support the idea and say it would save taxpayers millions of dollars. “Let ‘em go to slaughterhouse,” he said. “What value are they now? ... They’re a drain. They’re a negative.”
Filmmaker Ginger Kathrens, who has produced documentaries about wild horses, said, “The BLM would like to see wild horses gone, because with no wild horses, end of problem. ... Wild horses will be managed to extinction.”
The BLM says there are currently 7,831 "excess" mustangs and that the "appropriate management level," the number of wild horses which can be supported in official herd areas, should be only 23,622.
Roy and other advocates insist wild horse overpopulation is a “myth propagated by the BLM and the livestock industry.” “The reality is that there are a small number of wild horses out there, fewer than 32,000, and there are millions of cattle and sheep,” she said. “We don’t have an overpopulation of wild horses. We have an overpopulation of livestock on our public lands.” Roy’s group recently analyzed how the government allocated forage in 50 herd management areas where there have been roundups in the past three years. It found 82.5 percent was allocated to livestock; 17.5 percent to wild horses.
“It’s my observation that the government continually violates the provision of the act that requires humane handling of these animals,” said Laura Leigh of the advocacy group Wild Horse Education. Leigh has taken BLM to court four times and has won two temporary restraining orders in lawsuits she has filed against the roundups. “I feel that removing wild horses by helicopter stampede is inherently inhumane.” Leigh says she has spent about 500 days observing roundups, living out of her truck, documenting injuries and even deaths with her cameras. One of Leigh’s videos has been seen more than 2 million times on YouTube. “I’ve seen broken legs,” Leigh said, standing outside a BLM holding facility in northern Nevada. “I’ve seen legs ripped up by barbed wire. I’ve seen horses kicked in the head. I’ve seen animals dragged by the neck with a rope. I’ve seen a helicopter hit horses.”
Full Article
Western Rangeland Protection Takes a Huge Blow
BY LAURA LEIGH ON APRIL 21, 2015
In my travels on our western rangelands in no way, shape or form do I witness anything but fast deterioration of our public rangelands. I see political pandering and window dressing. In no way do I see any evidence of Sally Jewell’s assertion that there is any significant improvement of habitat for sage grouse, or any living thing. I simply see “business as usual” as we enter into a fourth year of drought as our rangelands get pounded into dust.
What are the implications for wild horse and burros? The data collected to forward listing of sage grouse species is immense. Experts within a multitude of conservation groups across the western states presented a unified, detailed and site specific case for real protection. Wild horses and burros are way behind the curve in this type of presentation to gain any sane protection of critical habitat that our herds rely on.
Mr Molvar put it plainly, “the issues have been punted to the courts.” Unfortunately we have a Congress that is not above maneuvering to subvert federal court rulings. We saw this last year with Judge Winmil’s decision in Idaho on the express need for the BLM to perform rangeland health evaluations prior to issuing livestock permits to protect critical resource turned into a muddled mess as Congress passed title XXX in the defense spending bill to green light permit renewals without assessment.
The importance of creating site specific and detailed documentation of each wild horse and burro herd has just increased a thousand fold. Legal scrutiny of across the board management practices must become impeccable.
Legislators must begin to hear a loud cry from the American public in a relentless fashion that we want the exploitation of our public land to stop infringing on preservation and protection of our overly stressed environment.
Full Article
In my travels on our western rangelands in no way, shape or form do I witness anything but fast deterioration of our public rangelands. I see political pandering and window dressing. In no way do I see any evidence of Sally Jewell’s assertion that there is any significant improvement of habitat for sage grouse, or any living thing. I simply see “business as usual” as we enter into a fourth year of drought as our rangelands get pounded into dust.
What are the implications for wild horse and burros? The data collected to forward listing of sage grouse species is immense. Experts within a multitude of conservation groups across the western states presented a unified, detailed and site specific case for real protection. Wild horses and burros are way behind the curve in this type of presentation to gain any sane protection of critical habitat that our herds rely on.
Mr Molvar put it plainly, “the issues have been punted to the courts.” Unfortunately we have a Congress that is not above maneuvering to subvert federal court rulings. We saw this last year with Judge Winmil’s decision in Idaho on the express need for the BLM to perform rangeland health evaluations prior to issuing livestock permits to protect critical resource turned into a muddled mess as Congress passed title XXX in the defense spending bill to green light permit renewals without assessment.
The importance of creating site specific and detailed documentation of each wild horse and burro herd has just increased a thousand fold. Legal scrutiny of across the board management practices must become impeccable.
Legislators must begin to hear a loud cry from the American public in a relentless fashion that we want the exploitation of our public land to stop infringing on preservation and protection of our overly stressed environment.
Full Article
Wild Horse Education; by Laura Leigh
Sample Letter:
There is an extremely unfair slant towards using our Public Lands for available forage and water, specifically cattle ranchers and their grazing leases, as compared to the small allotment given to our wild horses on their herd management areas (HMS’s) . Wild horses and burros are only found on a very small portion of our Public Lands, yet have become the convenient scape goats for ALL the habitat degradation that has occurred on Public Lands. Wild horses are only allocated 11% of the acreage on Public Lands while cattle allotments consume 66% of the acreage, and private interests have the remaining 23%.
If wild horses were the only reason for degraded habitat, we would only have degraded habitat where we have wild horses. This is not the case.
The whole thing smells of pandering to the ranchers and private interest companies. Our beautiful wild horses, an icon of our country protected by law, stand on the smallest slice of these public lands, yet they are blamed for everything; land degradation, lack of water, and overpopulation of their HMAs, and of course those of us who want to save them from roundups are accused of being party to starvation, though the greatest majority of herds are very healthy, even in the prolonged drought. To justify more roundups, BLM says it is the horses doing all the damage. But they say this off the top of their heads, without an iota of data from actual range assessments, while they admit they have an 80% backlog of range assessments that are required prior to grazing lease renewals. They appear to not even try to address all their failures listed in the NAS report, to the range management; the NAS suggested scientific approach to population assessment, or anything at all of the numerous management failures that were highlighted in the NAS report that BLM itself solicited.
All that brings us to where we are today. BLM has removed 45,000 wild horses over the years, putting them into long and short term holding, in deplorable facilities, with no shade or wind breaks, and with no consideration for their strong family bonds, critical to wild horses, when the horses are sorted following roundups.
And now, BLM’s Advisory Board has handed down a recommendation that BLM “sell without restriction (which means horses sold will go to slaughter) and/or euthanize” horses in these holding facilities. I see a HUGE problem with this scenario. I do not like that our horses are being made the Scapegoat. I do not like that money is heavily influencing these decisions on the majority of the share of the good parcels of our public land. I do not like that our horses are left with nothing while BLM says due to limited forage and water, and range degradation actually caused by cattle, that the wild horses must be rounded up, to a hypothetical AML number which NAS also has no basis in science or fact! Let’s face it; BLM is caving to the pressures of ranchers and private interest parties like mining and oil, or flat out being bought and paid for by same.
This has to stop! NOW! The people of our country are tired, are fed up, with the corruption and mismanagement of our public lands and our wild animals suffering the consequences.
We ask you to please consider this when BLM issues who gets what land.
Sincerely,
There is an extremely unfair slant towards using our Public Lands for available forage and water, specifically cattle ranchers and their grazing leases, as compared to the small allotment given to our wild horses on their herd management areas (HMS’s) . Wild horses and burros are only found on a very small portion of our Public Lands, yet have become the convenient scape goats for ALL the habitat degradation that has occurred on Public Lands. Wild horses are only allocated 11% of the acreage on Public Lands while cattle allotments consume 66% of the acreage, and private interests have the remaining 23%.
If wild horses were the only reason for degraded habitat, we would only have degraded habitat where we have wild horses. This is not the case.
The whole thing smells of pandering to the ranchers and private interest companies. Our beautiful wild horses, an icon of our country protected by law, stand on the smallest slice of these public lands, yet they are blamed for everything; land degradation, lack of water, and overpopulation of their HMAs, and of course those of us who want to save them from roundups are accused of being party to starvation, though the greatest majority of herds are very healthy, even in the prolonged drought. To justify more roundups, BLM says it is the horses doing all the damage. But they say this off the top of their heads, without an iota of data from actual range assessments, while they admit they have an 80% backlog of range assessments that are required prior to grazing lease renewals. They appear to not even try to address all their failures listed in the NAS report, to the range management; the NAS suggested scientific approach to population assessment, or anything at all of the numerous management failures that were highlighted in the NAS report that BLM itself solicited.
All that brings us to where we are today. BLM has removed 45,000 wild horses over the years, putting them into long and short term holding, in deplorable facilities, with no shade or wind breaks, and with no consideration for their strong family bonds, critical to wild horses, when the horses are sorted following roundups.
And now, BLM’s Advisory Board has handed down a recommendation that BLM “sell without restriction (which means horses sold will go to slaughter) and/or euthanize” horses in these holding facilities. I see a HUGE problem with this scenario. I do not like that our horses are being made the Scapegoat. I do not like that money is heavily influencing these decisions on the majority of the share of the good parcels of our public land. I do not like that our horses are left with nothing while BLM says due to limited forage and water, and range degradation actually caused by cattle, that the wild horses must be rounded up, to a hypothetical AML number which NAS also has no basis in science or fact! Let’s face it; BLM is caving to the pressures of ranchers and private interest parties like mining and oil, or flat out being bought and paid for by same.
This has to stop! NOW! The people of our country are tired, are fed up, with the corruption and mismanagement of our public lands and our wild animals suffering the consequences.
We ask you to please consider this when BLM issues who gets what land.
Sincerely,
Take Action:
United States Citizens.
Contact your Representatives.
At the following Link, just key in your Zip Code. You will be sent to a page of all Your representatives for your area. You can click on the Contact Form to enter your Letter or give them a Call using the Phone number supplied.
There is a Sample Letter Above; You can use that and adjust it. Please do be Polite. Hostility will get us nowhere.
The idea is that we NEED to get our representatives To Stop allowing Cattle & Livestock to have the Majority of the Grazing land.
And allow the Wild horses to have More than they currently do.
Contact your Representatives.
At the following Link, just key in your Zip Code. You will be sent to a page of all Your representatives for your area. You can click on the Contact Form to enter your Letter or give them a Call using the Phone number supplied.
There is a Sample Letter Above; You can use that and adjust it. Please do be Polite. Hostility will get us nowhere.
The idea is that we NEED to get our representatives To Stop allowing Cattle & Livestock to have the Majority of the Grazing land.
And allow the Wild horses to have More than they currently do.
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2. Join Safe Food Safe Horses Coalition. This is a Coalition of groups coming together for the Horses.
Animals Angels The Cloud Foundation Kill Pen: The Documentary Film Respect 4 Horses Salt River Wild Horse Management Group Standardbred Retirement Foundation |
Washington Horse Defense Coalition
Citizens Against Equine Slaughter Wild Horse Observers Association Canadian Horse Defence Coalition Crawford Farms Roosevelt Raceway Meadowlands Raceway Wild Horse Protection Act Veterinarians for Equine Welfare Maryland Horse Council The Hambletonian Tioga Downs The Winners Animal Defenders International Vernon Downs Epona's Path |