Hold Your Horses: Federal Plan To Round Up… Wild Horses?!
SPARKS, Nev. (AP) – One of most stirring symbols of the American West — mustangs thundering freely across the range — could be heading east.
The government wants to carry out what is believed to be the biggest-ever roundup of wild horses on federal land, moving as many as 25,000 mustangs and burros to pastures in the Midwest and East out of fear their fast-multiplying numbers will lead to mass starvation.
The plan is facing heated opposition from advocates, including celebrities Sheryl Crow, Bill Maher and Ed Harris, who contend the proposal is itself inhumane and unnecessary. They say the situation is not as dire as the government has painted it.
“The Obama administration must craft a new policy that protects these animals and upholds the will of Congress and the public’s desire to preserve this important part of our national heritage,” said William Spriggs, lawyer for the group In Defense of Animals.
He and other advocates spoke out Monday at a hearing on the proposal, held by a federal advisory panel at a hotel-casino near Reno. The panel took no immediate action.
The government argues that the mustang population in 10 Western states is growing so rapidly that the horses are quickly running out of food, in part because of drought ravaging the region.
The federal Bureau of Land Management says the number of wild horses and burros on public lands in the West stands at nearly 37,000, about half of them in Nevada. An additional 32,000 wild horses already live away from the range in federal-run corrals and pastures, and those are nearly full.
“We are concerned about the numbers,” Robin Lohse, chairwoman of the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, said during the hearing. “Time is not on our side.”
The BLM said last year it would have to consider destroying wild horses because of their escalating numbers and the costs of caring for them. But earlier this year, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the BLM, a part of the Interior Department, would instead ship 11,500 to 25,000 horses from the range to pastures and corrals in the Midwest and East.
The exact destinations have not been decided, but Salazar believes Plains states would make the most sense in terms of water and forage, said Don Glenn, chief of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program. He said Salazar also wants at least one site in the East.
The relocation plan is part of a long-running feud over wild horses in the West, where mustangs have roamed ever since they arrived with Spanish settlers centuries ago.
Ranchers view wild horses as a menace to their grazing land and were allowed to kill them until 1971, when the practice was banned. The government has made numerous efforts of its own over the years to control the population, including using a contraceptive vaccine. But capturing and injecting mares with the vaccine one at a time has proved costly and time-consuming.
In recent years, the government has rounded up and relocated wild horses to other lands in the West. Helicopters are used to drive the mustangs toward cowboys with lassos. The cowboys then put the horses onto trucks.
The latest proposed roundup, however, would take the horses outside the West altogether.
The California-based Defense of Animals strongly opposes roundups, arguing that the horses are an integral part of the ecosystem and that using helicopters can traumatize, injure or kill the animals.
The BLM spent about $50 million this year to feed, corral and otherwise manage the nation’s wild horses, up from $36 million last year. Without contraception or other such measures, mustang herds can double in size about every four years, authorities say.
One of the most vocal wild-horse advocates is Grammy-winning singer Sheryl Crow, who has adopted a mustang herself and took her concerns directly to Salazar in a recent telephone call.
“One of the first things he said was something must be done because the horses are starving. We don’t believe it,” Crow said in an interview with The Associated Press.
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Horses being defended by jackasses
Bill Maher(Shit Stain) wouldn’t know a horse from his ignoant ass, maybe he he thought the were refering to whores.
NMP
Takes one to know one ~ jackass ~ those MUSTANGS were here long before the damn ranchers & cattlemen. Those wild horeses did not ask to be brought here.
1. Horses are working livestock. Period.
2. When working livestock are no longer able to work, for whatever reason, then they become livestock.
3. That’s life folks and sometimes difficult decisions have to be made.
4. There are only three realistic solutions;
a) Horse goes to the killer, aka the slaughterhouse, which in the U.S. are no longer allowed to take horses.
b) Euthanasia, which means a $100 (at least) Vet bill and a similar bill from the nearest tallow company to pick up the carcass. I suggest you don’t try a pistol shot unless you’ve read the instructions in a 1930’s era U.S. Army Field Manual.
c) Maintain said livestock in a pasture and watch said livestock suck money out of somebodies wallet.
In England they don’t turn out old and or infirm horses, they select above options a or b, because they believe it’s cruel to take a horse that’s been provided for by humans it’s entire life and suddenly turn out the horse to more or less fend for themselves.
That’s my rant on so called “Horse Sanctuaries” where they “save” horses that are so infirm that they’re in constant pain. Yes, they can be healed-up to stay sound for a day or two so the local media can get a b.s. story about how those people are saving hoses, but within days the same horse is once again dead lame. As you might have guessed I find that infuriating.
About the wild mustangs, well that’s an issue of wildlife management and trying to explain that to the likes of Sheryl Crow et-al is useless. I know people have an emotional attachment when it comes to horse, dogs, cats etc. Very hard & unpopular decisions must be made, it’s just life, deal with.
What the administration is doing is a punt.
To Mike 3481,
You state this is your “rant.” You got that right in your comment.
The rant of a person who is ignorant of the reality of the decimation of wild horses to extinction by the DOI, BLM, Czar Salazar. it is estimated that the wild horses remaining on the range are from 18,000 to 30,000, depending on the BLM’s fantasy numbers of the day. However, there are approximately 8,000,000 cattle on the range…and growing. The Cattlemen are powerful and appear to have a monopoly on the BLM. More land is taken away from the wild horses FOR the cattle.
Please do more research to be informed, educated by scientific statistics/research/study, the BLM breaking the law… The BLM has been continuously reducing the wild horse population for decades, and the wild horses do not all go into captive BLM holdings. A great number surreptitiously go to the slaughter house.
Very “telling” of BLM plans for wild horses is a document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) this summer, drawn up by the BLM in secret meetings:
http://rtfitch.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/documents-reveal-blm-secret-plan-to-destroy-wild-horses/
http://www.animallawcoalition.com/horse-slaughter/article/968
Thank you for reading to be better informed.
Ignorant, no, sorry, but I’ll forget more about horses than you’ll ever know.
You’re pissed-off because I illuminated reality for you and it hit a nerve.
In my life I’ve crossed paths with easily over 100 bleeding hearts like yourself and I’ve leaned to ignore them
Get a clue before you go bankrupt.
End of discussion.
So, what’s Cheryl Crow and Mahr’s opinion on abortion?
This is what they concern themselves with during this crisis?
They should be considered as a game animal like deer, as they were never native to this continent, and are destroying the habitat of the native species. There is a large market for horse meat in europe.
You guys don’t know a whole lot about the scientific data surrounding the history of the horse.
Try to remember highschool.
Remember the land bridge that existed between the continents? Horses, fully evolved (not manipulated yet by man), crossed that land bridge to become the greatest ally to man. It built our cities, plowed our fields, fought our wars, entertained and endured with us and the history of man evolved.
It was re-introduced to this continent because Europeans came to forever change this landscape… of course with the use of his greatest ally, horse.
Some of them returned to their wild state and thrived because this is the environment that gave birth to Horse.
It currently exists in pockets… literally pockets… of our public land. It can thrive in conditions that are extreme.
Reality check.
BLM manages 262 million acres of public land. Horses currently reside in aprox. 10% of those areas. Areas designated by Congress to maintain these horses in their natural state.
Through poor planning and a lack of accountability by a public agency we currently find ourselves in a situation of “crisis” proportions where these horses (in the state mandated by law) are in real jeopardy.
There are solutions. However those solutions do not continue to put money into the pockets of the current list of contractors.
The propsed solutions by the same agency that created the problem continue to “hand on for dear life” to that same system of private contractors instead of utilizing any other potential solution.
Remember the land bridge that existed between the continents? Horses, fully evolved (not manipulated yet by man),~~granny
Bullshit land bridge. The indians never saw a horse until the spainiards brought them over. The fossil records show the 2 foot tall eohippus, the horse forerunner, but they were never endemic to this continent.They are destroying the habitat for the natural animals already here,big horn sheep,elk,antelope etc.
We used to sell horse meat to Europe, and the old ones were made into dog food. Can’t do it now, have to let them drop dead in the corral.
The money behind this fiasco comes from the wife of T Boone Pickens. Land is bought and then the government pays the caretaker by the head to keep the horses. They are becoming very rich people these horse care takers.
The Argentines and many other countries still do sell horse meat abroad.
In fact in the Argentine a foal born with undesirable conformation is immediately classified as livestock, as in meat and are raised as such. Also the mare that produced that foal is on thin ice, because if she does it again the next year she’s on her way to a Japanese or European dinner plate.
That’s why you’ll rarely find a horse in Argentina with incorrect conformation, as opposed to horses here in America where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a horse with pig-eyes, cow hocks, mutton withers, round fetlocks, etc.
So Maher and Crow do believe the government ‘manufactured’ a ‘crisis’ about horses and burros but not money or humans.
four legs good, two legs bad