Thursday, July 3, 2008

Death Sentence for rounded-up mustangs

From the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign:

The Bureau of Land Management?s (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board met on Monday. In our pre-meeting alert, we had expressed grave concerns over BLM?s plans, asking whether ?kill authority? was next on BLM's misguided agenda. Lo and behold, BLM came out and announced it is now considering simply putting to death 'excess' wild horses! How did it come to this?

In 2001, BLM obtained a 50% increase in annual budget for implementation of an aggressive removal campaign. 24,000 horses were slated for capture, with no long-term plan for their welfare. Now, predictably, the federal agency finds itself in the untenable positions of warehousing over 30,000 horses (more than remain in the wild); the funding it wants to save by euthanizing our wild horses was wasted on years of unnecessary round-ups to cater to special interests.

6 million head of private livestock graze our public lands and BLM wants us to believe that 25,000 wild horses are overpopulating the range? Removals are based on flawed and biased data; BLM itself admitted at Monday?s meeting that not even its censusing techniques are accurate. In 2005, while in the process of rounding up thousands of horses supposedly due to poor range conditions, BLM eased public land grazing restrictions for private cattle.

BLM?s irresponsible approach to wild horse management created the problem, and the agency is now asking the American public to swallow a very bitter pill, all the while continuing to round up horses by the thousands (2,000 are slated to come off the Nevada range in the coming weeks alone).

America cannot let this stand. Congress is in recess for Independence Day week, but stay tuned for a national action plan next week.

On behalf of America?s horses, thank you for your support at this critical time,

The AWHPC Team
American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign
www.wildhorsepreservation.org
Click here to join our email list and receive the latest updates.

2 comments:

steve said...

A solution must be found and a compromise between business interests and Wild Mustangs , it does require both compassion and practicle realism

Jax said...

It is true, that not every mustang can stay on our public lands...in 1900 there were 2 million free roaming horses in america. I recognize that such a number cannot be maintained any more than such a number of bison could be, but I resent when public lands SPECIFICALLY set aside for mustangs 'in perpetuity' (I think mustang supporters meant that to mean forever, but you know how those sort of things work.) are being taken from them for cattle.
But until plans for housing, training and rehoming them can be revised, further round ups of wild horses will be considered by me to be nothing less than slaughter.