Everyone sidesteps responsibility for starving horses

I must really be missing something to not understand why no one has done anything more about this situation when they've known it was going on for so long. I know horses are thought of differently out west than we do here in the east, and they are expected to forage on open range and do all right by themselves, but it seems to me like you could argue that Mr. Stovall is holding Mr. Leachman's horses illegally. Honestly, I can't even begin to figure out how you solve this situation, aside from starting by letting the locked up horses loose and humanely destroying any that are injured or too far gone to help. All I know is that this situation is just WRONG, and its worth more than 5000 dollars and five years of jail-time for whoever is found to be responsible.

http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/article_6d566364-3c43-5661-b6a7-7e113a13972c.html?mode=story

Grey Wolves Re-listed!

A federal judge granted an injunction that will temporarily place Grey Wolves back on the endangered species list until research proves whether they need it or not.
This means planned hunts for the fall are now off! Unfortunately, I can sense a rise in poaching coming...

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2008/07/work-in-progres.html

A Letter on Bison Management

Governor Brian Schweitzer
Office of the Governor
Montana State Capitol Bldg.
Helena MT 59620-0801

Thank you for your message regarding Yellowstone National Park bison management.

I would like to direct your attention to the recent Government Accounting Office (GAO) report on the Interagency Bison Management Plan, its shortcomings, and the inability to move to Step 2 of the Plan (expected to occur during the winter of '02-'03).

The GAO conclusions track very closely changes that I have been advocating, including consummation of a grazing agreement with the Royal Teton Ranch, allowing for removal of that cattle herd, and passage through the ranch for hungry bison.

The State of Montana will continue to work with the land owners, livestock interests, wildlife and conservation groups, and the federal agencies that bear responsibility for bison management. At this point, negotiations have been completed with the Royal Teton Ranch, site of the largest cattle herd near the park. As directed by the Interagency Bison Management Plan, this agreement will better secure Montana's disease-free status while providing more tolerance for bison. Half of the funding for this agreement has been committed by the National Park Service. Montana will now be working to secure the remainder of the funding with the National Wildlife Foundation, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, the National Parks Conservation Association, and others.

As is urged by the GAO report ( http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08291.pdf), we will continue to seek and support vaccine research that provides protections against brucellosis, work with other willing landowners on creative grazing and management agreements, and utilize fair-chase hunting to manage bison in a manner similar to other large game species.

I appreciate hearing from you. Thank you again for taking the time to contact me.

Sincerely,

BRIAN SCHWEITZER
Governor of Montana

Yellowstone under attack

Two alerts from Defenders of Wildlife this week:

The Yellowstone Bison slaughter, and the killing of wolves in the Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain regions.
According to wikipedia.com the American Bison is listed as "Lower Risk" in conservation status...but that lower risk comes with the title "Conservation Dependant." So, if these animals depend on our conservation efforts in order to thrive, why do park officials chase wandering buffalo back into the park where they can't find food in winter, or ship them off to be slaughtered? Because of unfounded fears that Buffalo (or Bison if you prefer), which belong to the same family as domestic cattle will pass along diseases to domestic cattle. The disease Brucellosis can be passed from animals to animals and animals to humans by intact skin contact...that means it's highly contagious, kids. But that doesn't seem like a good enough reason to me. The thing that strikes me most about the issue is that as near as I can tell, while Canada has completely eradicated the disease in their country, the United States doesn't seem to even require ranchers to vaccinate their animals against it! And we're going to kill the BUFFALO? Cause yeah, its their fault!
Now, I'm not a big fan of vaccinating wild animals against diseases (other than rabies, perhaps) but to me this seems like a case where vaccination of wild elk (which can also harbor the disease) and bison herds might be the lesser of two evils.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program: Rocky Mountain Wolves.
The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone and parts of Idaho and Montana has been one of the greatest endangered species recovery success stories of all time. So great, in fact, that the Bush Administration has been fighting to de-list them (prematurely, in the eyes of many conservationists) and last week Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming took over 'management' of the 1200 some wolves living in their states. To people like Idaho Governor Butch Otter (You can email his office here) this de-listing reads like an invitation to slaughter, and officials in Wyoming are planning to kill wolves on sight in as much as 88% of the state, including zeroing out (that means eradicating) entire wolf packs.
By comparison, Minnesota, which shares its 3500 wolves with Michigan and Wisconsin, manages its own wolf population and has set a minimum population limit of 1600...that's more wolves than live in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming to begin with.

Protect Cloud's Herd: Tell the BLM how you feel about wild horse removal

The end of the year brings many opportunities for you to help wild horses and burros. Write to the BLM about their plans concerning the Pryor Mountain wild horse herd, made famous by filmmaker Ginger Kathrens and the beautiful stallion Cloud.
Last year 7000 wild horses were removed from public lands, with plans to remove 4000 more in the next year. If I'm doing the math right (which might be doubtful) that's nearly half the wild horse population still roaming public lands. It is my belief that wild horses should A) remain wild and B) any necessary roundups should be put off until not only holding but TRAINING and REHOMING facilities can be built to cope with the influx of untrained and often unmanagable wild horses into a world already full of unwanted animals. There are more wild horses in holding facilities across the country than there are roaming the wild.
Another animal which has been let down by laws put into place to protect them is the wild burro of Big Bend State Park, Texas. Park employees have been shooting the animals, a practice apparently sanctioned by the Sierra Club (Sierra Club, por que?) in order to make room for the introduction of Big-Horn Sheep, a species which would increase big game hunting revenues.
If you would like to make your thoughts on any of these subjects heard, go to the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign website and click the links to email officials.

Save the Bay, and stop Aerial Gunning

Hello and welcome back. My lack of updates can only mean one thing: I'm back on dialup! It is amazing how easy highspeed makes my research. Anyhow, I'll get to the point!
Petitions are flying far and fast this time of year for some reason. Two of note, one perhaps of more interest to my fellow Marylanders (though it should be important to you all!) being a petition from Environment Maryland urging Governor O'Malley to live up to his campaign promise to protect the world's largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay. The other is a petition from Defenders of Wildlife that may help put a halt to the brutal practice of aerial gunning all together! Both very important goals.
For the Bay, unfortunately, Environment Maryland doesn't seem to have an online petition to sign, and perhaps the due date has passed (I can't find a date anywhere on the letter or envelope!) but there are many other actions you can take from their website to help protect the Bay, our countryside, even the entire country and the entire world. I urge you to check them out!
While their letter cites mostly land development along the Bay as the major threat, my personal vendetta is against the poultry factories. The Eastern Shore of the Free State is checkered with chicken farms and processing plants, and much of the waste from these facilities gets dumped straight into the Bay. The immediate result is probably a feast for blue crabs, but the chicken waste brings with it bacteria, including those that can cause flesh-eating diseases in humans. 40 some percent of the Bay becomes a 'dead zone' every year due to heavy runoff of agricultural and developmental pollutants, and more and more development grows every year. We must tell our government that we "Treasure the Chesapeake" as the license plate says, and we need to protect it!
My second petition would close a loophole in a previous Aerial Hunting law and stop the Alaskan, Wyoming, and Idaho governments from using this cruel practice to decimate their Grey Wolf population. As I've reported before, aerial gunning is the inhumane practice of chasing the animal to exhaustion with airplanes and sometimes helicopters and then shooting them, or shooting indiscriminately from the air. Not very sportsmanlike conduct if you ask me, and people do consider hunting to be a sport! Visit the Defenders of Wildlife website and sign the petition today! The goal is 40 thousand signatures by Labor Day, and we're already a third of the way there!
If nothing pressing comes up in the next week, I plan to recap my Wild Horse article. We're into roundup season now, and it is important to keep on top of things!

Saving America's Symbols: The Bison

I said I was going to write it, so here it is.Thanks to my fancy new newsreel, I learned of the release of a new book about the beginning of the conservation effort for the American Bison, back in Teddy Roosevelt's day, and it reminded me that I had planned to write this article.

Like the American Mustang, the Bison or Buffalo can be considered one of the founding creatures of our Nation. The constant migration of massive herds of Buffalo, and by massive I mean 30 million of the beasts, kept our great plains open and grassy, thwarting the encroachment of brush and trees. Entire cultures existed because of the Buffalo, Native Americans following the herds, hunting for what meat and hides they needed, and revering the Buffalo as they should, as a giver of life. Then, in the early-mid 1800's American settlers and trophy hunters from Europe began moving further west from the Mississippi. Buffalo were coveted for their hides and tongues, maybe their liver. The rest was left to rot. As the wholesale slaughter of Buffalo continued throughout that century (in the early days the herds were so thick you could shoot animals from a passing train) cultures and ecosystems began to suffer. Wolves, bears and mountain lions, while also coveted for their hides were also seen as competition for the elk and buffalo, and slaughtered. As more people came west and more of their life giving buffalo were taken, the great plains tribes came in to further and further conflict with settlers. By the turn of the century there were reportedly less than 30 buffalo left in Yellowstone National Park. Thats one MILLIONTH the number the great plains originally supported.

Today the American Bison continues to live under seige. While the Yellowstone population is up to a healthy 4000 animals, and South Dakota's Custer State Park holds 1,500, some of these buffalo are virtual prisoners in their supposed sanctuary. By nature the buffalo is a wanderer. This is how 30 million of them could be sustained by our American prairies. They are constantly moving to new grazing, rarely overgrazing an area. However, in Yellowstone National Park they can be rounded up and/or shot if they wander outside the park's three and a half thousand square miles. Speculation that the buffalo carry cattle diseases has ranchers in the northwest states up in arms and prepared to shoot the beasts on sight. My first response to this would be: "Don't you vaccinate your cows, man?" Furthermore, studies have shown that elk also carry the diseases, and elk are not restricted. No case of a buffalo transmitting the disease to cattle has ever been cited, and buffalo seem to naturally prefer not to mingle much with cattle. To me it seems like these animals are not 'living free' within our National Parks, but are being contained as a tourist attraction in a no-touch visual petting zoo. Animals of such dignity deserve better treatment than that.

I shall now descend from my high-horse (Really, he's 16.1!) and leave you with some links to information on buffalo and how you can help save them once again from the thoughtless and selfish actions of mankind. (So glad I'm a woman!)

Defenders Bison Page: Send letters to Congressmen urging them to stop the hazing, containment and slaughter of buffalo.