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Dear Friends of our wild horses;
Monday, December 7th. The day of the BLM National Advisory Board in Reno was bitterly cold with temperatures below zero. Snows blanketed the frozen landscape for as far as I could see. No planes were flying in or out of town. Inside our heated, comfortable, but windowless Casino meeting room, the BLM presented Secretary Salazar’s plan to take our mustangs from their native West to ‘greener pastures’ in the East.
The Board, which is stacked against the horses, largely nodded in approval at plans to decrease herds, reach the magic (but pathetically low) “appropriate management level” (AML) numbers, skew the sex ratios, and give every adult mare lucky enough to return back out on the range infertility drugs. Genetic viability never passed their lips, not that I heard anyway. The words preservation and protection were not spoken, not when I was in the room at least.
As over 20 advocates for the mustangs sat and listened attentively, no mention was made of the six wild horses found dead on Saturday in the Sierras northwest of Reno, five with obvious gun shot wounds in their scavenged bodies. Nor was any mention made that an unscheduled roundup of over 200 horses was going on in the Buckhorn herd management area near where the dead horses were found — a roundup that was scheduled to take place in August of 2010. We only learned about this clandestine operation the day the last horses were being run into traps, despite BLM Chief Don Glenn’s statement at the meeting that the public is welcome to watch the “gathers” — difficult when changes to the schedule are not announced. Imagine the horror of this roundup — being driven by a helicopter in the bitter cold, losing your family and, in the case of one mare, losing your life. Then being hauled out of the only home you have ever known to the Palomino Valley holding facility where there is no cover, not even a tarp on the fences to hide behind and escape the biting wind. The cruelty of winter roundups must end. An immediate moratorium must be placed on all roundups until the mess BLM has made of the Wild Horse and Burro Program is sorted out! (Updated roundup schedule here.)
Read more> http://www.horsesinthesouth.com/article/article_detail.aspx?id=9419
Tags: BLM, Bureau of Land Management, Cloud Foundation, Equine Protection, Horse Care, Mustangs, wild horses
December 23, 2009