The long awaited piece "Wild, But Not Free!" aired this morning on NBC. Coverage on NBC Nightly News is still pending.
Please take a moment and comment on all of the stories published in the extended coverage online. Let's show "big media" that wild horses and burros ARE National News and that we care!
(Embed codes of NBC video NOT working, please click on the three links.
Posted in Articles
Call for Adequate Medical Care and Husbandry of BLM Captive Wild Horses
Laura Leigh 5.15.13
(Reno, NV) Wild Horse Education (WHE), a non-profit organization in the state of Nevada that tracks the condition of wild horses and burros on the range and in holding, has sent a request to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) asking that immediate medical care and adequate husbandry practices be given to wild horses currently held at a short-term holding facility in Nevada.
Click link below for article and petition to sign:
http://wildhorseeducation.org/2013/05/15/plea-for-treatment-of-wild-horses-in-holding-join-us/
Wild mustangs at Ellie Phipps-Price’s Montgomery Creek Ranch.
Kent Porter / PD
Mustangs occupy a unique position in the nation’s history and culture, evoking visions of untamed, open space and sturdy steeds that helped settle the West.
But their reality has long been compromised by human interests — their tale one of changing priorities, political pressures and shifting policy.
Though now wild, these majestic herds trace their roots to domesticated horses first brought to America by Spanish settlers in the 1500s. For centuries, their descendents roamed across the valleys and hills that would one day make up the Great Plains and the western United States.
“I think that these animals have a rightful place in the wild, on the range,” said Sonoma Valley wine producer Ellie Phipps-Price, who has joined a campaign to stop the federal government from rounding up wild horses.
But despite 1971 legislation calling for their protection, some 301,000 horses and burros have been removed from public lands over the past four decades. Today, about 31,500 horses — 37,300 if one includes burros — still run wild, living across 10 western states, though more than half are in Nevada.
But federal regulators say the area cannot support even that many. The Bureau of Land Management, which is tasked with managing the long-term health and productivity of the land, believes the range can only support about 26,500.
One of the agency’s mandates is to maintain limits on mustang populations by removing “excess” animals from public lands, using helicopters to drive them into temporary corrals. There, they are transferred to long-term holding pastures, primarily in Kansas and Oklahoma, with the intention of offering most for adoption.
But the government is running out of space to store the animals.
The BLM currently has 50,000 mustangs in holding areas, at a cost of $43 million to American taxpayers last year. It managed to place more than 2,500 horses and burros through its adoption program, but there just isn’t enough demand to keep pace with those taken from the land.
“We’re in a bind,” BLM spokesman Tom Gorey said. “We don’t have a quick fix to our holding situation. We are reaching capacity. We’re approaching maxing out.”
Advocates for the horses say the problem arises from abandoning the 1971 congressional act that prohibits the killing of mustangs and wild burros after decades in which their populations were nearly decimated. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act declared these creatures the “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” and prohibited their “capture, branding, harassment, or death.”
But the bill was amended in a few short years as the mustang population rebounded, reaching an estimated 60,000 by 1976. The U.S. Secretary of the Interior was soon authorized to establish maximum herd sizes and cull horses deemed “excess.” The round-ups, which typically involve helicopters used to drive the horses from their grazing lands into fenced areas are sometimes grisly affairs, with horses thrashing violently to break free, resulting in injury and, occasionally, death.
A last-minute, 2004 legislative rider slapped onto an appropriations bill further undermined the ‘71 act, stripping the protective status from mustangs older than 10 or unclaimed after three passes at adoption. The measure permitted their sale to the highest bidder, even if it meant their commercial slaughter.
The BLM has never implemented that provision. However, it is likely that at least 1,777 sold to a Colorado man for $10 a head ended up as meat, in violation of the sales contract, according to an investigation last year by ProPublica, the nonprofit public interest news group.
Gorey said the BLM has an advocacy role for the mustang but is managing the 245 million acres in its jurisdiction for “multiple uses,” including the nearly 27 million acres of wild horse range. It must balance the needs of livestock grazing, wildlife habitat and human recreational use, while defending against erosion and destruction of watersheds.
The mustang, Gorey said “is the most emotional issue of all the issues that come under our bailiwick, and that’s why it makes news so much.”
The fate of the mustang is in part due to its own success in reproduction in the near-absence of natural predators. The population grows about 20 percent a year without intervention, Gorey said.
Cattle and sheep ranchers say the wild horses compete for forage with their herds and damage public rangeland.
Critics, however, argue that the cattle still outnumber the mustangs by a vast margin — far more than the 20-to-1 ratio the BLM says are on the range at a given time.
Mustang advocates contend the horses are being sacrificed to preserve low-cost forage for cattle. The beneficiaries, they say, are a small number of ranchers who pay $1.35 per animal for each month of grazing access on BLM lands, enjoying a federal subsidy equivalent to $58.3 million, according to a 2005 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
“The horses get thrown under the bus every time,” Phipps-Price said.
(You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com.)
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20130504/articles/130509766?p=1&tc=pg
Posted in Articles
Updated: May 04, 2013 9:13 PM MDT
By Devin Sanchez
NewsWest 9
TERLINGUA – It’s not a problem many would think about, but for Sandra Parks of Terlingua, it’s becoming more and more common: drivers crashing into wild burros. Parks said this is because burros aren’t like other animals that move out of the way.
KWES NewsWest 9 / Midland, Odessa, Big Spring, TX: newswest9.com |
Posted in Articles, Wild Burros
Wild Horse Education is putting together a book! We are telling "true stories of heart beats for wild hoof beats!" Using the old "nickel and dime" novels of the wild west for inspiration we are compiling stories of the "outlaws and law keepers" that fight for that spirit of the true wild west, our wild horses and burros.
Maybe you have a story you would like to tell?
Posted in Articles
Wild Horse Education comments below to the Scoping Letter on the proposed BLM removal plan of the South Steens HMA in Oregon.
Comments must be received by April 29th: Lisa Grant, Burns District Office email to blm_or_whb@blm.gov
You may use our comments as a template to craft your own.
These comments address scoping letter to the proposed ten-year plan being crafted and addressed in Document 4700 (ORB050/0RB060) pertaining South Steens wild horse Herd Management Area (HMA) in Oregon.
Posted in Articles
This week the legal actions in federal court for Triple B and Jackson Mountain move forward in Discovery. Leigh and her attorney, Gordon Cowan, continue the actions that began in August of 2011 at the Triple B roundup and then amended in June of 2012 to add Jackson Mountain.
On July 20th the BLM began the Triple B roundup in Ely/Elko Nevada.
Posted in Articles
