Conversation Starters for Your Thanksgiving Get-Together

Assertions are best. Rock your opponents back on their heels.

The bureaucrats assign most of the resources in areas set aside for wild horses to privately owned livestock.
AMLs are small relative to the available resources.
To solve the problem, the advocates want to end wild horse reproduction, not permitted grazing.
The off-range corrals and long-term pastures could be emptied three to five times over if the resources were shifted back to the horses.
The government manages HMAs primarily for cattle and sheep, HAs almost exclusively for cattle and sheep.
The advocates lead you astray, take your money and help the public-lands ranchers.
The advocates would have you believe that drilling and mining are the greatest threats to wild horses (but can’t produce any figures for the number of animals displaced thereby).
Next to the federal government, nobody’s getting rid of more wild hoses than the advocates.
Whenever the advocates get involved, wild horse numbers go down.
The government insulates public-lands ranchers from the realities of a free market.
Public-lands ranching is government dependency and redistribution of wealth.
Livestock belong in feedlots, not wild horses. Confine the ranchers to their base properties and expect them to pay market rates to feed their animals.
The forage assigned to livestock would support hundreds or thousands of additional wild horses in each HMA, making roundups and darting programs unnecessary.
Wild horses are never allowed to seek their level, never allowed to fill their niche, leading to elevated growth rates.
The forage assigned to livestock on public lands managed by the BLM would support one million wild horses, enough to empty all of the off-range corrals and long-term pastures twenty times over.
The wild horse and burro program has devolved into a pest control program, with benefits accruing to the public-lands ranchers.
The WHB Act no longer affords the protections sought by Velma.

If you want to help America’s wild horses, don’t focus on the horses. The advocates focus on the horses. Look upstream in the management process. Change the policies and plans that put ranching interests far above those of the horses.