Another briefing was filed in federal court yesterday by Animal Wellness Action, CANA Foundation and Wild Horse Education to demonstrate how a lack of management planning fails to protect wild horses from industrial encroachment, loss of genetic viability and even from harm during capture, according to a news release appearing today on EIN.
The group claims that the BLM moves directly to roundups while skipping the Herd Management Area Plans outlined in current policy (HMAPs), shirking any reasonable attempt to manage wild horses on the range.
Laura Leigh of Wild Horse Education said everything on the public lands has a site-specific plan for management that allows full participation by stakeholders except wild horses. The agency creates removal plans, not management plans.
How can you manage an area principally for wild horses, as specified in the original statute, with 98% of the resources to the horses and 2% reserved for wildlife, when the land-use plan assigns most of the resources to privately owned livestock?
And if you’re going to accept the current resource allocations and miniscule AMLs, why go to the trouble of writing HMAPs?
If you want to see the horses wild and free on their home range, and this does not mean subordination to ranching interests or gradual extermination by the Montana Solution, you have to focus on the land-use plans and the policies that affect them.
Plaintiffs in the case will be speaking at the Save Our Wild Horses Conference later this month.
The Sulphur HMA, which has an HMAP, is a disaster for the horses.
RELATED: Judge Rejects Advocates’ Claims, Won’t Halt Pancake Roundup.
Western Horse Watchers Association 
Legal staffs for many WHB Advos Orgs, speaking about their ‘legal strategy’ in pursuing actions on behalf of WHB, are on record as never being successful in bring cases on the basis of violations of the WHB Act. Instead they pursue actions based on violations of Administrative nuances. These legal folks claim the WHB Act is not well-written & (according to them) they want to be ‘careful’ in setting poor precedents. I would love to hear a defense as to why this approach by WHE/AWA/CANA et. al. has merit, given the judge’s denial on 1/28 of their initial request to stop the Pancake gather?