The Draft EA was copied to the project folder today, along with related documents.
Comments will be accepted through June 13.
Three HMAs in western Idaho are affected. All are subject to permitted grazing.
The Proposed Action, discussed in Section 2.2 of the EA, features
- Roundups
- Fertility control treatments
- Selective removals
- Introduction of animals from other HMAs
Today’s news release said the BLM is required to manage wild horse herds at the appropriate management levels that were established through the analysis of monitoring data and water and forage availability on a sustainable basis.
This is nonsense.
AMLs represent the number of horses allowed by plan, not the number of horses the land can support.
How can they represent carrying capacities when livestock receive three to six AUMs for every AUM assigned to the horses?
There is nothing in the WHB Act that says AMLs must be small relative to the available resources, but they are, so ranchers can access most of the food and water in the lawful homes of wild horses.
The fourth component of the new plan is clearly a nod to the public-lands ranchers, as if the other three weren’t, that boosts genetic diversity while keeping herd sizes small.
In the future you won’t be able to adopt a Hardtrigger horse, only a horse captured in the Hardtrigger HMA—a mutt, Heinz 57.
As for the fertility control treatments, restricted-use pesticides such as Zonastat-H and GonaCon Equine are not approved for control of pests that interfere with animal agriculture, so that component is dead on arrival.
RELATED: Owyhee Scoping Period Comes and Goes, Draft EA Up Next.
Western Horse Watchers Association 