Western Horse Watchers Association
Exposing the Hypocrisy, Lies and Incompetence of the Wild Horse Advocates
Opinion
This article by The Daily Pitchfork, dated December 12, is an example of what doesn’t come up when you’re searching for information about wild horses.
It’s almost as if the companies running the search engines have an agenda or something.
RELATED: ‘Wild Horse Wars’ Refuted.
If we have three co-equal branches of government, why is there so much interest in the presidency?
The political party trying to force its way into the White House hates Christmas as much as it hates the Constitution.
What exactly did they do yesterday? Spend some time in front of their holiday trees, listening to holiday music, wishing each other happy holidays?
Most of its members already subscribe to the movement discussed in this video, they just haven’t come out of the closet yet.
Some want no-horse ponies, mares that have become sterile through extended use of contraceptives.
Do they agree with the idea of managing HMAs primarily for livestock and HAs almost exclusively for livestock? Sure looks like it.
How do they differ from the public-lands ranchers? The ranchers want AMLs achieved as quickly as possible, while the ‘advocates’ want herd sizes reduced gradually.
Unfortunately, darted mares consume resources assigned to ‘other mandated uses of public lands,’ and that’s at the center of the debate.
RELATED: What Is a One-Horse Pony?
He came into the world that you might be saved from eternal damnation. Thanks to Megan Smith for the video.
Courtesy of Megan Smith.
When the words or deeds of one person cause others to lose the faith or act in ways that offend God, you have a scandal.
Here are a few facts about the material world, in case you didn’t get the memo:
Keep these things in mind when you look at a nativity scene and see the Word made flesh, lying in a manger.
There are tens of thousands of churches but only one standard. Which one has the fullness of the truth?
RELATED: What Triggered the ‘One-Horse Pony’ Remark?
It was a question about the Hunter Biden scandal, originally covered by the New York Post, and the rivers of money associated therewith.
If you’re on socialist media, you were likely insulated from the story in the weeks before the election, thanks to the jackals who run those services.
RELATED: What Is a One-Horse Pony?
That’s how the would-be usurper of the White House referred to a Fox News reporter yesterday, after he asked an embarrassing question, but does the animal actually exist?
Of course it does.
It’s a wild mare subject to ‘humane management practices.’ Barren most of her life, except for the year when the PZP zealots decide not to dart her.
So says the writer of a letter to the editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, published today.
In the wild horse world, ‘overpopulation’ means they’re consuming more than their allocated share of the resources, usually just crumbs. The lion’s share goes to privately owned cattle and sheep.
Roundups are not necessarily a bad thing for wild horses, according to the writer of the Sac Bee article, because humans will “find them loving homes and a life of fresh hay, warm barns and veterinary care.”
No more hooves stuck in cattle guards.
Instead, they’ll be locked in stalls and fed a steady diet of bits, spurs, tiedowns, blankets, braided tails and maybe even shoes, everything they dreamed of while on the range.
And, of course, everybody has a heated barn with running water, except the host of Western Horse Watchers.
RELATED: Sac Bee Publishes Hit Piece On Wild Horses.
The article, based on recent events at the Devil’s Garden WHT, features just about every piece of anti-horse propaganda you can imagine.
The management plan, not considered in the story, assigns most of the resources to privately owned livestock. Everything else follows from that.
RELATED: Devil’s Garden Horses Get Short End of Stick.
The federal government sells about 12 million AUMs per year to public-lands ranchers, across 155 million acres, mostly in the western U.S.
That transaction generates about $16 million per year in revenue for the government, which manages those lands—supposedly—for the benefit of the American people.
How much of that income is produced in areas identified for wild horses and burros?
One way to answer the question is to scale the revenue according to acreage.
The management plans assign 27 million acres to horses and burros, approximately 17% of the land authorized for grazing. The estimated revenue would be .17 × 16 = $2.7 million per year.
Another approach would be to consider the resource allocations in areas designated for wild horses and burros, where the plans allow 27,000 of them. Data reviewed on these pages suggest that livestock receive eighty to eighty five percent of the forage, excluding wildlife. That means they receive four to five times as much as the horses and burros.
If that’s true in other areas, the forage assigned to livestock in areas identified for horses and burros would be 27,000 × 12 × 5 = 1.6 million AUMs per year, worth $2.2 million per year at current prices.
Not much of an offset for the tens of millions of dollars spent every year—confiscated from American wage earners—to remove and warehouse the horses and burros, so the ranchers can enjoy more of what their allotments have to offer.
The major economic benefit accrues at harvest time. Of course, those revenues stay with the ranchers and their overlords, not the American people.
It’s redistribution of wealth, classic socialism. That’s what the farm bureaus, stockgrower’s associations and cattlemen’s groups are trying to defend.
The program can’t change the resource allocations that leave America’s wild horses and burros with crumbs, necessitating their removal from public lands in favor of privately owned livestock.
So as the roundups accelerate and the ‘Path Forward‘ is put into practice, know that the animals are being treated humanely—even the ones that don’t survive—while cattle and sheep graze peacefully on land that belongs to them.
RELATED: BLM Reaffirms Commitment to CAWP.
A bachelor stallion chases a mare and foal as they leave a water hole in the following video by Friends of the Heber Wild Horses. The fence is for livestock.
A management plan, drafted earlier this year, shows the WHT boundary relative to those of the allotments, page 10 in the pdf. The proposed AML is discussed on page 21.
The AML for areas outside the WHT is zero, meaning the horses could be captured and removed from the forest if someone complains or they create a hazard.
When grazing season begins, gates are closed, and the horses are cut off from some of their food and water, perhaps a sizeable amount.
If they can’t access critical resources inside their designated area, they’ll move beyond it in search of new ones. Gotcha!
This approach to wild horse management is not unique to the WHT. It’s standard practice for most of the wild horse areas on western rangelands. The new Desatoya resource enforcement plan, currently out for review, is another example.
The environmental assessment for the Heber management plan should be available for public review in early 2021, according to the project status.
RELATED: Heber EA in Progress.
They are areas identified in 1971 for wild horses and burros. Today, most of the HMAs are managed primarily for livestock, while the HAs are managed almost exclusively for livestock. Privately owned, of course.
Wild horses should be relocated to remote wilderness areas, to satisfy growing demand for range-fed beef, according to a column published yesterday by the Mail Tribune of Medford, OR. There, apex predators will keep their populations in check and cattle ranchers will be able to enjoy the full benefit of areas set aside for wild horses.
This is nuts. If Equine Elite can buy an 80-acre parcel near Burns, WY to build a high-density animal feeding operation—for horses removed from public lands—why is it unreasonable to expect the ranchers to do that? Many of them already have base properties of several thousand acres.
And why is it unreasonable to expect that lands identified for wild horses in 1971, about 50 million acres, should be managed principally for them, per the original statute?
Two more letters have been published in the East Oregonian. Both point to livestock as the problem and neither argues for contraceptives.
Counterpoint #2: Reader response dated December 12.
Counterpoint #3: Reader response dated December 12.
How refreshing. The original column appeared on December 5.
RELATED: Slaughter Debate Continues.
Western Horse Watchers Association 