The comment period ends September 27 and as of today, the project tops the most active list in ePlanning.
Under the Proposed Action, described in Section 2.1 of the Draft EA, the agency would issue a grazing permit for a period of ten years, subject to terms and conditions.
The allotment lies mostly within the Alamo HA, the lawful home of wild burros, as shown in the following image from the National Data Viewer.
The permit would offer 927 AUMs per year on a 12-month grazing season, enough to support 154 burros.
The advocates may see an opportunity to help the rancher by poisoning the jennies with Zonastat-H, a fertility control pesticide on the same EPA list as toxic chemicals.
A new pest control plan was released two weeks ago covering three HMAs in the area, including Alamo.
UPDATE: RAS was down when this post went live. The Allotment Master Report puts Palmerita Ranch in the Improve category with one permittee.
It’s like waking up from cancer surgery and being told “We didn’t get all of it.”
If you’re a Twin Buttes permittee, that is.
Now what?
The BLM has a planned inventory later this year to see how many horses remain, according to a story by The Daily Sentinel, and at some point will try to remove them.
With an aging population and most of the mares inhibited by pesticide-laced darts, bait-trapping may not be necessary according to comments 198 – 218 in the Final EA.
Zonastat and GonaCon can’t be pesticides because they don’t kill their targets.
Wrong!
A pesticide is any substance or mixture of substances intended for preventing, destroying, repelling or mitigating any pest, according to the EPA.
The intended effect of the two leading pesticides for wild horses is contraception, not death, according to the Final EA for management actions in the McCullough Peaks HMA. Go to the bottom of page nine in the pdf.
Adverse reactions may kill a few animals but that is not the intent.
By snuffing out new life, driving breeding populations to zero and shutting down natural selection, the chronic effect is extermination.
They won’t admit it but you have to give them credit for playing the long game.
The FONSI, DR and Final EA were copied to the project folder today.
The Cody Field Office authorized Alternative 2 in the EA, the Proposed Action, which features bait trap removals of excess horses, continued use of PZP and application of GonaCon-Equine to mares that don’t respond it, over a ten-year period.
The new plan supports three goals of rangeland management:
Pest control
Resource enforcement
Rancher protection
The BLM continues to ignore the 2017 labeling amendment for GonaCon-Equine that extended the interval between primers and boosters from 30 days to 90 days.
“GonaCon-Equine is approved for use by authorized federal, state, tribal, public and private personnel, for application to wild and feral equids in the United States (EPA 2013, 2015).”
Bait trapping may occur this year according to the news release.
The incident will begin on or about September 25, according to a BLM news release.
The agency will gather approximately 122 wild horses, remove approximately 24 excess animals and treat up to 49 mares with GonaCon Equine, a fertility control pesticide.
Those mares will be returned to the area with up to 49 stallions.
The event, billed as catch-treat-release in the August 28 schedule, will be open to public observation.
The current population is thought to be 152, not including this year’s foal crop.
The HMA covers 161,678 total acres in central Nevada, including 157,838 public acres, and is subject to permitted grazing.
The stocking rate allowed by plan is 1.1 wild horses per thousand public acres, in line with the target rate across all HMAs of one wild horse per thousand acres.
Would an article published by Utah State University, home of the FREES Network, be kind to the horses or the ranchers?
Students under the tutelage of Eric Thacker can recite the overpopulation narrative in their sleep, portraying the public-lands ranchers as victims, but, like the wild horse advocates, couldn’t convert an AML to AUMs if their lives depended on it, much less compute a forage allocation for livestock in an area set aside for wild horses.
What is an HMA? It’s an allotment with horses on it according to Ty Berg, husband of Anna Fallini Berg, operators of Twin Springs Ranch in southern Nevada and the only permittees on the massive Reveille Allotment.
And, yes, they are legally obligated to let the horses run wild on land their family has worked for over 150 years because the Reveille Allotment contains the Reveille HA, an area identified in 1971 for wild horses, which contains the Reveille HMA, the remnant where horses are still allowed. Refer to this post for a discussion of the arrangement, including a map.
The image at 1:21 in the following video tells you why there are few natural predators in the area.
Regarding the current wild horse population across the American west, discussed at 2:34, there are three times more horses than allowed by plan, not three times more than the land can support. The image at 1:36 explains why this is true.
AMLs are small relative to the available resources because the bureaucrats have assigned most of the forage to the ranchers.
The consensus of the Love Triangle, an informal coalition united not by methodology but by contempt for wild horses, described as “all sides” by the reporter at 5:34, is fertility control.
The video shows unlawful use of PZP by volunteers with the Campaign Against America’s Wild Horses, a leader in nonmotorized removal, at 5:44.
As of today, the link still points to the August 28 schedule, which aligns with three goals of rangeland management:
Pest control
Resource enforcement
Rancher protection
The upper section corresponds to nonmotorized removals, dominated by the wild horse advocates and their bogus nonprofits, some made to order.
The lower sections correspond to motorized removals, the domain of BLM staff and their contractors. (Animals captured with baited traps are hauled off with trucks.)
Western Horse Watchers Association 