Exposing the Hypocrisy, Lies and Incompetence of the Wild Horse Advocates
Bait-trapping was suspended today, with 104 animals removed from their home range.
Refer to this page for gather stats and daily reports. Body condition scores have been averaging 4 to 5.
An eight year old jenny died of a broken neck on the first day of the roundup.
Operations will resume on June 25 according to today’s announcement.
Horse owners don’t have enough options for disposing of animals that aren’t wanted because they’re sick, old, unmanageable or fail to meet expectations, according to a ‘guest column‘ that appeared yesterday in Beef magazine.
Land managers can’t use it as a means of population control for wild horses.
And it’s a damn shame because it’s in the best interest of the animals to be killed, you see.
Just like abortion. Saves hundreds of thousands of kids from lives of poverty and crime every year.
Legalizing slaughter would alleviate the pain and suffering of horses driven from their home range so their food can be sold to public-lands ranchers. You know, families torn apart, pregnant mares dropping colts in feedlots and all that. So unnecessary.
With today’s technology, the process could become highly efficient, opening the door to mass removals from western rangelands, putting an end once and for all to the ‘wild horse problem.’
Call it the Final Solution.
Lawmakers from Montana should endorse the ‘creative’ wild horse management plan announced on 04/22/19, according to an op-ed that appeared today in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. It’s the only way to stop the endless cycle of roundups.
The alternative, according to the writer, is the use of lethal tools, such as slaughter and mass killings, to manage wild horse and burro populations.
Although she criticizes current management practices, she does not ask why the roundups occur (as if wild horse overpopulation is an established fact, self-evident).
You can’t solve a problem by treating the symptoms, you to have to remove the causes.
The management plan focuses the symptoms (‘excess’ horses displaced from their home range) but ignores the causes (too many privately owned livestock grazing on public lands set aside for the horses).
In 1971 Velma Johnston won protections for wild horses but not for their land.
It’s time to end public-lands ranching, along with the bureaucracy that supports it.
A statement by the Forest Service dated 05/02/19, which coincides with the date that a photographer saw a man shooting at the horses, says “Rumors about possible suspects, gossip about motives, and general misinformation quickly spread throughout social media.” Are they trying to downplay the incident?
Let’s look at facts:
That they have a motive for killing wild horses is not an accusation, it’s a reasoned conclusion.
RELATED: Group Criticizes Forest Service for Response to Heber Shootings.
Protesters returned to the state capital yesterday, according to a report by FOX-13 News, in response to a planned roundup of the Onaqui Mountain horses.
Critics of the horses—most of them shills for the public-lands ranchers—say they’re suffering because they don’t have enough food and water.
But the problem is privately owned livestock on public lands set aside for the horses, fences and gates that impede their movement, water sources commandeered for fee-paying animals.
The big-name advocacy groups should be going after the misappropriation of these lands, the failure of government to manage them primarily for wild horses and burros, instead of spreading their contraceptive venom across the fruited plain.
RELATED: Onaqui Mountain Protesters Gather in Salt Lake City, Livestock Grazing in Utah, BLM Puts Crosshairs On Onaqui Mountain Horses.
On the Virginia Range.
Refer to this story, posted yesterday by ABC15 News of Phoenix, AZ.
Unlike the public-lands ranchers, wild horses have no friends in government.
RELATED: Group Criticizes Forest Service for Response to Heber Shootings.
Match the term on the left with the meaning on the right. Use the Lexicon if necessary.
These terms appear frequently in news releases about wild horse roundups.
Refer to this video by the Reno Gazette Journal.
These people are enemies of the horses. How much of the story was filmed on private property? How many of those landowners agree with their twisted worldview?
The public-lands ranchers are smiling tonight because of idiots like these.
RELATED: Barren, PZP Zealots Toot Their Own Horns On the Virginia Range.
Virginia Range mustangs gather at water tanks when one of them had automatic refill with a temporary water supply.
The Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board will meet on these dates in 2019, according to a pre-announcement filed today:
The meeting in Boise will kick off with a field trip to Sands Basin HMA, which was burned in the Soda Fire of 2015.
Meetings are open to the public and will be live-streamed at this page.
Searching for wild horses: A family outing by Our National Adventure. The island was hit hard by Hurricane Florence last September but the horses survived.
These people have a lot of nerve telling us not to disturb the natural behavior of these horses (4:58 in the video), when they’re out there with dart guns shooting mares in the ass with contraceptives!
With this much human involvement—breeding patterns determined by them—the horses are no longer wild, they are a carefully managed exhibit, a hint of what was.
A story posted today by AZ Family, the CBS affiliate in Phoenix, says an eight week old filly was taken off the range after its mother was found dead near the Salt River in central Arizona. The mom was the oldest mare in the herd according to the report.
Not when the other side wants you wiped off the map. There is no two-state solution in the wild horse world. Public-lands ranching has to go.
See also these remarks, published today by The Wildlife Society, one of the anti-horse groups that participated last week in the ‘Equid Summit.’
By the way, what happened to the Summit? It was in the news on Wednesday but went dark after that. The conference ran through Friday.
On the beach near Corolla, NC with Bonnie Waddell.
Castle McLaughlin, co-founder of The Nokota Horse Conservancy®, will present “A Brief History of the Nokota Horses” at the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum on June 5 at 7:00 PM.
Refer to this story by the Minot Daily News for more information. The event is free and open to the public.
RELATED: Story of the Nokota Horses.
Refer to this news release dated 05/30/19. Plan documents can be found at this page.
The HMA lies on the California-Nevada border, east of Highway 395. It contains 758,128 acres and is managed for horses and burros. The aimed-at population density is 1.15 animals per thousand acres (both species, upper end of AMLs).
“The AML was determined based on an in-depth analysis of habitat suitability, resource monitoring, and population inventory data with public involvement,” according to the draft, but, curiously, it falls in line with the target density of one animal per thousand acres for public lands managed by the BLM in the western U.S.
Take the size of the HMA in acres and drop the last three digits. There’s your AML.
Why spend millions of dollars on in-depth analysis?
The land can support way more than one animal per thousand acres so why are the horses and burros held to such tiny numbers?
The draft indicated there were 793 horses remaining on the HMA after the gather of 2010 and 3,506 horses on the HMA in 2019, for a compound average growth rate of 18 percent per year over the nine year period. Both population figures are estimates.
There are an estimated 632 burros on the HMA this year, bringing the total to 4,138 animals and the pre-gather population density to 5.5 animals per thousand acres.
Surely they must be skin and bones by now, that’s five times too many!
The draft offers four alternatives for dealing with the ‘problem.’ Most are discussed in detail. The following options were rejected:
What a surprise. Public-lands ranching is a disease that has spread across the western U.S., with an entrenched bureaucracy that resists every attempt to cure it.
The plan allocates 9,792 AUMs per year to horses and burros on the Twin Peaks HMA, which corresponds to the upper end of their AMLs.
Privately owned cattle and sheep receive 22,481 AUMs and 4,697 AUMs, respectively, for a total of 27,178 AUMs per year.
For purposes of comparison, let’s convert the AUM budgets to wild horses and cow-calf pairs, which are equivalent in their resource loading.
The AUM allocation for horses and burros yields 816 wild horses, assuming they graze twelve months per year. The allocation for cattle and sheep yields 4,530 cow-calf pairs, assuming they graze six months per year.
The population densities, based on these figures, are approximately 1.1 wild horses and 6.0 cow-calf pairs per thousand acres, respectively. (The grazing allotments fit neatly within the HMA, see map on page 95 of the draft.)
The results are summarized in these charts:
The HMA can only support one wild horse per thousand acres but it can support six times as many cow-calf pairs, privately owned, of course.
Next time you hear the BLM say “The land can only support 27,000 wild horses and burros,” know that they mean it can only support that many horses and burros vis-à-vis the number of fee-paying animals they want to allow on it.
The National Park Service said earlier this week that 21 males were found on the island in May, along with 55 females, for a total of 76 ‘wild’ horses. A report by WBOC News of Salisbury, MD did not indicate the change from a year ago and if the horses were subject to ‘humane management practices.’
The expected proportion of males (or females) is .50. The actual proportion of males was .28 and the actual proportion of females was .72.
The range of variation in these values attributable to natural causes can be computed from basic statistical formulas, where p = .50 and n = 76. The results show something unnatural is happening on the island.
Are males being removed from the area by NPS? Why would they die at a rate that far exceeds that of females?
How much of the variation is attributable to human involvement? Is it still reasonable to call these horses ‘wild?’
