Wild Horses Imperiled – Comments Needed Now!

Across the Western landscape, wild horses are in crisis and they need your voice immediately. In 1971 Congress unanimously passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burro Act, a mandate to forever protect wild horses and burros on our public lands. Today, however, the survival of these majestic mustangs is imperiled by the very agency charged with protecting them.

Cloud’s offspring on the auction block – scroll to the bottom to send your Senators an e-mail!

This weekend, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will auction off some of the offspring of the near-mythical wild stallion Cloud, whose life has been chronicled in a popular PBS Nature series, “Cloud: Wild Stallion of the Rockies.” Cloud’s herd of wild mustangs was rounded up earlier this month along with other horse bands off the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range on the border of Wyoming and Montana.

An IDA observer documented the roundup, in which horses, including young foals, were mercilessly chased by helicopter, causing injuries and lameness. Taken into captivity were 57 horses, including older horses like Conquistador, a 19-year-old stallion and his 21-year-old mare. These older horses are completely unsuitable for adoption and have no future unless returned to the open range.

Nevada horses targeted

In Nevada, the BLM is removing 350 horses southwest of Ely and plans to capture 270 more in October near Caliente. The roundups aim to remove all wild horses from the area known as the Caliente Wild Horse Complex and the Seaman and White River Herd Areas. The BLM claims that the 600 odd horses were overpopulating these 1.4 million acres (2,000 square miles!) but a wildlife ecologist who surveyed the area called this a “distortion.” Craig Downer says that the horses are being removed to appease ranchers, who view the horses as competition to the millions of cattle that are grazing our public lands

Wild Horses zeroed out

This “zeroing out” of wild horses flies in the face of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burro Act and the BLM’s own regional office 2008 goal to “Maintain and manage health, self-sustaining wild horse herds inside herd management areas within appropriate management levels to ensure a thriving and natural ecological balance.” Since 1971, when the Wild Horse and Burro Act took effect, wild horses have been zeroed out from 111 herd areas representing over 19 million acres of public land.

IDA helping horses

Last November at a meeting of the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, IDA publicly lambasted the BLM for its decades-long pattern of bungling wild horse management, which has lead to the current crisis where nearly half of America’s wild horses, approximately 30,000, have been rounded up from their native range and put into holding areas with fates unknown. The BLM was (and may still be) considering killing these majestic wild horses – or worse – lifting restrictions on sales and thus opening the door for slaughter buyers, as a solution to the rising cost of maintaining them in a sluggish adoption market. IDA clearly stated – and maintains – that this move by our government would be an unacceptable breach of the public trust and a travesty heard round the world.

House of Representatives votes to protect wild horses

IDA is also supporting passage of the Restoring Our American Mustangs Act (ROAM), which would update existing laws that protect wild horses encouraging the reopening of certain public lands to the mustangs, thus potentially decreasing the number in captivity. It also restores a crucial protection to keep wild horses from going to slaughter, which was stripped away several years ago, and would facilitate the creation of sanctuaries to house the 33,000 wild horses currently languishing in government holding facilities. This summer, the ROAM Act was passed by the House of Representatives on a 239-185 vote. The Senate version (S 1579) was introduced by Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) and is currently in the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee. What You Can Do

1. If you have land or know someone who has land who could temporarily house Conquistador and some of the older Pryor Mountain horses until we can convince the government to return them to their native habitat, please contact IDA immediately. (Suzanne Roy, 919-697-9389, [email protected]) Thefates of these horses (see here) will be sealed on Saturday.
2. Contact your Senators and ask them to support the ROAM Act (S 1579). Please fill in the form at the bottom of this page to contact your federal Senators as soon as possible and ask them to protect the wild horses, who are part of our national heritage and a symbol of the principle of freedom on which this country was founded.
3. Tell the Obama Administration that it’s time for change in our government’s wild horse management policies. Ask the President to:
• Stop the BLM’s aggressive horse removal campaign, which is currently underway at the behest of special ranching interests and costs the taxpayer millions of dollars.
• Implement a moratorium on round-ups until actual numbers of wild horses on public lands have been independently assessed and a humane plan for the management of these horses on the range and for those currently in captivity is in place.
• Require humane, horse-advocate observers on any future roundups that do take place.
• Support the creation of wild horse sanctuaries for the 33,000 wild horses the government currently keeps in holding facilities costing taxpayers $100,000 per day and tens of millions annually.
President Barack Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500
fax: 202-456-2461
email through http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/Cc your letter to the Bureau of Land Management, which on Monday September 28, will hold a public hearing on the wild horse management issue. Ask that it be included as official comments for the meeting of the Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board Meeting. [email protected]

4. Attend the meetings in Washington for the wild horses!