The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) says slaughter remains a possibility for some of the more than 30,000 wild horses and burros being cared for in government-run pens.
A Government Accountability Office report issued last week lent support to the agency’s assertion in June that the costs of caring for the animals have skyrocketed. The GAO said the agency should consider euthanizing some horses or selling them, likely to a slaughterhouse, as an alternative to keeping them in long-term holding pens for their entire lives.
Meanwhile, the cost to care for the animals for life rose from $7 million in 2000 to $21 million in 2007.
Critics accuse the agency of mismanaging the horse program and say the roundup is only made necessary because the BLM favors cattle ranching over wild animals in the competition for water and graze land.
After being passed up for adoption three times, horses are sent to long-term holding pens where they may live to as old as 25, far longer than they would in the wild, BLM spokeswoman Celia Boddington says.
“As horses get older, they are extremely challenging if not impossible to gentle,” she says.
In the wild, the horses reproduce at a rate high enough to double the herd in four or five years, the BLM says. With drought conditions in parts of the West, the agency says it cannot allow the herds to grow unchecked.
With the economy going into the crapper, I would say that even fewer horses will be adopted, which in return will increase the number that will be put down. Horses are like the working class, it is a lose-lose scenario.
PRESS RELEASE
Bureau of Land Management on Rampage to Destroy Famous Wild Horse Herd
For Immediate Release August 10, 2009
Cloud and the wild horses of Montana’s PryorMountains are world famous but fame it appears is not going to protect the herd from a drastic government round up planned to begin September 1st in their spectacular wilderness home.
There are currently only 190 wild horses (one year and older) living in the PryorMountains. The BLM plans to remove 70 of them, plus foals. According to the foremost equine geneticist, Dr. Gus Cothran, 150-200 adult horses are needed in the herd to ensure their genetic diversity, which is vital to their long term survival.
These 70 horses would be placed in jeopardy. Any horses over 10 years of age can be bought directly by killer buyers and transported over the Northern border to Canadian slaughterhouses or south into Mexico. Younger horses not adopted would be put into government holding with 33,000 others that the BLM has removed from the wild and has proposed killing because they can no longer afford to feed them.
BLM cites poor range condition as the reason to remove the horses but abundant snow and rain for the past two and a half years has produced wonderful range conditions according to all who have visited Cloud and his herd. The Agency is not listening to anyone. They want this herd gutted. Nearly all the mares returned to the range would be given an experimental two-year infertility drug, PZP-22.
This helicopter round up is just one among many that the BLM is trying to complete, perhaps before the Obama Administration can catch up with what is going on.
The PryorMountain wild horses are descendants of the Lewis and Clark horses who were stolen by the Crow Indians in the early 1800’s. They can be traced further back to the horses brought over with the Spanish Conquistadors in 1500 making them one of the most Spanish of all wild horse herds in North America.
Please contact The Cloud Foundation for more information
http://www.thecloudfoundation.org, info@thecloudfoundation.org, 719-633-3842