Showing posts with label Bureau of Land Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bureau of Land Management. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Angry Animal Advocates Can Calm Down: Tens of Thousands of Wild Horses and Donkeys Will be Spared the Threat of an Untimely Death
The federal government said this week that it will not consider a suggestion to euthanize the animals or sell them to slaughter.
The pronouncement, issued by the Bureau of Land Management, followed a public outcry over an advisory board’s recommendation on Friday that the agency kill or sell all of the 45,000 horses and donkeys in its custody that cannot be adopted.
In a statement and blog post in response, the Humane Society of the United States described the recommendation as “unhinged advice,” “a complete abdication of responsibility,” and “a sort of ‘Final Solution.’ ”
An online petition has collected more than 118,000 signatures so far.
But a spokesman for the bureau made clear in an interview that it had no plans to act on the advice.
“We’re making no change in our current policy,” the spokesman, Tom Gorey, said on Thursday. “We’re not going to sell to slaughter or put down healthy horses.”
The bureau will reinforce its contention at the next meeting of the group that made the recommendation, the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board. The recommendation was adopted by seven of its members, with one dissenting and another absent. It meets again in the spring.
The advice, however, puts into focus what some have described as a crisis for the program: The bureau takes in more and more animals as the population in the wild swells, using money that could be spent on dealing with population growth in the first place.
The federal agency houses more than 45,000 horses and burros in corrals, pastures or sanctuaries at a cost of more than $49 million annually.
In addition to the animals in captivity, there are more than 67,000 wild horses and burros roaming on federal land in the West, about 2.5 times the level the agency deems ideal for them to “thrive in balance with other public land resources and uses.”
The imbalance is most severe in California, where the current population is 3.8 times the sustainable level, according to the bureau’s estimates.
The agency takes more in each year, but it can’t keep up with explosive growth: The wild population expanded by 15 percent last year and 18 percent the year before.
While the agency adopts out thousands of animals each year and administers birth control to hundreds more, neither of these methods makes for a viable long-term solution to the population problem, Mr. Gorey said. The best hope is to improve birth control.
“What we need is a deus ex machina; we need a longer-lasting fertility-control agent and right now that’s not to be seen,” Mr. Gorey said. Current methods last about a year.
In the meantime, he said, the agency will just have to do the best it can to keep the booming population down.
The Bureau of Land Management used a helicopter to trap wild horses in Utah in 2015, though several escaped. It is costly to manage the animals, some critics say. Credit Jim Urquhart/Reuters.
You may be interested in reading: Bureau of Land Management Recently Recommended that 45,000 Wild Horses and Burros be Sold and/or Killed by a Range Management
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Monday, September 19, 2016
Bureau of Land Management Recently Recommended that 45,000 Wild Horses and Burros be Sold and/or Killed by a Range Management
Animal lovers are appalled by a recent suggestion from a federal advisory committee.
According to The Verge, the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently recommended that 45,000 wild horses and burros be sold and/or killed by a range management group currently holding the animals in government-run holding facilities.
To prevent them from overgrazing, these wild horses and burros were initially rounded up off the western rangeland owned by the government and used by beef farms. For years, the government has been removing the animals from their natural habitat and putting them into facilities where they can be adopted out.
This grim new measure, which would be partially paid for with tax dollars, was proposed after the committee decided it is too expensive to care for the horses and maintain over-crowded facilities, reports The Dodo.
This adds more fuel to a fiery debate about whether the government should allow the land to be used for for-profit cattle raising and, in turn, permit wild animals to be removed from that land for the benefit of beef farms.
The BLM spent nearly half the program’s entire budget, $49 million, caring for the wild horses and burros it took off the land. Many critics of the BLM are angry with how the agency has chosen to handle the problem of overgrazing, stating that the program should look into birth control options for the wild animals instead of capturing and/or killing them.
Unfortunately this isn’t the first time the BLM has been connected to the murder of wild horses. Last October, the agency sold 2,000 of the federally-protected animals to a buyer who planned to slaughter the horses.
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Monday, December 21, 2015
All the Missing Horses: What Happened to the Wild Horses Tom Davis Bought From the Gov’t?
Update, Oct. 26, 2015: Three years ago, we revealed that
the federal government, which is supposed to protect wild horses, was instead
selling them to an advocate of horse slaughter. It wasn't clear what happened
to the horses after that. Now it is: a government report has found that 1,700
protected horses were killed.
The Bureau of Land Management faced a crisis this spring.
The agency protects and manages herds of wild horses that
still roam the American West, rounding up thousands of them each year to keep
populations stable.
But by March, government pens and pastures were nearly
full. Efforts to find new storage space had fallen flat. So had most attempts
to persuade members of the public to adopt horses. Without a way to relieve the
pressure, the agency faced a gridlock that would invite lawsuits and
potentially cause long-term damage to the range.
So the BLM did something it has done increasingly over the
last few years. It turned to a little-known Colorado livestock hauler named Tom
Davis who was willing to buy hundreds of horses at a time, sight unseen, for
$10 a head.
The BLM has sold Davis at least 1,700 wild horses and
burros since 2009, agency records show -- 70 percent of the animals purchased
through its sale program.
Like all buyers, Davis signs contracts promising that
animals bought from the program will not be slaughtered and insists he finds
them good homes.
But Davis is a longtime advocate of horse slaughter. By his
own account, he has ducked Colorado law to move animals across state lines and
will not say where they end up. He continues to buy wild horses for slaughter
from Indian reservations, which are not protected by the same laws. And since
2010, he has been seeking investors for a slaughterhouse of his own.
"Hell, some of the finest meat you will ever eat is a
fat yearling colt," he said. "What is wrong with taking all those BLM
horses they got all fat and shiny and setting up a kill plant?"
Animal welfare advocates fear that horses bought by Davis
are being sent to the killing floor.
To read more on this story, click here: All the Missing Horses: What Happened to the Wild Horses Tom Davis Bought From the Gov’t?
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