The BLM has just announced that it intends to pay $1.5 million to the National Academy of Sciences for a two-year study that would purportedly determine how best to count, control, collect, and ultimately manage America's wild horses. The agency claims it wants to use "the best science available" in managing wild horses and burros on public lands. Who are they kidding?
How can we possibly take this initiative seriously while the BLM is moving at literally breakneck speed to round up every wild horse it can find? It doesn't want a study, it wants a mandate. I don't buy it, and neither should anyone who truly cares about the future of the wild horses who are still roaming free on their appointed ranges.
The BLM's sudden interest in science is nothing more than an attempt to placate the Inspector General, whose office recently reported that the Department of Interior "has no comprehensive scientific integrity policy." Heck, wild horse advocates could have told them that.
Calls for a comprehensive scientific review are meaningless in the absence of a concurrent agreement to suspend the wild horse roundups pending the results of the investigation. If the BLM is so concerned about the need for an updated evaluation of how it calculates wild horse numbers and determines herd management areas, why is it in such a hurry to grab every horse in sight before such a study is even conducted, much less made available?
But if the National Academy of Sciences is to conduct a review, it should seek the answers to some hard questions. For example:
* Why is the BLM proceeding to "zero out" the 53,300-acre Moriah Herd Management Area (HMA) in White Pine County, Nevada? When it was last surveyed, in March, 2009, there appeared to be only 50 horses within the HMA. BLM now estimates that there might be as many as 72 (it really doesn't know), including this year's foal crop, but it says everyone must go. In the BLM's Environmental Assessment for this "Gather," it admits that it never even considered the idea of reducing the number of cattle who are permitted to share this HMA because that would be "outside the scope of this analysis."
* Why is the BLM indiscriminately injecting fertility suppressing drugs to wild mares in herds--such as the Pryors--that are already so small as to be below genetic viability?
* Why has the BLM set such ridiculously low AMLs (Appropriate Management Levels) in vast Herd Management Areas? Can it really be true that the 550,000-acre Calico Complex can only sustain 572 horses? Or that the 798,000-acre Twin Peaks HMA cannot support more than 448 horses? Based on the BLM's own assessment of the body condition of the horses who have been removed from Twin Peaks, for example, they are in excellent flesh and health, with absolutely no signs of distress due to lack of water or foraging resources.
* Why does the BLM's Eagle Lake (CA) office devote more space in its Twin Peaks Gather Reports to describing the television crews, videographers, writers, reporters, and congressional aides than to disclosing the ages, sex, and condition of the horses who have been ruthlessly and unnaturally stampeded into traps? We have a right to know.
The BLM's request for "an independent technical review" of its Wild Horse and Burro Program is stunning, actually. It's nothing less than an admission of guilt. In effect, the agency is acknowledging that its Environmental Assessments are based on outdated data and faulty science, but in the interim, it expects us to let it keep using the same old flawed methodology so that its henchmen and contractors can keep capturing wild horses to stock Secretary Salazar's nightmarish network of permanent holding facilities--or concentration camps--as R.T. Fitch so aptly calls them.
No, National Academy of Sciences. Don't confuse the BLM with the facts. Its mind is made up, and no scientific study--no matter how well documented--is going to change it. And that's a tragedy for America's wild horses.
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Read more:
Wild horses suffer unimaginable cruelty at hands of BLM during Twin Peaks roundup
Comments
Excellent reporting Maureen! The title hits the nail squarely on the head, doesn't it.
An immediate moratorium is needed to go hand in hand with this plan! Not one more horse should be allowed to be removed from the HMA's, until the study is completed! The DOI / BLM, can begin to best manage them, by agreeing to halt all proposed roundups immediately.
FYI >>> The above and first comments are mine. Maureen, thank you for using my image of this proud, stunningly healthy, stallion..... : ) This day he was free and wild @ Twin Peaks, exactly where he should be. What a beautiful sight this is!
The BLM figures it will take them 2 years to commit equicide against our wild horses and burros. I think their "final solution" plan will be accomplished long before then.
This "scientific review" is a joke and of course the blm'ers are spinning it like it is their own idea and not that they were pushed into by NAS & 54 Representatives. Anyone who spies an article that does not mention this fact should make a comment that includes this. It sickens me that they are trying to pull the wool over the public twice by one action. And even when the study is completed they do not actually have to abide by it. Salazar has already altered documents who actually thinks that won't be the fate of these study results. Another waste of money.
We wont have anymore mustangs by the time they get done with the studies, horses have been around for thousands of years along with humans, we all know what needs to be done. Control the numbers, open state adoption, abandon, viewing, riding and education centers for all americans to enjoy. HORSES HEAL PEOPLE it would create thousands of jobs and get amercans up off the couch. We must stop the attack on our mismanaged tax paid for horses, we want managed herds, not abused. stockpiled horses waiting to be turned in to horsemeat, that is not what the annie act was put in place for. 40+ years of abuse, where is the blood money from the previous 100k wild equines slaughtered. who collects that money SHOW US THE MONEY. blm is a conflict of interest with the horses, unless you can put a hunting tag on the horses back, a good horse is a dead horse. The horses get in the way of the mining operations. The horses would prefer to be shot at, then endure the torture they are put through every year being harvested by aircraft and crammed into a trailer they have never seen before only to be stockpiled and labeled a burden then sold out behind our backs across our boards for horsemeat
Please. everyone, look at BLM's own announcement. It does NOT say that the study will have anything to do with current methods of horse population count or management. All it is proposed to do is review BLMs program and procedures to decide if the BLM is doing the best it can with the best "AVAILABLE" science and facts. Not available methods to do things better. They have no current numbers or current studies, even by their own admission, so of course they can argue that they are managing the program appropriately according to what they have in their database (the best available to them)....This fact also needs to be stated, and the precise scope of the NAS involvement needs to be known and commented on. If possible, NAS could undertake their own studies of horse population and range conditions, or contract with independent (not BLM/DOI funded and selected) researchers to do this. Read the fine print --- the devil is always in the details. I would hate to see people celebrating that NAS is finally involved, only to hear in 2 years that they find that given the limitted data BLM has, they are acting appropriately, but that they have the following zillion recommendations for more research, which BLM will say they do not have the budget for. How about NAS review how BLM has responded to the decades-old study that recommended more research/?JMHJO (just my humble jaded opinion).
I'm not sure which press release (or which story) you're reading, SSR.
The BLM's own press release says that the NAS study will address "population estimation methods (i.e., "counts"), annual herd growth rates, population control measures, and whether populations will self-limit, as well as other subjects needing new research."
And, I don't believe my commentary suggested that I was "celebrating" that the NAS; far from it. I have little faith that the BLM will heed the NAS's recommendations, even if they are solid.
My main point, though, is that for this to be considered a serious effort on the part of the BLM, leading the public to believe that it wants to base its decisions on actual, verifiable data, it would have to institute an immediate moratorium on the current roundups, rather than continue to steamroll forward in the absence of facts.
There won't be any horses left on the ranges to study.
What are they thinking?
Advocates have been begging for intelligent studies and what do the horses receive but escalated removal, death, destruction, separation and eternal imprisonment.
Put the horses back on their homelands BLM, and then invest some of our tax money to preserve life and beauty and our heritage, instead of wasting millions of dollars of our money to destroy what is ours!
You are just an agency employed by the citizens of this country and we have asked for an immediate moratorium on roundups until these studies are performed!
Return the horses to their homes and reunite their families! Then, you may have something to study...
great questions. Thanks for putting them into clear words.
I was just writing about the literal breakneck speed too, whenI paused to read the Sunday report from Twin Peaks. Not GATHER RELATED, naturally. Those pesky wild horses just will find metal fences to ram into and break their necks.
We must have " a) moratorium on round-ups, b) investigation into the real WHY behind this carnage and c) study for the future
If there's not a moratorium on round-ups before NAS kicks off its review, there will be no horses left to study.
Well, the BLM has had this since for years ~
Wild Horses -- National Academy of Science field studies do not support the majority of claims that wild horses damage the environment. Responsible advocates understand that areas suffering from verified overpopulation are a different matter. Alberta's wild horses endure a relatively low survival rate among foals. The climate is challenging and predators are abundant.
Cows have no upper front teeth, only a thick pad: they graze by wrapping their long tongues around grass and pulling on it. If the ground is wet, they will pull out the grass by the roots, preventing it from growing back. Horses have both upper and lower incisors and graze by "clipping the grass," similar to a lawn mower, allowing the grass to easily grow back.
In addition, the horse’s digestive system does not thoroughly degrade the vegetation it eats. As a result, it tends to “replant” its own forage with the diverse seeds that pass through its system undegraded. This unique digestive system greatly aids in the building up of the absorptive, nutrient-rich humus component of soils. This, in turn, helps the soil absorb and retain water upon which many diverse plants and animals depend. In this way, the wild horse is also of great value in reducing dry inflammable vegetation in fire-prone areas. Back in the 1950s, it was primarily out of concern over brush fires that Storey County, Nevada, passed the first wild horse protection law in the United States.
Footnotes:
Rangeland Management: Improvements Needed in Federal Wild Horse Program RCED-90-110 August 20, 1990
Public Land Management: Observations on Management of Federal Wild Horse Program T-RCED-91-71 June 20, 1991
Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros: Final Report. Committee on Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros, Board on Agriculture and Renewable Resources, National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington D.C., 1982
How much more would they need if they REALLY wanted to go with some real science? At the very least, this should be acknowledged as needing further study and possibly a pause in the headlong rush to exterminate our wild horses.
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