What’s really going on?
Today a BLM staffer tells Anne Novak, Executive Director at Protect Mustangs, to make a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request to learn what BLM has done with more than 1,500 wild horses and burros in the captive pens at Palomino Valley Center, Nevada.
Be sure to read Outrage over secret documents planning to kill or slaughter 50,000 native wild horses
Protect Mustangs is an organization who protects and preserves native and wild horses.
We could lose everything we love to climate change, including wild horses and burros.
Watch Josh Fox’s new documentary How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change premiere tonight on HBO at 9 PM
© Irma Novak, all rights reserved
Here is Josh Fox’s new film How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowToLetGoOfTheWorld/?fref=nf&pnref=story
Protect Mustangs is an organization who protects and preserves native and wild horses.
The Cattlemen and livestock industry are making a huge push in Washington to give millions of tax-dollars to BLM for HUGE roundups to sterilize America’s last wild horses and burros. That means they will die out. Watch the Video testimonies here:
The House Committee on Natural Resources is stacked against wild horses and burros.
The vet called to testify seems to be from a wealthy Nevada ranching family. The Farm Bureau witness seems to be Pro-Slaughter for wild horses, etc.
The only representative for wild horses testifying is pushing for cooperative agreements with BLM as well as fertility control–Pesticide PZP–and that opens a pandora’s box for all forms of fertility control based on the BLM myth that wild horses are overpopulated : (
The Oil and Gas industry is about to launch a huge #Fracking boom in the areas where wild horses live so follow the money behind this rigged hearing. . .
PUBLIC comment allowed for 10 Business days after this meeting, which is July 7, 2016.
EMAIL: the Clerk: aniela.butler@mail.house.gov
This is YOUR call to action to JOIN the Alliance for Wild Horses and Burros to stop the slaughter, sterilizations, and stop the killing of America’s wild horses and burros. Go to https://www.facebook.com/Alliance-for-Wild-Horses-and-Burros-282933648725820/
Sign and share the petition for a 10 year Moratorium on Roundups: https://www.change.org/p/president-of-the-united-states-urgent-grant-a-10-year-moratorium-on-wild-horse-roundups-for-recovery-and-studies
Sign and share the petition to defund and stop the roundups as well as the slaughter: https://www.change.org/p/defund-and-stop-the-wild-horse-burro-roundups
Thank you!
From,
the Team at Protect Mustangs
(www.ProtectMustangs.org)
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ProtectMustangs
Member of the Alliance for Wild Horses and Burros (AWHB)
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Alliance-for-Wild-Horses-and-Burros-282933648725820/
Protect Mustangs is an organization who protects and preserves native and wild horses.
Protect Mustangs is an organization who protects and preserves native and wild horses.
GonaCon™ is an EPA-registered, immuno-contraceptive pesticide. Its classification is “restricted-use” due to “non-target injection hazard.” EPA warns that “pregnant women should not be involved in handling or injecting GonaCon and that all women should be aware that accidental self-injection may cause infertility.” Children are not allowed in areas where the product is used. [4, 6] Please keep in mind that the GonaCon™ dose-in-question is meant for a horse.
GonaCon™ “works” by causing an auto-immune disorder. Behaving like a perverted vaccine, GonaCon™ tricks the immune system into producing antibodies that destroy a female’s gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). Without GnRH, a female does not produce sex hormones, does not come into estrus, and is thus infertile. Behaviorally, courtship-rituals cease. [1, 3-6]
For those wild-horse-and-burro advocates who oppose the other immuno-contraceptive — PZP — you will be disturbed to learn the following from the USDA-APHIS “Questions and Answers” sheet regarding GonaCon™:
“After evaluating GonaCon™, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) … approved the slaughter of pigs vaccinated with GonaCon™. Similar injectable hormone-altering products are used routinely in livestock applications.” [5]
Good grief. So, the slaughterhouse pig ovaries used to manufacture PZP may very well come from animals who were previously injected with GonaCon™ to destroy their GnRH hormone — without which the ovaries cannot produce estrogen — and those poor pigs may also have been “routinely” injected with other similar “hormone-altering products.” Then our wild horses and burros are injected with PZP, which itself causes a marked drop in estrogen after just three treatments. [2] Surely, these hormonal atrocities constitute animal abuse.
GonaCon™ is long-acting. The treatment-protocol, consisting of two injections administered 30 to 60 days apart, can cause infertility for as long as four-to-five years without the need for booster shots. [3, 5] However, mares would still need to be rounded up and held captive for those 30 to 60 days to administer the injections properly. If all females in a small herd were treated per the multi-year plan, it could result in an unintended consequence — a huge gap in the herd’s age-structure, because very few if any foals would have been born during that period. Indeed, although the pesticide’s effectiveness was expected to diminish over time, a 3-year study of GonaCon-treated elk revealed that the percentage of infertile females actually increased each year, finally reaching 100%. It was also noted that every one of the treated elk suffered an abscess at the injection-site. [1]
Because GonaCon™ stimulates the immune-system, it will elicit the greatest reaction — the greatest output of destructive antibodies — if a mare is blessed with healthy immune-function. Such a mare will react strongly and be contracepted quickly. But she could just as easily be sterilized. In fact, GonaCon’s™ “application instructions” warn of the chance of sterilization. [5]
On the other hand, GonaCon™ may not work at all if a mare suffers from weak immune-function. That mare’s immune system will fail to react to GonaCon™, and she will get pregnant in spite of it. Thus, over time, there is the risk of another unintended consequence — selection for the immuno-compromised. As Jenny Powers, a National Park Service wildlife veterinarian and one of three lead scientists who participated in the elk research commented: “Any time we’re manipulative with wild animals, we’re messing with natural selection.” [1]
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Report prepared by Marybeth Devlin on December 18, 2015 for Protect Mustangs
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References:
1. Keller, Larry. (2011, May 17) To shoot, or not to shoot, at Rocky Mountain NP. High Country News. Retrieved from http://www.hcn.org/blogs/range/to-shoot-or-not-to-shoot-at-rocky-mountain-np
2. Kirkpatrick, J. F., I. K. M. Liu, J. W. Turner, Jr., R. Naugle, and R. Keiper. 1992a. Long-term effects of porcine zonae pellucidae immunocontraception on ovarian function of feral horses (Equus caballus). J. Reprod. Fert. 94:437-444. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1317449
3. McGrath, Matt. (2011, September 1) “Deer ‘pill’ curbs aggressive mating.” BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-14744811
4. United States Environmental Protection Agency. (2009) Pesticide Fact Sheet. Mammalian Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone (GnRH). Retrieved from http://www3.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/reg_actions/registration/fs_PC-116800_01-Sep-09.pdf
5. USDA-APHIS. (2006, May 1) “GonaCon™—Birth Control for Deer: Questions and Answers.” Digital Commons@University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/usdaaphisfactsheets/7/
6. U.S. Department of the Interior. (2015) Review of Ungulate Fertility Control in the National Park Service. Retrieved from https://www.nature.nps.gov/biology/wildlifehealth/Documents/Ungulate%20Fertility%20Report_09242015.pdf
Protect Mustangs is an organization who protects and preserves native and wild horses.
The call of an early morning crawls over the land and holds me still, ultimate claimant of divine serenity, it stare’s me down!
But wait a minute, am I not the onlooker here?
Scraping hooves and whimpered neighing, tributaries from valiant hearts fluster the silent lay of this land from behind the fenced enclosure. Wild pounding rumble of dazed, yet frenzied nobles snorting solid toughness.
… Stampede!
Jubilee of the unruly escapee, melt-down of exploding hooves fragments the scene; a free flowing surge of coiling manes and the taste of slow-motion fill the air. A roll-on cry for space and freedom is violently plastered into this primordial landscape.
The wind will not stop – – but it had!
Nailed to the land a brief moment I stand in awe, entrusted to its tranquil features, not even a moment ago its blustering strength, herald to an array of unnerving whirring and indigenous odd callings had taken me aback.
The wind will not stop – – but it had!
From this pristine and fog-hugged land a stifled grunt arises. Hooves detonate the snow, flung aside in angry temperament like shrapnel in an Arab roadside device. Yellow teeth speak of wild nonsense, sound-bites and pumice-like froth propel from the scene.
The rumble and clamour of this rogue stampede reaches me with joy. This heaven-sent rumbustious stand-off makes me yell and scream; “burn low and long your longing my regal friends, run wild a thousand miles or more”. Zany vanguards to the jiving wind your foals.
From leathered lips a livid dribble seeps, plants once talked to me and told me this.
© Eppo Harbrink Numan – The Hague, October/November 2010
Do you know Utah ranchers & cattlemen want to get control of federal land? They don’t seem to like BLM or wild horses!
“That horse, as bad as I DESPISE that horse on the desert, is untouchable under federal law,” says David Ure, director of School Institutional Trustlands Administration, Utah
“We are not welfare ranchers. We do not take one dollar of state or federal assistance on our ranches because we believe that every time you take money you didn’t earn, somebody earned money they didn’t get,” says Darrell Spencer.
It’s unclear which of these ranchers is a ‘welfare rancher” but Darrel Spencer says he’s not one of them.
Protect Mustangs is an organization who protects and preserves native and wild horses.
The old hypothesis — that PZP merely blocks sperm attachment — has been disproved.
Kaur & Prabha (2014) found that the infertility brought on by PZP is ” … a consequence of ovarian dystrophy rather than inhibition of sperm-oocyte interaction.” They reported that PZP’s antibodies induce ovarian dystrophy, oophoritis (inflammation of the ovaries), destruction of oocytes in all growing follicles, and depletion of resting follicles.
Despite all the hype about PZP being non-hormonal, the manufacturer himself knew that it had an adverse hormonal effect — significantly-lowered estrogen. In 1992, he reported that ” … three consecutive years of PZP treatment may interfere with normal ovarian function as shown by markedly depressed oestrogen secretion.” Thus, PZP is an endocrine disruptor.
Worse yet, Sacco et al. (1981) found that PZP antibodies are transferred from mother to young via the placenta and milk. The transferred antibodies cross-react with and bind to the zonae pellucidae of female offspring. This is bad news because BLM regularly administers PZP to pregnant and lactating mares, who transfer the destructive antibodies to their filly-foals. Thus, the fillies get their first treatment with PZP in utero, while nursing, or both.
Nettles (1997) found an association between PZP and stillbirths. In 2015, the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros reported that 7 mares previously treated with PZP, when taken off it, were able to get pregnant. However, 6 of those 7 mares — that is, 86 percent — produced foals that were stillborn. All other ISPMB mares that had not been previously injected with PZP successfully birthed healthy foals. Environmental and other conditions were identical. The only variable was PZP. Meanwhile, over on the East Coast, the Corolla herd, long-managed with PZP, has recently experienced birth defects among its newborns.
Gray & Cameron (2010) questioned the supposed benefit of PZP-sterilized mares living much longer than their normal life expectancy, and and Knight & Rubenstein (2014) warned of unintended consequences of PZP’s ironic effect of extended longevity. Ultra-elderly mares take up scarce slots within AML-restricted herds. They consume resources but no longer contribute to the gene-pool. It is detrimental to a population’s genetic viability to carry significant numbers of sterile herd-members way-beyond their normal life-span. Meanwhile, those few foals that are born have to be removed to achieve AML because they’re more adoptable.
Ransom et al. (2013) conducted a longitudinal study of three herds currently being managed by PZP — Little Book Cliffs, McCullough Peaks, and Pryor Mountain. They found that the the birthing season lasted 341 days — nearly year-round — which puts the life of mares and foals in jeopardy. Nature designed the equine birthing-season to occur in Spring, not year-round, and certainly not in the dead of Winter.
Ransom et al. also found that, after suspension of PZP, there was a delay lasting 411.3 days (1.13 years) per each year-of-treatment before mares recovered their fertility. They warned: “Humans are increasingly attempting to manage the planet’s wildlife and habitats with new tools that are often not fully understood. The transient nature of the immunocontraceptive PZP can manifest into extraordinary persistence of infertility with repeated vaccinations, and ultimately can alter birth phenology in horses. This persistence may be of benefit for managing overabundant wildlife, but also suggests caution for use in small refugia or breeding facilities maintained for repatriation of rare species.”
PZP’s manufacturer conceded that it could take up to eight years to recover fertility after just three consecutive PZP treatments.
The study on PZP by Knight & Rubenstein (2014) found that ” … three or more consecutive years of treatment or administration of the first dose before sexual maturity may have triggered infertility in some mares.” These findings are particularly troubling. They suggest that, actually, only two consecutive PZP-treatments may be reversible. Except, that is, in the case of fillies who have not yet reached puberty — they could be sterilized by just one injection.
PZP’s manufacturer was quoted describing PZP as “so safe it is boring.” Independent research shows otherwise — that PZP is a powerful hormone disruptor that could sterilize a female with just one injection. If staff and volunteers believe that PZP is boringly safe, they will be less likely to protect themselves adequately from this dangerous pesticide. Indeed, many of the volunteers are women and, therefore, at risk. Accidental self-injection with PZP could cause them to suffer diseased ovaries and depressed estrogen-levels — in addition to infertility and, potentially, sterility. Consider the magnitude of the risk — the PZP-in-question is a horse-size dose.
~ Marybeth Devlin, Wild Horse Advocate
Protect Mustangs is an organization who protects and preserves native and wild horses.
Update on our petition for shade and shelter for captive wild horses and burros
Last year I had several meetings with BLM staff to bring shade to the captives at Palomino Valley Center (PVC). I hoped it would set an example for other facilities without shade as well.
BLM staff wanted to try a specific shade structure to ensure it would work for the facility. They told me there was no money in their budget to buy it. I offered to quickly raise the money for the trial shade structure to fast-track the process.
Sadly the BLM’s Washington office created a lot of red tape and delays. The window for the 2015 hot weather trial period ended.
My hopes were to have the PVC shade trial completed in 2015 so by the summer of 2016 the pens would be filled with shade structures providing relief from the hot weather and triple digit heat-waves.
In the wild, equids can move to cooler zones. In the BLM pens they are trapped.
Now it’s 2016 and summer temperatures are starting to climb. . . I hope there won’t be anymore dead wild horses in the pens this summer. Previous heat-waves have been tragic.
Please email this petition to everyone you know and ask them to sign and share it. Let’s keep the pressure on BLM to do the right thing.
After all, BLM made more than $4 billion in profit last year. Funds should be made available for BLM to purchase trial shade structures themselves right now! The least BLM could do is to provide shade to the iconic captives struggling under the pounding sun.
Together we can turn this around!
With dedication,
Anne
Anne Novak
Executive Director
www.ProtectMustangs.org
Contact@ProtectMustangs.org
Mission: To protect and preserve native and wild horses.
Petition to bring emergency shade and shelter to captive wild horses and burros: https://www.change.org/p/bring-emergency-shelter-and-shade-to-captive-wild-horses-and-burros
Protect Mustangs is an organization who protects and preserves native and wild horses.
Time for a brief quiz.
Question 1): How many wild horses and burros are currently roaming across the Western rangelands?
Question 2: How many wild horse and burros are adopted by private citizens each year?
Question 3): Absent “control measures,” how long does it take for the population of wild horses and burros to double in numbers?
Answers: 1). 67,000. 2). 2,500. 3). Four years.
In other words, each year there are thousands more of these feral animals being added to what is already an overpopulation across the semi-arid rangelands of Nevada, California, Utah and several other Western states.
In fact, the Bureau of Land Management announced last week that as of this March, there an estimated 67,000 wild horses and burros in the West public rangelands, which is a 15% increase over the estimated 2015 population.
The updated data are more than twice the number of horses on the range than is recommended under BLM land-use plans. It is also two and a half times the number of horses and burros that were estimated to be in existence when the Wild and Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act was passed 45 years ago in 1971.
“Over the past seven years we have doubled the amount of funding used for managing our nation’s wild horses and burros,” Neil Kornze, BLM Director, said in a statement. “Despite this, major shifts in the adoption market and the absence of a long-term fertility control drug have driven population levels higher.”
The major shift to which Kornze referred is a dramatic decrease in adoptions of wild horses, due to economics and other factors — ie, the fact that the wild mustangs, in particular, don’t adapt well to life in a stable.
Here’s the problem: The lifetime cost of caring for an unadopted horse removed from the range approaches $50,000 per animal. With 46,000 horses and burros already residing in off-range corrals and pastures, this means that without some way to place these animals with willing owners, BLM will spend more than a billion dollars to care for and feed them over the rest of their lives.
And there are plenty more where the current ones came from.
As The New York Times phrased the situation in a lengthy article two years ago, “There are now twice as many wild horses in the West as federal land managers say the land can sustain. The program that manages them has broken down, and unchecked populations pose a threat to delicate public land, as well as the ranches that rely on it.”
And the situation has only worsened since then.
A question of numbers
Keep in mind that the population of wild horses and burros affects not just agency budgets and wildlife populations, but impacts a significant economic and cultural resource: the grasslands of the West. When deer populations exceed their rural habitats east of the Mississippi, there is property damage and traffic accidents for suburban and rural residents to contend with, but there is far less impact on agriculture.
Not so out West. There simply isn’t carrying capacity for ever-expanding herds of horse and burros, while at the same time maintaining the grazing rights of ranchers and conserving the limited supply of grassland and water resources.
BLM officials are trying to address the challenge on a number of fronts, including:
None of those measures — even in combination — will be enough, however, and so the agency announced in a statement that it would request two new pieces of legislation: One to permit the transfer of horses to other agencies that have a need for work animals; and another that would create a congressionally chartered foundation to help fund and support adoption efforts.
Unfortunately, all the money in the world can’t turn adoption in to a sustainable solution. Wild mustangs and feral burros make lousy pets and equally undesirable work animals. It’s one thing to “domesticate” bison, another “wild” species dependent on rangelands. The time, trouble and expense of keeping them corralled represents an investment recouped by selling the meat and hides, whereas the only reason to keep horses around these days is to ride them, either for pleasure, for racing or for equestrian competition.
Most wild horses are highly unsuited to all of the above.
As is true with any invasive species, the spectrum of control measures starts out with the least intrusive, most humane interventions. But unless such a limited strategy actually works, efforts must be ramped up — all the way to forcible population control.
I’ve yet to hear from any activist with a better solution.
Or one with an extra billion they’d like to donate to the cause.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Dan Murphy, a veteran food-industry journalist and commentator. Cross-posted for education and discussion from PorkNetwork
Protect Mustangs is an organization who protects and preserves native and wild horses.