URGENT: Petition to stop violent wild horses roundups and stop sending them to slaughter!

Wild horses are a native species who must be saved!

Sign and share the urgent petition

Loopholes allow the BLM to sell thousands of wild horses to slaughter middlemen known as kill buyers to dispose of alleged “excess and unadoptable” American wild horses and this must stop now! Slaughter is cruel and inhumane.

This is what cruel roundups look like:

Roundups are the first step towards slaughter.

Craig Downer published the peer reviewed paper titled The Horse and Burro as Positively Contributing Returned Natives in North America.

According to a press release from National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released June 5, 2013, “The U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) current practice of removing free-ranging horses from public lands promotes a high population growth rate, and maintaining them in long-term holding facilities is both economically unsustainable and incongruent with public expectations, says a new report by the National Research Council.”

The NAS report states there is “no evidence” of overpopulation. Only tobacco science and spin backs up BLM’s population claim to justify roundups and fertility control/sterilizations. . .

PZP is an EPA approved RESTRICTED-USE PESTICIDE that sterilizes wild horses after multiple use so it’s risky for long-term herd survival. See information here: http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/reg_actions/pending/fs_PC-176603_01-Jan-12.pdf

Giving PZP to wild mares also results in foals being born late in the fall or winter and dying because they are too little to make it through a harsh winter.

Fertility control research trials are big business. Left unchallenged, wild horses and burros will continue to be lab rats for human fertility control research. This exploitation must stop!

We request an immediate halt to roundups for scientific population studies and studies on holistic management before it’s too late.

Wild horses are a returned-native species in America. Rounding up federally protected wild horses and burros has been documented as cruel. Warehousing them for decades is fiscally irresponsible. Sending wild horses to slaughter by selling them to middlemen is cruel and inhumane. Clearing wild horses and burros off public land–for industrialization, fracking, grazing and the water grab–goes against the 1971 Free Roaming Wild Horse and Burro Act put in place to protect the living legends of the American West. They must never go to slaughter.

We request you defund and stop the roundups immediately as well as reverse the Burns Amendment to stop unlimited sales of wild horses to slaughter.

There is no accurate census and the BLM figures do not add up. We request population studies for each herd management area (HMA) and each herd area (HA) because we are gravely concerned there are less than 18,000 wild horses and burros in the 10 western states combined. More roundups, fertility control/sterilizations and sales to slaughter will wipe them out because the majority are no longer genetically viable herds.

Wild horses are underpopulated despite spin from the forces that want to perform heinous sterilizations in the field. Humane fertility control could be looked at as an option only after scientific population studies have been conducted for each herd management area. The EPA approved restricted-use pesticides known as PZP and Gonacon have risks as do other drugs . . . Right now fertility control is premature, will destroy natural selection and could cause harm because wild horses are underpopulated in the West.

Field observers have noticed a worrisome decline in wild horse and burro populations since the BLM’s rampant roundups from 2009 to this day.

Kindly allow returned-native wild horses and burros to reverse desertification, reduce the fuel for wildfires and create biodiversity on public land, live with their families and inspire us with their spirit.

Right now America’s wild horses and burros are being managed to extinction. They need your help to stop the roundups and slaughter today.

Go to the petition on Change.org here and email it to your friends and family: https://www.change.org/p/defund-and-stop-the-wild-horse-amp-burro-roundups

16 thoughts on “URGENT: Petition to stop violent wild horses roundups and stop sending them to slaughter!

  1. I am asking for full disclosure and transparency of our Federal government no more experiments no more mysteries about horses being shipped out with private profit to contractors and /or BLM staff. I ask for your disclosure on fracking the land taken so violently from the wild horses.

  2. Stop! Stop! Stop! Just stop! Our wild horses, burros & donkeys are being systematically driven to extinction. Our land belongs to them as well. We can coexist with all species. We just have to try. Otherwise future generations will only know about wild horses, burros & donkeys from books. Stop before it’s too late.

  3. It is of the utmost importance to leave these horses in their natural element, without any interference by man. They had survived and lived in the natural order of their element. It is man, who decimated the natural predators,cand now, through the profiteering, and developing of the habitat that is left, it is said”they are overpopulated!” Such a statement from thosevwho do not realize the folly and the upsetting of Nature. Only to reinstitute back, that which was taken away, and reistablish the original state, before man encroached and destroyed it, can we possibly have the nature back in balance.

  4. Removing these wild equines is unacceptable.
    We pay for their care and you have no rights to imprison them.
    REMOVE THE CATTLE.
    We all know the cattle are destroying grazing land not the equines.
    We’ve seen the data.
    Leave them along.
    This is my demand as an American tax payer.
    Thank you.

  5. I just got back from driving up to Cold Creek today, a heavenly place where one could escape the confines of the city and visit the wild horses running free in Southern Nevada — one of the last. I did not see one wild horse on today’s visit and I am saddened and morally outraged at the deception on behalf of the BLM. Cold Creek had an “emergency” roundup/gather this past September and, according to Karla Norris of the BLM, they had counted the horses and rounded up approximately half – well where are the remaining 270 or so horses that they left behind? Statistics say I should have seen at least one horse today. The Southern Nevada wild horses have been (mis) managed into extinction right in front of my eyes. This is an atrocity!! We must kick the BLM to the curb. They have clearly lost any care or concern for the conservation of these majestic horses, nor have they honored their protection afforded within the 1971 congressional act.

  6. I think what the BLM and BLM associated ranching organizations are doing to America’s Wild Horse and Burro population is shameful. As has been stated several times, wild horses are underpopulated on public lands. I don’t think the BLM or the Department of Interior understands just how many people in this country strongly disagree with their mismanagement of public lands. The corrupt backroom deals and “look the other way” policies that benefit America’s animal agribusiness need to end immediately. The right to make decisions on behalf of the wild horses and burros lies with the people, not with the bureaucrats in Washington D.C. With elections coming up, I urge everyone who reads this to contact your representatives in Congress and the candidates running for those offices, get them to put out a statement in writing or video clarifying their stance on Wild Horse and Burro management policies going forward. Every politician you can get a comment from will bring more attention to the need for our horses and burros to be wild, free and viable reproductively.

  7. Stop killing America’s Wild Horses & Burros… End domestic slaughter of all horses !!!!

  8. Horses developed and evolved in what is now the United States, crossing the Bering land bridge during the ice ages to Siberia, migrating and colonizing all of the continents except for Antarctica. Horses were tamed and domesticated as companions to man in Asia, eventually serving in transportation, in agriculture, in warfare all across all of the world. Current economic policies favoring misguided ranching activities in the United States have severely curtailed the areas available to wild horses in the American west, interfering with the natural order, reducing the numbers of free ranging wild horses from two million not so long ago to less than twenty thousand still living in the wild, and with over fifty thousand incarcerated in government concentration camp holding areas at great expense to the taxpayers. That must change.

  9. BLM’s mustang-population “data” is a fraud. While pretending to rely on the assumption that herds grow 20% a year, BLM posts numbers up to 8 times higher than that to justify roundups, which are pre-scheduled on a rotation-basis, seeming to target particular herds. For instance, the Agency recently claimed that the famous Kiger herd in Oregon grew from 21 horses to 156 horses in just four years — an increase of 643%, which equates to a yearly average increase of 160%, which is 8 times higher than the 20% BLM supposedly uses. Such growth is biologically impossible. Kiger is not an isolated example, although it is the worst found so far. Here are some other phony figures on population-growth recently claimed by BLM to make it appear that gathers were necessary:

    Blawn Wash (UT)
    319% increase in 3 years, averaging 107% per year

    Fish Creek (NV)
    80% increase in one year

    Green Mountain (WY)
    281% increase in four years, averaging 70% per year

    Stewart Creek (WY)
    311% increase in four years, averaging 78% per year

    But herd-growth cannot reach even 20 percent a year. It is important to understand that the birth-rate is not the same as — and should not be equated to — the population growth-rate. Here’s why. An independent study reviewed BLM roundup-records for a representative sample of four herd management areas composed of 5,859 wild horses (Gregg, LeBlanc, and Johnston, 2014). While the researchers found an overall birth-rate of just under 20 percent, they also found that half of foals perish in their first year of life. Thus, the effective foal-to-yearling survival-rate is just 10 percent. Further, adult wild horses also perish. They succumb to illness, injury, and predation. Their death-rate must be taken into consideration as well. But BLM ignores mortality — foal and adult — in its population-estimates. Given the 50% foal mortality-rate, and the 5% or higher average annual death-rate of adult wild horses, herd-growth could not increase 20% a year, and a herd-population could not double in 4 years — refuting yet another BLM myth.

    Stealthily inserting bogus birth-rates into the data, wrongly conflating birth-rates with population growth-rates, and failing to factor in mortality-rates — that is how BLM creates the false impression of a population-explosion. But “cooking the books” is not the only way BLM falsifies the population-picture. Another ruse BLM employs is restricting maximum herd-size below minimum-viable population (MVP) size. Then, whenever a herd is made to appear — via fictitious figures — to exceed the arbitrary management level, BLM screams “excess!” and declares an immediate need for mass-removals and sterilizations. It should be noted that more than 70 percent of the herds are “managed” below MVP.

    BLM also fails to consider another factor limiting herd-growth — stochastic events — which are random catastrophes such as wildfires or contagious diseases that suddenly wipe out mass-numbers of herd-members. Stochastic events can result in no-growth or even negative growth.

    Now BLM is distributing grant-money to universities and researchers to study more ways of dealing with the phantom overpopulation. All manner of sicko experiments are being carried out on the wild horses, such as treating them with endocrine disruptors and sterilizing them surgically. Why? Because BLM is a corrupt agency. It invented this counterfeit crisis to create a sense of urgency, which will pressure Congress to give the Agency extra money to “solve” a non-existent problem.

  10. The horses are as much a part of the wild America we search for……Please do not deny us their majesty……Do not deny their right to live where they have always lived…….

  11. Please stop horse roundups immediately and permanently now and in the future. Also, fertility control is not necessary. Horses will not produce more than the environment can handle. All this cruelty to horses must be stopped. Please leave thye horses to nature and help nature take pro;er care of the horses instead of trying to control everything. Thank you very much.

  12. Agencies egregiously mis- lead elected officials and the public when referring to wild horses as a feral reintroduce species, even after Congress declared them a wild free roaming cultural resource… are the fossils found in the Anza Borrego Desert State Park the same SPECIES?

    †Equus enormis—Enormous Horse (Murray 2008)
    †Equus francescana*—Francescan Horse (Murray 2008: cf.)
    †Equus pacificus—Pacific Horse (Murray 2008: ?)
    †Equus simplicidens—American Zebra (Murray 2008: cf.)
    †Hippidion sp.—Hippidion Horses (Murray 2008: cf. gen.)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.