Urgent: Take action now to stop the proposed extermination of 45,000 wild horses and burros

While everyone is distracted, committee members in the U.S. Senate are making life and death decisions for wild horses and burros on your behalf.

You can use your voice for the voiceless before it’s too late! Read the sample letter below to help you with phone calls, faxes and emails:

Dear Senator Feinstein, Senator Murkowski ,Senator Blunt and Senator Udall:

We realize you are about to decide on the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) wild horse and burro budget for 2017 on behalf of the American people.  The BLM has been influenced by the livestock, oil and gas and other mining interests stating that Herd Areas are designated for multiple use, conveniently and illegally ignoring the fact that wild horses and burros under Sec. C get ‘devoted principal presence of their range areas’. We ask that you stand up for them.

Will the BLM use Americans’ tax dollars to kill off our wild horse and burro herds since the BLM’s own Advisory Board has recommended that 45,000 wild horses and burros be destroyed?  This suggestion is disgusting and against the law and against the Wild Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 passed to protect these incredible national treasures.

Therefore we ask that all BLM monies be specifically utilized for the following usages.

1.)  First, American tax dollars be allocated to maintain, feed and care for all the wild horses and burro’s in holding.

 2.) Get an independent headcount of all wild horses and burro’s in holding and on public land with public and press participation to insure that the head count is accurate as requested in this petition (https://www.change.org/p/u-s-senate-investigate-the-wild-horse-burro-count-in-captivity-and-freedom) This will insure BLM cannot skew their numbers for more BLM monies.

3.) BLM is required to start implementing a return wild horse and burro policy to their Herd Areas with a drop food and water program when necessary. This will greatly reduce spending five dollars a day on feeding the more than 13,000 wild horses and burros warehoused in feedlot settings known as short-term holding.

4.)  BLM must return the 22 million acres to the Herd Area’s of the original 53 million acres designated to them which they have removed without any congressional approval.  The BLM is blatantly lying to the public saying they have not removed any Herd Areas.   Removing thousands of wild horses while removing their Herd Areas and allowing for livestock grazing beyond their legal limits puts undo pressures upon the land that would otherwise not exist were the wild horses and burros management program being followed as the original law intended.

5.) Do not transfer federally protected wild horses to states, cities and counties. It would result in them being sold into the slaughter pipeline when the WILD horses don’t do well as “work horses”. We see the cruel fiasco looming in South Dakota when wild horses have been impounded by the state. They are planning on selling them at a livestock auction with kill-buyers licking their chops.

6.) Stop the BLM propaganda machine to fool Americans paid for with tax dollars. The BLM has misinformed the American public about wild horses and burros saying they are overpopulated and destructive to the environment when in fact they are nature’s top soil enhancer and are designed to protect the plants they need for survival. Keep in mind that wild horses are indigenous to the Americas.

7.) Due to the BLM’s illegal selling off at least 1,700 healthy wild horses to a private kill buyer who made thousand of dollars at the expense of taxpayers losing thousands of dollars, we feel you need to take charge and protect the lives of innocent captive wild horses and burros.

Below is the contact information for those who hold the fate of America’s wild horses and burros in their hands right now:
Senator Feinstein seems to welcome contact

Here’s information about how to contact her:

  • Contact her Washington, DC office.
  • Contact one of her four state offices.
  • Send her an e-mail message.
  • Please note:  If you are having difficulty with a government agency and you need casework assistance, please fill out a casework authorization form and send it to her San Francisco office, or call the San Francisco office for additional help at (415) 393-0707.
Senator Murkowski provides this link: https://www.murkowski.senate.gov/contact

Her office in WASHINGTON, D.C.

709 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: (202)-224-6665
Fax: (202)-224-5301

His office in Washington, D.C.

260 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: (202) 224-5721
Fax: (202) 224-8149

Senator Udall provides this link: https://www.tomudall.senate.gov/?p=contact
His office in Washington, DC
531 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington DC, 20510
(202) 224-6621

Protect Mustangs is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to the protection and preservation of native and wild horses. www.ProtectMustangs.org




#BREAKING: Protect Mustangs calls for an end to animal cruelty

PM Secretary Jewell Continue reading

Conversation about fertility control with Brett Hass, retired biologist previously with NSA (part 1)

Don’t let pesticides like Gonacon™, PZP or SpayVac® manage native wild horses to extinction. The Spin Dr.’s and some ignorant horse advocates are pushing fertility control on underpopulated wild horses. Know the truth and expose those spewing the spin.

PM Gonacon Pesticide Fact Sheet

Read the entire Gonacon™ Pesticide Fact Sheet

Interview

John Cox: Brett, you’re a retired biologist, previously with the NSA for how many years?

Brett Hass: 46 long years John. We met in Vietnam, when we a lot younger my friend (smiles). We were doing wildlife and vegetation studies in your AO (area of operations). That was my first assignment with the NSA, as a matter of fact.

John Cox: Let’s cut through all of that. What do you think of Gonacon™ and some of the other fertility controls BLM is using?

Brett Hass: As usual, and as government agencies do and BLM and DOI are extremely guilty, they pretend that science guides its wild horse and burro management strategies. So the agencies involved go forth and resolve issues, supposedly, with experimental drugs–in this case GonaCon™. The question is, in reality, does it resolve anything at all, or is it simply to further experimentations with this drug and the wild horses the most expendable of situations currently?

The problem is very obvious, with the first-time use of an experimental drug, they act like children with a new toy–but this toy is extremely dangerous, to not only the horses and actually lead them to extinction, but the environmental consequences are apparently neglected entirely? (shakes his head negatively). . .

But let’s get real, the very absence of science contradicts any time of sound reasoning for its use whatsoever. So once again we have a government agency, using a Nazi-Type experimental fertility drug on horses and other wildlife–without knowing, or even acknowledging for that matter, what the long-term consequences are–or in perception–the problems that will arise in its actual use.

There is no resolution, as I reviewed the population situation and see first hand there is no over-population if wild horses just within the BLM numbers alone; but livestock, that is a completely different matter, in reality.

John Cox: In your appraisal of the information you’ve read, would you, as a tenured Wildlife Biologist for over 50 years, use this drug?

Brett Hass: Absolutely not! There is no pertinent reasoning to use it right now and especially on wild horses or much of anything else for that matter. Our wildlife and environment is simply too important to be so frivolous with such activity, especially an unknown situation, as fertility drugs used in our natural environment. But as you say, ignorance is quite something, and our government seems to portray ignorance quite well, and frankly the only situation they seem to be competent to accomplish.

Much more on this discussion with Brett Hass later . . .

574px-Blm.svg

Below is the original PZP Pesticide Fact Sheet before HSUS seems to have lobbied the EPA to make changes to the chemical class. It’s still only approved as a pesticide to manage pests. PZP is made from slaughterhouse pig ovaries mixed with modified freund’s complete adjuvant.

PM PZP Test mares

(American wild horses used in fertility control experiments)

© John Cox, printed with permission

John Cox is a Vietnam Vet, living in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest who writes about the environment. He’s passionate about saving America’s wild horse herds and wolves. 

Read John Cox’s blog at: https://prophoto7journal.wordpress.com

Have you read about the Gonacon™ Experiment on the Water Canyon herd and the UNLUCKY 11 orphans? It all started as a PZP proposal and went down the slippery slope. . .  Read about it here: http://protectmustangs.org/?p=8488





Farwell message that BLM has lost its way

By U.S. Government [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

from a PEER Press Release

Sole Focus on Commodities Threatens Natural Heritage, 44-Year Veteran Warns

Posted on Oct 10, 2012


Vernal, Utah — The U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management has lost sight of its mission in a quest to maximize fossil energy and other resource exploitation on public wild lands, according to the retirement message sent by a career natural resource specialist and posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The sobering message depicts cascading natural system failures due to unchecked oil and gas drilling and related cumulative damage to public lands and waters.

Stan Olmstead started his career in natural resource management inside public agencies 44 years ago, with stints in the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. For the past 20 years he has been a Natural Resource Specialist and an Environmental Scientist in BLM’s Vernal Field Office in eastern Utah, near the Colorado border. On September 28th, his final day of federal service, he sent a memo entitled “Last Formal Comment” to all BLM employees throughout Utah.

In this memo, he decried a singular “focus on commodities and economics as opposed to environmental health.” He elaborated by writing “At the Vernal Office little concern has been shown to care for sensitive species … We promote energy development without stop and continue to measure natural resources by dollar value…” Olmstead offered these pointed examples:

  • BLM fails to protect sensitive wildlife and as a result “lost the mountain plover; the only known population in Utah… Little effort to prevent this loss was implemented.” He called this dereliction “a serious mission departure.”
  • “Plugging and abandonment of well sites have not been a priority. Numerous oil & gas wells have not produced for more than 15 years and yet these sites remain un-reclaimed.”
  • Cumulative impacts from oil and gas drilling. For example, “we disturb large percentages of our [grazing] allotments located in oil & gas fields and AUMs [Animal Unit Months] remain the same. If you lose 30% of the forage in a specific allotment it is logical to reduce the AUMs by 30%.”

“Stan is telling us that BLM has lost its way. BLM is supposed to be a ‘multiple-use agency’ but managers have misplaced the ‘multiple’ as they go full-drill and shortchange conservation,” stated Southwest PEER Director Daniel Patterson, an ecologist also formerly with BLM, noting that the BLM Director position is currently vacant. “BLM needs a visionary new leader who will keep public lands development at sustainable levels and understands you can’t have every use on every acre.”

Olmstead also cited poor land reclamation, unmonitored water depletion for endangered fish of the Colorado River watershed, and mounting air pollution, all due to divergence from BLM’s mission “to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.” He concluded with this call to colleagues:

“We need to alter our bureaucratic method of operation …Be honest about what is happening.”
###

Read Stan Olmstead’s last message to colleagues

Look at massive livestock impacts on BLM lands

Mustang advocates ask for federal spending transparency

Calico Roundup (Photo © Cat Kindsfather, all rights reserved)

For immediate release

Outrage over livestock auction companies—paid with tax dollars—to ‘control’ wild horses and burros

WASHINGTON (February 20, 2012)—As the American public prepares their tax returns, Protect Mustangs asks the Department of Interior to disclose why $116,744,281 of taxpayer dollars was paid to 86 contractors from fiscal year 2000 to 2009 for “Wild Horse and Burro ‘Control’ Services“. Besides the more than $13 million paid to a roundup contractor named Dave Cattoor, why was more than $16 million paid to Tadpole Cattle Company, Inc. and more than $15 million paid to Fallon Livestock Auction Inc.?

“Why are livestock auction contractors paid to ‘control’ wild horses and burros?” asks Anne Novak, executive director for Protect Mustangs. “What’s going on? Are America’s living treasures being sold at auctions where kill buyers shop for horse meat?”

“The word ‘auction’ raises the red flag for all horse advocates,” says Kerry Becklund, director of outreach at Protect Mustangs. “Auctions are the first step in the slaughter pipeline—resulting in a cruel death.”

America’s wild horses are particularly vulnerable.  They live in remote regions where they can be rounded up and sold to slaughter. They are not filled with chemicals like domestic horses so their meat could be in high demand on the Asian market.

The preservation group wants to know how many wild horses have been rounded up and sold at slaughter auctions since 2000 under BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife or the Forest Service’s jurisdiction.

Protect Mustangs maintains its adamant stance that no tax dollars should pay for inhumane horse slaughter nor support the barbaric industry in any way.

The preservation group is currently working on meeting their goal of one million signatures to petition President Barack Obama and Congress to pass the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act of 2011, S.B. 1176/H.R. 2966—to ensure all horses in America are treated humanely.

“Be the one in a million who ends horse slaughter”, says Novak. “Sign the petition and share it with your friends.”

# # #

Media Contacts:

Anne Novak, 415-531-8454  Anne@ProtectMustangs.org

Kerry Becklund, 510-502-1913  Kerry@ProtectMustangs.org

Contact Protect Mustangs for interviews, photos or video

Links of interest:

Contracts for Wild Horse and Burro Control Services (FY 2000-2009) http://bit.ly/xVlVm5

Contractor handling wild horses: http://bit.ly/xxUzJz

Resources to advocate for horses: http://bit.ly/z99DSm

Saving America’s Horses (film): http://bit.ly/A1gxPJ

The Petition (film): http://www.ThePetitionmovie.com

Change.org Petition to Protect Horses & pass American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act: http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-usa-horse-slaughter

Protect Mustangs on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/uDF5JP

Protect Mustangs on Twitter: http://twitter.com/protectmustangs

Protect Mustangs on You Tube: http://www.YouTube.com/ProtectMustangs

Protect Mustangs website: http://www.ProtectMustangs.org

Protect Mustangs is a Bay Area-based preservation group whose mission is to educate the public about the American wild horse, protect and research wild horses on the range and help those who have lost their freedom.