Forcibly drugging wild mares with PZP at the Carson Prison
By,
Carl Mrozek
Unfortunately, the secret mandate to turn our public lands into vast oil, gas and coal fields–interspersed with millions of cattle under Bush–Cheney has continued unabated under Obama with geothermal fields, plus solar and wind farms being added to the mix of revenue generating initiatives, many on lands reserved by law for primary use by wild horses and burros.
Even as their herds diminish under constant assault by all of these special interests on public lands, wild horses continue to be scapegoats for degradation of public lands due to overpopulation, by the BLM which over-counts then by at least 200% while greatly exaggerating their rate of population increase–based on optimal conditions and zero mortality.
BLM’s solution to this fabricated overpopulation explosion of wild horses and burros has been massive roundups which are now being replaced by large-scale birth control with PZP (porcine zone pellucida) which results in sterilization after multiple applications. While their tactics have grown more sophisticated, BLM’s overall management program is much the same: Management for Extinction–only slower and less visible than before. Many herds have achieved balanced population levels with little or no management but today all the $$ is on fertility control, short-term and sterilization, long-term–not on natural population control, because this won’t eradicate the herds as ordained by the power brokers in DV. Alas if we don’t wake up, expose and oppose the lies and subterfuge re: the widespread use of PZP soon, our iconic native wild horses may join blue and bowhead whales in the waiting line for extinction–sooner than later.
Carl Mrozek’s nature clips are seen often on CBS Sunday Morning News. He is currently making a documentary on Wild Burros.
BLM’s plans for sterilization include the slow extinction drug called PZP which sterilizes after multiple use
Since 2009 and surely earlier, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has always said they want to sterilize wild horses and burros. BLM and Secretary Sally Jewell want to use other forms of birth control besides PZP even though Congress has paid BLM to let Big Pharma experiment with PZP on our wild mares for decades.
At least one pharmaceutical company was hoping to use PZP for human contraception but since it’s not safe for the ovaries and makes wild horses sterile after multiple use, it’s not ideal for a human product.
PZP, Porcine Zona Pellucida, is made from slaughterhouse pig ovaries and mixed with adjuvant.
BLM never said they liked PZP for wild horse management. The truth is BLM thinks PZP is impractical and they don’t believe it works well. BLM doesn’t want to round up wild horses every 1 or 2 years (for native PZP or PZP-22) and be bothered with drugging wild mares at the “right time” of year. 90% of the herds on public land need to be rounded up to be darted with PZP. Only the ones who are almost domesticated and let people close can be darted in the field. The feds would rather use a one shot deal to sterilize wild horses or just geld (castrate) or spay them and toss them back out to die off and not reproduce.
You might be hearing spin and rumors once again from the growing group of BLM collaborators/advocates who used to fight for wild horse freedom but who now fight for PZP. They have invested in PZP as their pillar of management. Some are applying for grant money to monitor the herds on PZP.
Their fear based spin goes like this:
“If the BLM doesn’t use PZP to manage population for a zero growth then they will sterilize them.” This statement is FALSE. BLM already wants to sterilize them and PZP sterilizes after multiple use.
“If the BLM doesn’t use PZP to manage population for a zero growth then they will sell them and they will end up slaughtered.” This statement is FALSE. BLM wants to dispose of as many wild horses as possible. PZPed mares have been seen in the kill pens.
“If the BLM doesn’t use PZP to manage population for a zero growth then they will kill them.” This statement is FALSE. The BLM would face a wave of public outrage and protests if they announced plans to kill alleged “excess” wild horses.
Then there is the outright lie: “PZP is only a temporary measure to use until we can stop horses from going to slaughter.” No policy the government undertakes is ever quickly undone. If BLM were to start administering PZP to all the wild mares from starting at 18 months old, then this would take years to undo. The herds’ genetic viability would be wiped out. America’s wild horses would be managed to extinction for sure.
The coalition working for PZP-based management of wild horses called The American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign (AWHPC) used Return to Freedom sanctuary as their 501c3 fiscal sponsor for donations up until 2016. It seems Return to Freedom has also received a lot of money from BLM in the past. Was that for decades of PZP research?
The Humane Society of the United States and their wild horse partner known as The American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign have been throwing a lot of money at PR and marketing campaigns to push PZP on an emotional public. At some point it’s believed they spent a lot of money hiring a PR firm to get their “PZP for human management”, #Justice4Mustangs, #KeepWildHorsesWild message out. AWHPC uses a fundraising and advocacy program for their website, alerts, petitions, etc. called SALSA. Their pricing is outrageously high and rises based on the number of supporters connected to the platform. Their website is www.SalsaLabs.org
Even the docudrama AMERICAN MUSTANG pushes PZP on their target audience. It was made by a major donor and player at AWHPC. How can they push PZP pesticide on what they say in the film is a native species? Was the footage taken at 1:02–1:08 and 2:13–2:21 of wild horses in the care and control of Return to Freedom while being boarded at the feedlot in Fallon Nevada for close to 2 years?
The truth is wild horses are not overpopulated. BLM fraudulently releases crazy population numbers to fool your elected officials into giving them more money to wipe out America’s last federally protected wild horses on public land. You can read more about that here: http://protectmustangs.org/?p=8551 .
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/sterilization.
Sadly BLM collaborators like The Cloud Foundation–one of the leading PZP pushing groups and an active member of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign, doesn’t seem to be fighting BLM’s overpopulation myth anymore. They lost their way in 2011 when the group named after the Cloud the Stallion films on PBS seems to have abandoned the fight for America’s wild horses’ right to real freedom. It appears the Cloud Foundation and the filmmaker caved into pressure and the seduction of PZP–as being the “lesser of two evils.”
Now the Cloud Foundation is enticing their followers to speak out for PZP instead of BLM’s proposed radio collars and sterilization of the White Mountain Herd in Wyoming. What ever happened to speaking out for the federally protected yet voiceless wild horses and stopping BLM from managing them to extinction?
Wild horses want their right to real freedom. Forced drugging with PZP pesticide is an infringement on the core of wild horse freedom. It violates their right to let nature decide the survival of the fittest, who breeds and tortures the mares who will be raped repeatedly because she isn’t fertile yet comes into heat monthly.
Other groups are hoping for grant money to participate in more PZP related research.
Accepting the need for any kind of fertility control is a slippery slope because BLM and the Department of Interior will pounce on the opportunity to tell elected officials that the majority of the public wants birth control to fix their counterfeit crisis. Of course this isn’t true. The majority of the American public has no clue that their tax dollars are being used to fund cruel animal experiments and manage a wild species to extinction.
The Las Vegas Review Journal reported on the Western Governors’ Association Conference in December 2015 where the Department of Interior’s Secretary Sally Jewell briefed those present on the wild horse issue:
No Secretary Jewell, birth control will not satisfy people that realize BLM has inflated the population data to support their goal to remove as many wild horses as they can. The public feels passionately about wild horses’ right to be protected in the true spirit of the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. We don’t want them forcibly drugged up with pesticides like PZP, Gonacon™, SPayVac®, brutally given chemical vasectomies and field spaying for birth control nor do we want wild horses and burros used for experiment and research.
The War on Wild Horses
Secretary Jewell basically informed the governors that wild horses are overpopulating like rabbits. When she spoke about birth control she wasn’t specifically talking about PZP. The head of the Department of Interior was talking about fertility control, period.
She worked as a power broker in the oil and banking industries before her stint as CEO of REI. Jewell’s goal seems to be to maximize resources on public land for profit. Wild horses and burros can slow down profit so they need to be wiped off the game board.
Secretary Jewell cast out an open invitation for universities and Big Pharma to experiment on our treasured wild herds with an incentive grant program.
The BLM is only out for big money. The federal agency can get more money from mining, fracking, for oil and gas as well as for renewables such as massive dirty solar farms, etc without wild horses out there.
The livestock and Big Ag lobbies are strong so BLM must be sure to leave them some crumbs. That’s why the Cattlemen’s lobby feels so threatened to share any grazing space or water–not that they ever liked sharing public land grazing with native wild horses.
Protect Mustangs speaks out against the Cloud Foundation’s PARTNERSHIP with BLM using risky PZP that could terminate natural selection: http://protectmustangs.org/?p=4941
The Effects of Porcine Zona Pellucida Immunocontraception on Health and Behavior of Feral Horses (Equus caballus)
Authors: Knight, Colleen M.
Advisors: Rubenstein, Daniel I.
Department: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The horse population on Shackleford Banks, a barrier island off the coast of North Carolina, has been controlled using a program of porcine zona pellucida immunocontraception since 2000. Prior studies found no negative physiological effects of the immunization, but suggested some adverse effects on behavior such as increased harem switching and extended reproductive season. Although no mares were immunized in the year of study (2013), we examined the effects of past contraception and foaling on health and behavior of the mares in an attempt to better understand its impacts on both the individual and the population. Current lactation was found to be the best predictor of health and behavior: lactating mares were in worse physical condition, spent more time grazing, and switched harems fewer times. Mares that had never foaled also were in better physical condition than mares that had foaled in the past, but did not differ in behavioral measures. There were indications that the PZP treatment has had effects other than preventing pregnancy: an increased number of years since immunization was correlated with better body condition and fewer harem switches, independent of lactation. Contraception treatment intensity or timing did not have any significant adverse effects on health and behavior on its own. However, three or more consecutive years of treatment or administration of the first dose before sexual maturity may have triggered infertility in some mares.Inducing sterility, while relieving the mares from the energetic costs of lactation and reducing the stress from harem switching, may have unintended consequences on population dynamics by increasing longevity and eliminating the mares’ ability to contribute genetically.
PZP is an EPA approved restricted use pesticide and Protect Mustangs is against using it on wild mares especially when there is an underpopulation problem on public land despite government spin. The truth is most wild herds are being threatened with low numbers and a lack of genetic variability.
Despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences stated there is “no evidence of overpopulation”, a group with alleged funding related conflict of interest is pushing the sterilizant known as PZP on an uninformed public using the ‘it’s either slaughter or PZP’ scare tactic.
Today’s drug pitch is found in the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/suzanne-roy/wild-horses-at-risk-of-sl_b_4934857.html It references population control experiments on the less than 48,000 acre Assateague Island in the East and lacks scientific comparison with the vast open range found in the West–where some herd management areas cover 800,000 acres or more.
Why did the coalition of several groups give up the fight for wild horses’ real freedom?
Freedom is the American mustangs’ right according to the Free Roaming Wild Horse and Burro Act of 1971. They should not be manipulated by man on the range nor in congressional back rooms. Native wild horses should never be domesticated through sterilizants with man choosing who breeds. That’s nature’s job in the wild. It fosters survival of the fittest.
The solution to the fertility control debate is to focus on what the wild herds need to thrive in freedom not what a campaign, driven by a sanctuary or the BLM, wants to achieve. We need good science to find solutions.
The BLM wants to eliminate the majority of wild herds to free up public land for toxic drilling so why is this coalition following BLM’s lead to push population control before science?
There is no accurate population count to justify roundups. BLM’s overpopulation claims are a farce.
What’s the solution for a falsified overpopulation problem? A reality check and good science.
Fearing extinction from excessive roundups since the 2009 public land grab for energy exports, America’s wild horse birthrate in the West is abnormally high. That should be a red flag that there is something seriously wrong with ecology on their native range.
The Chainman Shale deposit of oil and natural gas in northeastern Nevada and into Utah is about to boom. Exploration began around 2009 in tandem with vast roundups removing the majority of wild horses who have the legal right to be on public land. Some went to probable slaughter and others make up the 50,000 captives warehoused in long-term holding facilities at taxpayer expense.
America’s wild horses should live wild and free–not drugged up with “restricted use pesticides” passed by the EPA for pest control and unsafe for domestic horses.
We invite the public and elected officials to demand a 10 year moratorium on roundups for recovery and studies to develop good science for management. Wild horses are an essential part of the thriving natural ecological balance. They will help reverse desertification and reduce global warming by filling their niche on their native range.
Contact us if you want to keep America’s herds wild and free. Our email is Contact@ProtectMustangs.org We need your help in various ways.
Remember the herds are the lifeblood of our native wild horses. Due to underpopulation their genetic viability is in crisis today. American wild horses must be protected from experimentation and from domestication so they can always run wild and free.
Protect Mustangs speaks out against the Cloud Foundation’s PARTNERSHIP with BLM using risky PZP that could terminate natural selection: http://protectmustangs.org/?p=4941
www.ProtectMustangs.org Protect Mustangs educates, protects and preserves native and wild horses. The nonprofit conservation group strives for a moratorium on roundups and science-based holistic land management to reduce global warming.
RENO, Nev. – A scathing independent scientific review of wild horse roundups in the U.S. West concludes the government would be better off investing in widespread fertility control of the mustangs and let nature cull any excess herds instead of spending millions to house them in overflowing holding pens.
A 14-member panel assembled by the National Science Academy’s National Research Council, at the request of the Bureau of Land Management, concluded BLM’s removal of nearly 100,000 horses from the Western range over the past decade is probably having the opposite effect of its intention to ease ecological damage and reduce overpopulated herds.
By stepping in prematurely when food and water supplies remain adequate, and with most natural predators long gone, the land management agency is producing artificial conditions that ultimately serve to perpetuate population growth, the committee said Wednesday in a 451-page report recommending more emphasis on the use of contraceptives and other methods of fertility control.
The research panel sympathized with BLM’s struggle to find middle ground between horse advocates and ranchers who see the animals as unwelcome competitors for forage. It noted there’s “little if any public support” for allowing harm to come to either the horses or the rangeland itself.
The report says the current method may work in the short term, but results in continually high population growth, exacerbating the long-term problem.
The American Wild Horse Preservation Fund, a national coalition of more than 50 advocacy groups, said the report makes a strong case for an immediate halt to the roundups that livestock ranchers say are necessary to protect the range and provide their sheep and cattle with a fair share of forage.
“This is a turning point for the decades-long fight to protect America’s mustangs,” said Neda DeMayo, president of the coalition’s Return to Freedom.
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is among the livestock groups that have voiced support in the past for aggressive, increased use of fertility control but remain adamantly opposed to curtailing roundups. Horse advocates themselves are not united behind the idea of stepping up use of contraception on the range.
“We are grateful that the National Academy of Science recommends stopping cruel roundups, but we challenge their decision to control alleged overpopulation like a domestic herd with humans deciding who survives and breeds,” said Anne Novak, executive director of Protect Mustangs in San Francisco.
The conflict has raged for decades but has intensified in recent years for cash-strapped federal land managers with skyrocketing bills for food and corrals and no room for incoming animals.
BLM officials said they welcomed the recommendations in their effort to make the program more cost-effective but had no immediate reaction to the criticisms.
“Our agency is committed to protecting and managing these iconic animals for current and future generations,” Deputy Director Neil Kornze said.
Compounding the problem is a horse census system and rangeland assessment practice rife with inconsistencies and poor documentation, the committee said, noting a previous NRC committee charged with the same task reached the same conclusion 30 years ago.
Panel members said they found little scientific basis for establishing what BLM considers to be appropriate, ecologically based caps on horse numbers and even less basis for estimating the overall population itself.
“It seems that the national statistics are the product of hundreds of subjective, probably independent, judgments and assumptions by range managers and administrators,” the report said.
BLM’s current population estimate likely is anywhere from 10 per cent to 50 per cent short of the true level, the report said.
The questions about the estimates come after a BLM report said the number of animals at holding facilities surpassed the estimated number on the range in 10 Western states earlier this year for the first time since President Richard Nixon signed the Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971.
The agency averaged removing 8,000 horses from the range annually from 2002 to 2011. Last year, it spent 60 per cent of its wild horse budget on holding facilities alone, more than $40 million, the committee said.
Palmer said the public traditionally adopted about 3,000 of the horses annually but that has fallen off in recent years.
“The goal would be to manage horses better on the range so that any numbers that would be taken off would be matched with the adoption demand, which is not the current case. The number taken off far exceeds the adoption demand.”
The goal is to see if SpayVac®, a novel formulation of a glycoprotein called porcine zona pellucida (PZP), will provide a longer-term effect than other PZP vaccines currently used by the BLM. If the vaccine is found to reduce foaling in this controlled setting, it will be considered for use with free-roaming horses to help control population growth rates on the range.
As the primary agency responsible for management of wild horses on U.S. public lands, the BLM has a need for a long-lasting contraceptive agent to control herd growth rates. Given the protection afforded by the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 and a general lack of natural predators, wild horse populations increase at an average rate of 20 percent a year and can quickly exceed the carrying capacity of their ranges.
The BLM, as part of its development of a new wild horse and burro management strategy, has been stepping up its efforts to reduce population growth rates in wild horse herds using contraceptive agents. A main limitation of the agents currently available is that they are of relatively short duration or need to be administered annually. Maximizing the duration of contraceptive effectiveness is especially important in wild horses, which in most cases must be captured in order for the treatment to be successfully administered.
In the BLM-USGS study, 90 mares have been treated with either one of two formulations of the vaccine or a placebo. The mares will be followed for five years to measure anti-PZP antibody levels and compare the foaling rates between treated horses and controls. Although breeding is not usually allowed to occur in BLM facilities, a clinical trial in this controlled environment will provide critical information on how well SpayVac® works as a contraceptive.
The mares and stallions enrolled in the study were selected from horses already in BLM holding facilities. They are being housed in three 30-acre pastures and will be together during the next five breeding seasons. Foals that are born during the study will be offered for adoption each fall after they have been weaned. At the conclusion of the study, all adult horses will be returned to the BLM’s Adopt-A-Horse Program or placed in long-term pasture facilities.
The BLM has an interagency agreement with the USGS for research and scientific support, and this study is a collaborative effort with scientists from the USGS, veterinarians with the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), and TerraMar Environmental Research LLC.
How many wild horses are out there? Some Herd Management Areas have as little as 3 horses on them. Where is the scientific proof they are overpopulating?
Protect Mustangs opposes pesticides for indigenous horses and calls for change
WASHINGTON (May 11, 2012)—Protect Mustangs, a San Francisco Bay Area-based wild horse preservation group, opposes the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) categorizing indigenous wild horses as “pests”. This classification would allow the EPA to approve the restricted-use pesticide, ZonaStat-H, for use on wild horses for birth control. Protect Mustangs maintains there is no scientific proof that wild horses and burros are overpopulated on the more than 26 million acres of public land and states that science proves wild equids heal the land—reversing damage and desertification. Today Protect Mustangs has asked the EPA to retract their wrongful categorization and halt the use of the drug. Besides the environmental hazards of using ZonaStat-H, the group is concerned the potentially dangerous pesticide could permanently sterilize and lead to the wild horse and burro’s eventual demise in the West.
After decades of research, ZonaStat-H, the EPA registered name for PZP-22 (porcine zona pellucida), has not been approved for human use. China has been testing PZP for years but research shows damage to the ovaries so the drug remains in the test phase. Protect Mustangs is concerned the pesticide will permanently sterilize America’s indigenous wild horses after multiple use or overdosing, and that the use of PZP-22, GonaCon, SpayVac and other immunocontraceptives are risky.
“Americans across the country love wild horses,” explains Anne Novak executive director of Protect Mustangs. “We are outraged that the EPA would call our national icons ‘pests’ to push through an experimental contraceptive under a pesticide program!”
Under provisions of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, the EPA can consider nonhuman animals to be pests if they harm human or environmental health.
“This is an example of the government ignoring good science that proves wild horses heal the environment and create biodiversity at virtually no cost to the taxpayer, when left out on the range,” says Novak. “Vermin don’t repair the environment and reduce global warming but wild horses can.”
The first study, “Facilitation Between Bovids and Equids on an African Savanna,” was published in Evolutionary Ecology Research in August 2011, and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Keller Family Trust and Wageningen University, the Netherlands.
The second study, “African Wild Ungulates Compete With or Facilitate Cattle Depending on Season,” was published in Science on Sept. 23, 2011, and supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the International Foundation for Science.
The Savory Institute, a proponent of holistic management, states wild herds heal overgrazed grassland and uses livestock to mimic wild herds to bring the land back to life.
Public land grazing allotment holders might call free roaming wild horses a nuisance but they have an obvious conflict of interest—they want all the grazing and water rights for their livestock that outnumbers wild horses 50 to 1. It appears they would like to eliminate the rights of the free roaming wild horses and burros.
Protect Mustangs hopes the EPA will not buy into their game.
There is no scientific proof wild horses are overpopulating on the range. Despite years of requests from members of the public and equine advocacy groups, the government refuses to make an accurate head count on public land. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been accused of inflating estimates to justify costly wild horse roundups and removals—paid for by the American taxpayer.
Indigenous wild horses do not reproduce like rabbits—many die before the age of two. Life on the range can be hard and most wild horses never reach the age of 19. As a wildlife species, this is normal. Left alone, they will self-regulate as an integral piece of the ecosystem.
Recent scientific discoveries prove wild horses are native wildlife. The horse evolved here and must be respected as indigenous before they risk extinction at the hands of the American government.
Wild horses have natural predators such as mountain lions, bears and coyotes to name a few. BLM goes to great trouble to downplay the existence of predators to foster their overpopulation estimate-based myths.
Another frequent argument for the use of pesticides as birth control for wild horses and burros is that they would reduce the need for roundups. However, birth control would not end roundups because it would be difficult to dart wild horses in remote regions and lost darts become biohazards. Trapping in accessible herd management areas and roundups would continue in order to administer the drug.
In the early 1900s there were two million wild horses roaming freely in America. Today there are only about 40,000 captured mustangs living in feedlot settings—funded by tax dollars. Due to the government’s zealous roundups and removals, less than 19,000 wild horses remain free in all the western states combined. The BLM is caving into corporate pressure from the livestock, energy, water and mining industries who don’t want to share public land with America’s indigenous wild horses.
Novak says that, “we want the EPA to apologize for classifying American wild horses as ‘pests’, acknowledge the classification error and cancel approval of ZonaStat-H and any other pesticides for mustangs.”
“By classifying our wild horses as ‘pests’ the EPA is fostering the dangerous belief that wild horses are a nuisance, something destructive that needs to be wiped out,” says Vivian Grant, President of Int’l Fund for Horses. “We call on the EPA to correct this categorization of the American mustang now.”
Contact Protect Mustangs for interviews, photos or video
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.
