Tag Archives: legal

Red Alert: America’s wild horses are disappearing! Staff lawyer needed ASAP

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It’s URGENT to hire a staff lawyer quickly so we can get the most out of the legal genius and save America’s wild horses in court before they are killed! Click here to make a tax-deductible donation today: https://www.gofundme.com/mustanglaw

The lawyer will be the only paid professional at Protect Mustangs. The rest of us are volunteers because we care so deeply about America’s wild horses and their right to freedom.

Most organizations are paying their Presidents and Executive Directors big salaries. They pay other staff good salaries and benefits too. At Protect Mustangs it’s different. We are here for the wild horses not for the paycheck.

As you know I’m deeply committed to protecting America’s mustangs so I donate all my professional time as do our other wonderful volunteers. Sadly pro-bono lawyers won’t donate enough time to take a big case through the end. And we want to pound BLM with more than one lawsuit that will really protect wild horses.

Time is running out . . .

Mustangs are being persecuted and forced off their legal land because greedy people want the resources and don’t care about wild horses. Roundups are cruel and deadly. Afterwards wild horses are traumatized even more by being ripped apart from their families that they love. Once mustangs are offered for adoption 3 times by the feds and not picked–they can be sold to slaughter because the Burns Amendment made it legal. This is heinous!

Today is a special day of giving. Please help America’ s wild horses survive and live in freedom with a tax-deductible donation to our legal fund to hire a staff lawyer. Click here to donate: https://www.gofundme.com/mustanglaw

Protect Mustangs is a boots on the ground organization saving mustangs with a great track record of 3 out of 4 successful legal actions that have saved thousands of wild horses. (Pine Nut, Wyoming and Fort McDermitt). Now our hands are tied without our own lawyer on staff because there is so much to do!

You can change that.

If you want to make a difference and you want to save America’s wild horses then make a donation to our legal fund right now by clicking here: https://www.gofundme.com/mustanglaw

Together we can turn this around!

For the mustangs,
Anne

Anne Novak
Volunteer Executive Director
www.ProtectMustangs.org

Protect Mustangs

P.O. Box 5661

Berkeley, Ca. 94705

Protect Mustangs is dedicated to the protection and preservation of native and wild horses

PM Pine Nut 332 90K meme

Protect Mustangs.org

Protest Horse Slaughter Med

PM WY14 Saved May 2014 Neutral Zone

H.H. The Dalai Lama wisdom

H.H. The Dalai Lama wisdom

Legal petition filed to cancel PZP pesticide registration

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It is with great pleasure to announce that Friends of Animals has filed a legal petition to cancel the EPA’s registration of wild horse fertility control pesticide, PZP http://friendsofanimals.org/foa-files-legal-petition-cancel-registration-wild-horse-fertility-control-pesticide-pzp and that Protect Mustangs’ education and outreach has culminated in this action. When Anne Novak started the PZP Forum in November she felt that through education and outreach, action would follow. Everyone’s participation in the PZP Forum has made it an educational hub while the battle wages on . . .

Our successful Pine Nut lawsuit that brought PZP to the court for the first time, when we partnered with FOA, came out of The Forum. We hope FOA’s PZP legal petition will be equally successful.

We are grateful FOA has the funding needed to employ legal staff spearheaded by Michael Harris, who rocks at wildlife law, with the awesome Jenni Barnes.

We hope someday we can afford to hire legal staff but for now, as a dynamic grassroots volunteer organization, we stretch donor’s dollars so we will be paying less on a case by case basis. We encourage wild horse supporters to donate to the Protect Mustangs’ legal fund so we can file our unique legal actions quickly to help America’s wild horses and protect them from all sides. Our Legal Fund site is here: http://www.gofundme.com/qarve8

With our boots on the ground in the West, we educate, advocate and rescue. We are dedicated to serving and protecting America’s wild horses ‘forever wild and free’™.
(BLM’s photo of mares used for PZP experiments)

20 Nevada horses are slated for slaughter in NM January 1st

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Despite overpopulation myths and fear tactics that wild horses must be sterilized and given restricted use pesticides in the form of birth control, slaughtering wild horses is against the law and must be upheld. Please donate to our legal fund to fight to keep America’s mustangs safe from slaughter.

We are working hard to keep wild horses out of the clutches of Kill Buyers. Our lawsuit was very effective. http://protectmustangs.org/?page_id=5144 Our settlement stopped 2 more years of Ft. McDermitt wild horses from being rounded up and sold to slaughter under their agreement. They will try to round up the wild horses with a new agreement and we need to be ready. Please help donate to our legal fund. Write “legal fund” on your donation. It takes a village to save wild horses! 

December 18, 2013

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A New Mexico horse slaughter plant plans to open Jan. 1 after a federal appeals court rolled back a court order that had kept the Roswell facility from beginning operations.

According to KOB-TV (http://bit.ly/1eqMdg1 ), Valley Meat Co. owner Rick De Los Santos says the plant will start off slow, but already has multiple meat contracts lined up.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Dec. 13 lifted an emergency order that blocked the opening of the Roswell plant, another in Gallatin, Mo., and one in Sigourney, Iowa, that has converted to beef.

Animal protection groups have been trying to block the slaughtering of horses.

De Los Santos says Valley Meat has employees ready to work and 20 horses from Nevada for slaughter.

Note in this newscast (http://bit.ly/1eqMdg1) Rick De Los Santos says he has a huge contract with China for horse meat. The Asian market is only going to skyrocket so we must fight for our wild horses to stay off their dinner plates. Please donate what you can. Thank you very much!

This has been cross-posted for educational purposes.  Please leave respectful comments so we can publish them. Thank you.

7 legal points for wild horses and burros

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Truck in the pens (© Anne Novak, All rights reserved)

Truck in the pens (© Anne Novak, All rights reserved)

by Kathleen Hayden

1. Wild horses and burros are no less “wild” animals than are the grizzly bears that roam our national parks and forests (Mountain States v. Hodel) neither the states of the federal government have the right to harm Our Heritage Wildlife as found by the 1995 Supreme court Ruling Babbit v.Sweet Home.

2. The Babbit v Sweet Home case found that the term “take” means to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct. 16 U.S.C. § 1532(19)

3. By a 6-3 vote, the Court upheld the statutory authority of the Secretary of the Interior to include “habitat modification and degradation” as conduct which constitutes “harm” under the ESA.
In addition to the statutory provisions described above,

4. Section 5 of the ESA authorizes the Secretary to purchase the lands on which the survival of the species depends. Accordingly, Sweet Home maintained that this Section 5 authority was “the Secretary’s only means of forestalling that grave result [i.e. possible extinction)

5. As a result, based upon “the text, structure, and legislative history of the ESA the Supreme Court concluded that “the Secretary reasonably construed the intent of Congress when he defined ‘harm’ to include ‘significant habitat modification or degradation that actually kills or injures wildlife species.

6. Pursuant to BLM’s 2001 Special Status Species Policy requirement that “sensitive” species be afforded, at a minimum, the same protections as candidate species for listing under the ESA. It called on BLM managers to “obtain and use the best available information deemed necessary to evaluate the status of special status species in areas affected by land use plans . . . .

7. See Policy at § 6840.22A. Under the Policy, those land use plans “shall be sufficiently detailed to identify and resolve significant land use conflicts with special status species without deferring conflict resolution to implementation-level planning.” Id. (Case 4:08-cv-00516-BLW Document 131 Filed 09/28/11 Page 8 of 37 (Sagegrouse decision)