Our Mission: To Change BLM Managment Tactics

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“It is incredible that one should have to furnish any argument to bring about any laws to save the Mustang, but if there must be an argument let it be this: that of all the things that have played a part in the development of this country, except for man, the horse has played the most important and beneficial role. He portrays the West as all people like to think of it. He is the symbol of wild freedom to us all.”

-Velma B. Johnston, a.k.a. Wild Horse Annie (1959)



There is a battle going on in the United States of America that many people are unaware of. Perhaps they think it’s unimportant, that it doesn’t affect them. The battle to save America’s wild Mustangs isn’t just between soft-hearted horse-lovers and hard-working ranchers. It’s much more complex than that. And in the end… we could all lose.

First of all, I do not support the idea of ceasing all BLM management of wild Mustang herds because since ranching and urbanization has taken over the ranges, and since humans hunt Mustangs' natural predators, the Mustangs would eventually overpopulate, cause habitat degradation, and starve. I must say that in some places the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) helps to care for the wild Mustangs by rounding up herds in places where there's very little food and/or water, and by rounding up Mustangs that wander onto private land (land owned by people). Some people in the BLM sincerely want to protect the Mustangs. Many roundups go without incident; the Mustangs are herded off the range into the holding pens, vaccinated, freeze-branded, and then adopted by loving owners. The BLM has many different facilities, and many are perfectly fine and do help the Mustangs. In some places the BLM is a good thing.

But in most other areas, the BLM uses its authority to take advantage of the animals and the land in its care. Over the past nine years, 40% of the Mustang population has been removed by the BLM for no other reason than rancher and government greed. Alternative methods for managing Mustang populations are available (savethemustanghorses.blogspot.…), and yet the BLM does not use them to any significant extent. Roundup teams are paid roughly $350 for each horse they bring in (dead or alive), so the pilots often go to drastic measures to capture as many horses as possible during each gather. Entire herds of Mustangs (including newborn foals) are driven at breakneck speeds over land deemed too rough for vehicles. Mustangs and burros (wild donkeys) are injured during the roundups and many beyond recovery and must be euthanized. (savethemustanghorses.blogspot.… , savethemustanghorses.blogspot.…)

The BLM openly admits to holding approximately 50,000 Mustangs in captivity (roughly double than there are in the wild), and their finances are running out. It costs roughly $3,000 tax dollars to process a single wild horse for adoption, and hundreds are removed in a typical roundup. It costs around $100,000 every single day to feed the captive Mustangs. Many Mustangs in BLM corrals are in poorer condition than they were and would be in the wild, and some are starving. Almost no BLM facilities provide shelter for the horses held captive. The panicked herd stallions often fight each other in the small spaces, desperately trying to keep their mares together, therefore hurting themselves and others.
"I'm assured repeatedly [by BLM veterinarians] that these horses are cared for," said wild horse advocate Elyse Gardner. "So why does it seem that it is the public observers that continually need to bring so many overlooked injuries, illness or orphaned foals to the attention of the BLM?" Again, alternative methods for managing Mustang populations on the range (so that they need not be removed and held in captivity) are available (savethemustanghorses.blogspot.…), but the BLM does not use them to any significant extent. This shows extreme shortsightedness on the BLM's account. They are wasting enormous amounts of money and causing animals to suffer when less expensive, more humane methods are available.

While many Mustangs do find good homes with kind people, many are sold to irresponsible owners who want to "break a wild bronco". Such owners don’t know how to handle wild horses, and are often injured. If the Mustangs are not adopted or sold, they are rarely ever returned to the wild. The BLM holds unadopted/unsold Mustangs in taxpayer-funded corrals until they either die of old age, they are euthanized, or the BLM gains the right to slaughter them. I repeat: alternative methods for managing Mustang populations on the range (so that they need not be removed and held in captivity) are available (savethemustanghorses.blogspot.…), but the BLM does not use them to any significant extent. The BLM would rather these animals suffered a slow death rather than use alternative methods to manage them.

Recent discoveries made by the National Academy of Sciences (www8.nationalacademies.org/onp… , www.nap.edu/catalog/13511/usin…) has found that by removing so many wild horses in roundups, the BLM is actually causing population growth instead of reducing it. By lowering the population to such an unnaturally small number, the herds become smaller than the carrying limit of the lands (the limit of how many animals can graze on the land before food begins to run out).With so much extra space, the species springs back as it would after a natural disaster or plague. NAS studies show that Mustang populations have been increasing by around 10% to 15% each year. For the BLM to continue their current operation, they will have to remove more and more Mustangs each year, therefore causing increasing population growth, and so on. The answer is clearly not to step up roundups yet again, but to find alternative means by which to control the population and to prevent Mustangs from becoming problems on privately-owned land.

Studies show that nearly 85% of the Mustangs are below genetic viability, meaning that they are inbreeding. By removing Mustangs and their genetic information from the wild, the BLM is forcing the Mustangs to inbreed even more.

Even with the rapid population growth (and therefore rising cost of roundups) if things continue in this manner, in about 50 years there will be no free-roaming Mustangs left. Wildlife biologists estimate that the Mustang will be extinct in the wild before the end of the century. Time is running out for the American Mustang. Will we let them become like the Quagga and the Tarpan, pale ghosts of memory? Your air won’t be any cleaner, your water won’t be any clearer, and your food won’t be any more abundant with Mustangs extinct.

In 1900, over a million Mustangs ran free (lipizzaner-kgirl.deviantart.co…, www.horse-breeds.net/mustangs.… , academickids.com/encyclopedia/… , www.masterliness.com/a/Mustang…).) Now, less than 25,000 of them are left, and that number is steadily falling. Turning our backs is not the answer. We cannot leave Mustangs to their own devices, but we also cannot ignore the damage that the BLM is doing.

Monday, January 25, 2016

Three Articles Regarding the Mustang Situation





  1)      The Horse and Burro as Positively Contributing Returned Natives in North America” by Craig C. Downer:  http://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ajls.20140201.12.pdf

Summary: The prevailing view is that the horse species (Equus caballos) is not native to North America and only appeared on the scene 500 years ago, but this article describes how horses are most likely native to North America, and were killed off by humans before being later reintroduced by the Spanish about 500 years ago. The article is written from an evolutionary point of view, but describes various fossils of equines that originated in North America. While the “millions of years” is debatable, the fossils are not. The evidence, including fossils, DNA, an actual frozen Equus caballos dating back 10,000 years, pre-Columbian cave paintings of horses, as well as Chinese writings from over 3,000 years ago describing horses resembling modern Appaloosas, indicates that the equine animal family originated in North America and spread outward, perhaps on ice bridges during the Ice Age (after the Flood, according to a Creationist perspective), or perhaps was brought to othe continents by humans after earmy people visited North Americ, possibly the Chinese. Equus caballos was present in North America approximately 10,000 years ago, which indicates that the horse species originated in North America. The article continues on to describe how horses benefit the North American ecosystem.


    2)      The Declining Importance of Public Lands Ranching in the West” by Mark N. Salvo:  http://scholarship.law.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1217&context=plrlr

Summary: The article describes the debate over how important public lands ranching is to the U.S. economy. The pro-ranching industry says that raising grazing fees will cost America jobs and cause Americans to go hungry, but is this really the case? The article claims that it isn’t. The article describes how the majority of our beef products do not come from public lands ranching, even though ranchers hold such an enormous number of cattle on those lands (approximately 4,000,000.) Such a massive population of non-native animals is undoubtedly extremely damaging to the environment. On top of that, Americans are moving away from eating beef, which is causing cattle ranching to die a natural death. Grazing fees and wild horses are not causing it, the nation’s diet as a whole is. Americans are discovering that beef is not a sustainable diet. The article describes how every year there are fewer and fewer ranchers, and fewer beef producers in general nationwide. Cattle ranch-related jobs, ranching included, make up only around 5% of jobs in the Western United States. The article even goes so far as to say that completely eliminating the ranching industry in the West would not cause any significant employment impact or loss of food.



    3)      Using Science to Improve the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program: A Way Forward” by the National Research Council: http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/materials-based-on-reports/reports-in-brief/wild-horses-report-brief-final.pdf

Summary: The article describes how the Bureau of Land Management’s current method of removals and stockpiling is ineffective and expensive (not to mention inhumane), and will ultimately send the BLM into a financial train wreck. The BLM is not using scientifically sound methods to keep wild horse populations under control, and thus the horses double their populations every 4 – 5 years, many are starving, and there are more horses in BLM captivity than the BLM can afford, thus causing questions of euthanasia and horse slaughter that wouldn’t have to be asked if proper science was used in the first place. The National Research Council (of the National Academy of Sciences) recommends that the BLM use on-the-range management – particularly fertility drugs such as PZP – to prevent the horses from overpopulating without requiring removals and stockpiling. On-the-range management would also not remove genetic material, thus keeping the wild herds small (so as not to cause environmental damage), sustainable, and genetically diverse. PZP is also far less expensive than helicopter roundups; it costs approximately $100 to render a mare infertile for a minimum of 2 years, whereas it costs over $1,000 to remove and process a single wild horse for adoption, and that’s assuming the horse will be adopted (there is always a chance it will not find a home and will live out its life in a BLM corral, sucking up tax dollars in feed and veterinary care). The article mentioned how the wild ponies on Assateague Island have been managed through PZP since 1988 and have been kept at a stable population of 150. PZP is tried and true. Roundups do not work.

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