The budget, if approved, will allow for the murder and slaughter of Americas wild horses and burros on a national scale!
The Salt River Wild Horse Management Group is once again outraged! While it may not affect the Salt River wild horses directly, this budget will put all wild horses and burros under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in great harm. The BLM manages approximately 60,000 to 70,000 wild horses left in the wild and 45,000 of them that are stuck in holding pens. We consider those wild horses and burros just as valuable and cherished as the Salt River wild horses. They are an American icon, a living piece of history and the rightful inheritance of all Americans!
“This is wildly inappropriate and unacceptable”, states Simone Netherlands, president of the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group.
Arizona stood up for their wild horses and they are still here, now all of America’s wild horses need you, the public, to make a last stand for them.
Here’s what YOU can do;
1. Call the members of Congress who represent you. (202) 224- 3121. Ask the operator to connect you to your representative and your senators, when you tell her where you live, she will know, or you can also look it up yourself here; https://www.govtrack.us/
Make that call three times, because you have two senators and one representative. You will get the front desk person on the line first, then politely ask for the legislative assistant that handles wild horses, it is most useful if you talk to that person. If you get a voicemail that is ok, leave a message and try again later to get the real person.
2. Your fourth call should be the white house. Call Monday through Friday 9 am to 4pm. (202)456-1111.
Here’s what your message could sound like: Hi my name is … , I live in…. , I do not agree with the language in the President’s budget that proposes to kill healthy wild horses in holding and on the range. It is preposterous. America’s wild horses are a tourist attraction and a piece of America’s history, they are not overpopulated and they are not starving. Wild horses and burros should be managed humanely on the range through the use of humane birth control, that would save 10 million dollars and it would control the populations humanely. Our public lands do not belong to special interests like cattle grazing, they belong to all Americans. The American public including myself will not stand for the brutal slaughter of our American Icons. Please relay this message directly to the president and his staff. Thank you.
The Bureau of Land Management’s fiscal 2018 budget reads: “The budget proposes to give the BLM the tools it needs to manage this program in a more cost-effective manner, including the ability to conduct sales without limitation. (Slaughter) The budget proposes to eliminate appropriations language restricting BLM from using all of the management options. (Slaughter) The long term goal is to realign program costs and animal populations to more manageable levels, enabling BLM to reorient the WHB program back to these traditional management strategies.” (Slaughter)
TRANSLATION: The BLM just proposed to murder without limit Americas federally protected wild horses and burros to balance their budget.
Yet wild horses and burros do not cost anyone a dime while living their lives peacefully on our public lands on which they have a legal right to live and humane birth control is available at 25 dollars a dose. (that lasts for one year. )
But the BLM also wants to reduce birth control when they already spend less than 1% of their budget on that right now and refuse to give this HUMANE management tool a chance. Instead they intend to rob the public of America of their rightful historic inheritance.
In order to convince you that its right, the BLM uses the following claims on their website:
“Wild horses are starving”: They are definitely not starving, if they were we would be the first ones to complain about that. We have thousands of pictures of healthy and fat wild horses coming off the range after which they are stuffed in holding pens.
“They are overpopulated”: They are not overpopulated, we have approximately 60,000 wild horses and burros left in the wild; when bighorn sheep were at the same number of 60,000 they were deemed a species of concern! We also have one million elk and 35 million deer nationally, to call a population of 60,000 an overpopulation, is absurd.
“They are doing damage to the environment”; They are not, it is the 3 million cattle on our public lands that are doing the damage, not the 60,000 wild horses. Strangely no one mentions the 3 million cattle.
“There are 46,000 excess wild horses”: There are not, this number is made up, grabbed out of thin air by the BLM themselves claiming they are over Appropriate Management Levels. Appropriate Management Levels are actually highly inappropriate, not viable and will bring wild horses and burros to extinction. The NAS concluded that these numbers by the BLM bear no scientific basis or rationale.