10-31-2015
A little-known 2004 amendment to a Nixon-era law allows formerly protected wild mares to be auctioned for slaughter
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| Source: Reuters |
Chief, a Kiger mustang born in the remote wilderness of Utah, lives with 400 other rescued wild horses and burros in a 1,500 acre sanctuary, hundreds of miles from his original home. Years ago the stallion was captured in a round up led by the Bureau of Land Management. After a long helicopter chase, he ended up in a government-run holding facility for years before being adopted by Return to Freedom Wild Horse Sanctuary in Lompoc, CA. Not all horses rounded up by the BLM are as lucky.
The majority of captured equines remain stuck for years, if not for the rest of their lives, in cramped holding facilities that are quickly running out of space. As of July 2015 the facilities held 47,000 wild horses, and the BLM’s holding capacity is set at 50,929. Yet the agency is planning to remove another 2,739 wild horses and burros this year at a taxpayer cost of $78 million.
An example of an emergency holding facility for excess mustangs is a cattle feedlot in Scott City, Kansas. In 2014, a BLM contractor leased the feedlot, owned by Beef Belt LLC, to hold 1,900 mares. The horses were transported from pasture to corrals designed for fattening up cattle. Within the first few weeks of their arrival, at least 75 mares died. Mortality reports acquired from the BLM through the Freedom of Information Act show that as of June 2015, 143 more horses had died. The facility is closed to the public.
BLM’s management of American wild horses and burros has several tales of mismanagement and animal neglect like the one above. Since 1971, the BLM has removed more than 270,000 wild horses and burros from public lands, in what it says is an effort to avoid overpopulation and “to protect animal and land health.” Ideally the rounded up animals should be adopted or shipped to long-term pastures, but in the past several years the number of horses being adopted have fallen dramatically. As a result, every year, more and more of these animals end up languishing in what are supposed to be temporary holding facilities.
Over the past four decades the BLM has eradicated or moved to holding facilities more than 70 percent of the country’s wild horse population. According to BLM’s current estimates, there are only about 48,000 horses remaining in the wild.
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The Bureau of Land Management is mandated by law to protect the future of the wild horses and burros of America. In 1971, in response to growing public protest over the indiscriminate capture and slaughter of wild horses by ranchers and hunters, President Richard Nixon signed the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, making harassing or killing feral horses or burros on federal land a criminal offense. The law recognized the animals as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.”
In 2004 the Act was stripped of its central purpose when Republican Senator Conrad Burns of Montana prepared what is now widely known as “the Burns Amendment.” Taking advantage of his position as chair of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, Burns slipped his bill in with complete secrecy, knowing that committee reports cannot be amended. The bill amending the 1971 Act was never introduced to Congress; it was never discussed or voted on. The amendment allows the BLM to sell older and unadoptable animals at livestock auctions. These auctions often draw ‘kill buyers’ who seek horses for slaughterhouses, as the LA Times reports.
The Burns Amendment overruled critical sections of the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, and overturned 33 years of national policy.
“The law was one of the few ever passed unanimously by both the House of Representatives and the Senate. To ignore the democratic will of the general public of the US in order to favor certain minority vested interests, mainly rich individuals and corporations, is a true perversion of democracy and a shameful betrayal,” says wildlife ecologist and author Craig Downer.
Before becoming an advocate for the wild horse and burro cause, Downer worked for the BLM. He conducted stream site inventory and assessment work in their Nevada chapter. During his time at the agency, he learned that wild horses and burros weren’t the animals that were causing stream and lakeside habitat degradation in regions where they roamed free.
"Overwhelmingly it was the livestock, chiefly cattle, that degrade the vital riparian habitats. They are post-gastric digesters while the other large North American grazers are almost exclusively ruminant digesters. Horses and burros also disperse their foraging over vaster areas and into more rugged terrain than cattle," he says.
Here’s how Downer explains it further. (Excerpted from his presentation at the Wild Horse Summit in 2008):
“Being much less mobile than wild horses and burros, livestock concentrate their grazing pressures in certain areas, especially in and along species-rich stream, marsh, or lake shore habitats known as riparian (which I have experience monitoring with the BLM). Cattle and sheep have destroyed these riparian habitats on a large scale by overgrazing throughout the West — as throughout the world, especially in arid and semi-arid areas, and thus are responsible for the extinction or near extinction of literally thousands of species of plants and animals.
The wild horses, on the other hand, do not linger at watering sites or along riparian areas but disperse their grazing pressure much more broadly in the arid to semi-arid West; and as a consequence they greatly reduce dry parched vegetation. Their post-gastric digestive system is perfectly suited to taking advantage of this drier, usually coarser vegetation, as such does not entail as much metabolic energy involved with the more thorough breakdown of this food when compared with ruminant grazers: cattle, sheep, deer, elk, etc. Their digestion also favors the dispersal of the seeds of many native plant species that are not as degraded in passing through their digestive tracts. These involve species that have in many cases co-evolved for millions of years with horses and even burro-like Asses, developing many mutually beneficial symbioses in the process.”
According to the BLM, there is an overpopulation of horses on public lands. The agency states that because of federal protection and a lack of natural predators, wild horse and burro herds can double in size about every four years, which leads to habitat degradation and unhealthy herds. Yet the agency allows millions of cows to graze on the same lands where wild horses were previously removed.
Cows originate from Europe and thus are adapted to riparian meadow areas. Their grazing can be devastating for dry Western ecosystems, especially in many areas where they outnumber wild horses 50 to 1. According to Downer, well-managed wild horse populations can contribute positively to ecosystems that they have adapted to due to their evolutionary past. “Restoring the missing ‘equid element’ with its post-gastric digestive system works wonders for the plains and prairies as well as the drier regions further west,” he explains.
But it is not only cattle that are granted right-of-way on public lands. In 2010, a controversial round up held in the Calico Mountain Complex of Nevada removed 2,500 horses from their habitat. The round up caused 160 horse deaths, including those of two foals who were chased on icy terrain until their hooves had sloughed off. The eradication of a healthy horse population from such a remote location raised questions.
Source: Earth Island Journal
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