For Sale: Wild horses for $25 each

Imagine this? Right now you can purchase a part of this nation’s wild heritage and a national treasure for as little at $25.00. And you can do it over the internet.

From January through March 2008, the Bureau of Land Management are running a “special,” auctioning off wild mares and their weanlings, the mares for $25 and the weanlings for $75, Or as they so blithely put it, that’s $50 apiece if you get one of each.

Wait. Don’t they belong to us in the first place?

Yes, the BLM are still conducting helicopter roundups. Their intention, to zero out our herds of wild mustangs and burros. There are reportedly more wild horses and burros in BLM holding pens than there are out on our public lands.

With so many horses already looking for homes because of rampant overbreeding by such organizations as the American Quarter Horse Association, the price of hay because of drought and the escalating cost of fuel causing horse owners to look for new homes for the ones they have, even at those prices they are unlikely to have many takers.

Link to BLM website sale.

Cindy at American Herds reports this to us:

Re-reading the July 2007 Minutes from the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board and this caught my eye.

Don’t know if I have sent it around before but if so, it is still worth “refreshing our memories” about. “Don” is Don Glen, Division Chief WH&Bs and top of the WH&B Program food chain - minus BLM Director or the Secretary of the Interior.

“Don asked the Board for any recommendations that could help the holding situation. Possibilities could include Instant Ownership Title where prohibition on sale for slaughter would be accomplished on the Title Transfer Document similar to the Sale animals and Long Term Holding on Public Land. Both of which may require a change in legislation. The Board discussed giving incentives to Permittees to take at least one horse each. The Board developed a work group of Renee Taylor, Gary Zakotnik, and Dr. Boyd Spratling to review options and gather information relating to Permittees and Long Term Holding on Public Lands. The Board asked the BLM to check to see if there was a solicitor’s opinion regarding putting wild horses back on public lands. The work group will give a report at the next meeting. The Board recommends that language be inserted into the “Report to Congress” that infers that “Congress must fund the Program properly or allow for alternatives.”

The Minutes also indicate that the Board will be submitting a Report to Congress very soon.

She suggests we could assemble our own “report” to Congress and submit it in conjunction with theirs to at least TRY to give “our” representatives a slightly different angle and statistics to counter BLMs tactics with.

Here is the link to the July 30th Minutes.

SHARK takes a bite out of rodeos

The following has been excerpted from SHARK’s newsletter:

The website of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) has an article bragging that the rodeo mafia, along with rodeo sponsor Boyd Gaming, which owns and operates casinos in Las Vegas and other parts of the country, has sufficient influence on the U.S. armed services to induce the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds to give joy rides to rodeo thugs. Even more outrageous, the U.S. Air Force is allowing the thugs to fire the guns of these super-expensive aircraft! This is your hard-earned tax dollars being wasted by the millions!

It’s bad enough that the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds does an air show for the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo (and has for the past 54 years and yet deny it). Additionally, pilots for the Thunderbirds make a special personal appearance in the rodeo arena at the Cheyenne Rodeo, rubbing elbows with the very people who are maiming and killing the animals. SHARK is currently working on a video that will expose the unholy alliance between the Cheyenne Rodeo and the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. Now, even before that video is ready for the internet, the Thunderbirds have dropped to a new low.

How can it be that during a supposed “War on Terror” that is costing billions and billions of tax dollars, the Air Force nevertheless has the time and money to give joy rides to rodeo thugs? It is yet another rodeo scandal in a time when rodeo scandals are coming so quickly we hardly have the time to list them all, but rest assured that we are surely going to try.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Please contact the Thunderbirds to let them know what you think of their support of animal abuse at the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo and giving joy rides to rodeo thugs with your tax dollars:

U.S.A.F. Aerial Events
1690 Air Force Pentagon
Washington, D.C. 20330-1690
Phone: 703-697-3462 / 703-571-7926
http://www.af.mil/main/contactus.asp

They also tell us:

An organization called “Good Neighbor Law” has recently named none other than Dr. John Maulsby (You remember he is the monster that brutally murdered an elk calf, his family and herd - currently Colorado’s State Vet that declared shocking horses is not cruel) to be November/December 2007 “Good Neighbor,” citing of all things, his protection of animals. Not surprisingly, Good Neighbor Law is made up of people who deny global warming, oppose a ban on horse slaughter, support rodeos and are involved in other abuses against animals, and the environment.

The Fund for Horses are collaborating with SHARK to promote state legislation banning horse tripping, currently pending in Arizona. Next stop, Colorado.

We are also working with SHARK to end the notorious Omak Suicide Race, and we will be in attendance with them at this year’s event if we have not been successful in putting a stop to it.

For more information on SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness), please visit their website at www.sharkonling.org.

Horses left to starve after Romania bans carts (EU)

By Gethin Chamberlain in Galati, Romania for DAILY TELEGRAPH UK
Last Updated: 12:34am GMT 17/02/2008

Ribs showing clearly through their tattered flanks, the starving horses corralled on the edge of the eastern Romanian city of Galati are just a few days away from death.

Once, they would have pulled wooden carts along the city’s streets or worked in the fields, as horses have done in Romania for centuries. But now they have been abandoned by their owners, victims of a disastrous attempt to bring the country into line with European Union law by banning horse-drawn carts from main roads.

Victims of EU law: Hundreds of horses have been abandoned

Over the past month, hundreds of stray horses have been found roaming the streets and parks of Romania’s major cities. Many are half-starved and barely able to walk; some have died where they were discovered, unable to get back to their feet.

Pitifully thin and bearing the scars of frequent beatings, the horses rounded up in Galati will be sent to the slaughterhouse within days unless someone comes forward to claim them, or to offer them new homes. But there is little demand for an ailing animal in a country where an estimated one million working horses have been officially labelled an anachronism.

Some owners have decided it is cheaper to dump the animals than to keep them, since the cost of feeding a horse is now about £80 a month. Many people living in the countryside earn just £50 a month.

“People only care about exploiting the animal,” said Corina Daniela Grigore, who runs the Help Labus animal welfare group in Galati, home to Romania’s giant Mittal steel plant.

“They think that if it is no use to them any more they can just set it loose.”

She said the authorities were struggling to cope with the scale of the problem and were turning to private groups for help.

“We had a call to say there was a sick horse next to the steel plant,” she said. “We had to rent a truck to pick him up and we looked after him for four days, but his legs were injured and he could not get up off the ground. We had to watch him die.”

Similar stories have emerged across Romania after police started to enforce laws banning carts from the roads in order to bring Romania into line with European road safety legislation.

Romanian police, who say they were under pressure from the EU to cut accident figures, blame horse-drawn carts for 10 per cent of the country’s 8,400 serious road accidents last year.

Chief Commissioner Carol Varna, head of the Romanian police traffic safety department, said that more than 1,000 carts had been seized since officers started to enforce the law.

“There are some owners who just let their horses go when they cannot afford them any more,” he said.

In the past month, at least 15 horses have been found abandoned in the centre of the capital, Bucharest.

Elsewhere in the country, campaigners have been told of animals pushed into ditches and beaten to death with sticks. Television news reports showing abandoned horses dying in the snow prompted 200,000 people to sign a petition calling for a new government body to look after animals.

Calin Alexandru, a vet who is co-ordinating Bucharest’s attempts to deal with the problem, said it was a struggle to find homes for the horses. “We are seeing more and more abandoned,” she said. “We cannot find their owners.”

In response to the outcry, the government is introducing tough fines and jail sentences for anyone found to have beaten or abandoned a horse.

But horse owners, who face fines of up to £100 and the confiscation of both their cart and their animal if they are caught on main roads, believe that it is the end of a way of life.

Vasile Adresana, 25, said he had no choice but to get rid of his horse when the police started cracking down on the roads around his home town of Roman, in the north-east of the country.

“I used to work gathering wood which I would sell, but the government introduced these laws under EU pressure. Everyone ignored them for a while, but when the police started enforcing the laws there were many roads that I was no longer allowed to travel on with my cart.

“There was not enough thought given to the consequences.”

His wife Miheala, 23, said one of their neighbours had kept his horse, but only because he could no longer get rid of it legally. “The animal is all skin and bone and he beats it all the time - he can’t use it for anything and he gets frustrated, but it’s not the horse’s fault.”

John Ross, a British equestrian who arranges riding holidays in Transylvania, said that the police were too quick to blame animals for the high accident statistics.

“The ban was slipped in stealthily,” he said. “There are some villages where farmers cannot legally get to their fields any more.”

• Additional reporting: Carmiola Ionescu in Bucharest

VIDEO AT ONLINE ARTICLE AT THIS LINK