Comment on Baroness wild horse story
The following comment was made online to the Nevada Appeal story about Nevada’s wild horses:
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PZP contraceptive has already been used for a decade or two in Nevada. And they’ve rounded up & removed 50% of Nevada’s wild horses in the last 5 years anyway.
So you’ve got the NDA [Nevada Department of Agriculture] wanting to ‘zero out’ state wild horses.
Then you have people like the ‘Bighorn Sheep King’ Larry Johnson on the BLM [Bureau of Land Management] Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board making recommendations like ‘gelding wild stallions’ on federal lands in Nevada. Prior to being accepted on the advisory board, and then being ‘appointed a second term’ despite qualified nominees wishing to fill what was supposed to be a vacancy after his term was up, Mr. Johnson would personally testify before our US Congress for the need for money federal money to round up wild horses in Nevada.
Conflict of interest? Ethical? Bighorns Unlimited is allowed to construct water developments for their bighorn sheep. Are wild horse advocates allowed to do the same for wild horses and burros? Heck no. There’s big money for the state in bighorn hunting permits, big money.
There isn’t a problem of a wild horse overpopulation, there’s a problem of greed. They (NDA, some NV Senators, public lands ranchers, the BLM, big game hunters, and developers) won’t be happy until they’re all gone and they’ll continue to lie and fabricate reasons to ‘zero out’ all wild horse herds.
Regarding this latest scheme of NDA’s – it would be kinder to just run them off of a cliff, and I mean that literally.
To take any wild animal, with no period of transition to captivity and humans, and just run them into corrals, chutes, stick needles into them, brand them, load them in trucks, put them through an auction ring with loud noise and more people, only to be then sold to killer buyers who jam them into crowded trucks and haul them for thousands of miles to either Canada or Mexico – to be inhumanely slaughtered in line with other horses – IS CONSIDERABLY CRUELER THAN JUST RUNNING THEM OFF A CLIFF – like they did in the old days – before the public found out about it and demanded protection for these animals.
Nevada and the NDA treat wild horses as if they’re nothing more than a herd of cattle – already used to such manhandling.
This ill-conceived outrageous plan has to be stopped immediately and those who laid this plan out should be transferred into positions that do not involve any type of animal management at all.
Nevada certainly has not been a good steward to the nation’s population of wild horses; federal, state, or otherwise. How many cows are out there in ‘the wild’? Compared to how many wild horses?
Maybe Nevada should just put a big fat cow on the state quarter?
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by terryw4 on Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:32:26 PDT
