EPA registers PZP for use on wild horses

BONNIE ERBE headlines a column on wild horses entitled, “Horse contraceptive could end cruelty to mustangs” about the EPA’s recent registration of the HSUS sponsored equine birth control drug, PZP.

However, that title becomes a bit misleading when one takes a close look at the experimental usage of PZP over the past few years on America’s wild horse herds.

Are the BLM employing bait and switch tactics in the management of wild horses with usage of PZP? Is there a whiff of collusion in the air here, or just our wild horse imagination?

Whatever the case, we do not see PZP coming to the rescue of America’s wild horses; anything but.

HSUS promise time and again that the aggressive and herd destroying roundups by the BLM will diminish under their recommended birth control program. But this has not happened.

What has happened — and continues to happen — is herds of wild horses and burros are still being ruthlessly rounded up at an alarming rate, and the few left standing treated with various birth control methods including PZP. This, coupled with the BLM’s continued threat to castrate all males, and one can see that these birth control measures are being used as just another way to rid America’s public lands of their last few wild horses, and are not being used to either minimize or eliminate roundups.

While Erbe misses the boat there, she is certainly fully on board with this:

Supporters of humane treatment of America’s wild horses and burros have been fighting the BLM for years. They are trying to stop annual roundups that include the use of helicopters swooping as low as a few feet above the fear-stricken animals. CNN’s Jane Velez Mitchell’s online video report on one of these roundups shows how 77 of the regal mustangs died during one roundup as a result of helicopter pilots’ techniques.

The CNN video also shows handlers using excessively cruel techniques when they herd the horses. One picks out a tiny foal, scares it away from the herd, then lassos it roughly around the neck as it’s running and harshly trips it to the ground. What is with these sadists?

For whom is this exercise in senseless misery performed? For the cattle industry, that’s who. Even though much of the land on which the horses and burros live was specifically set aside for them, as living symbols of America’s western history, greedy cattle ranchers want that land for grazing. And they want it cheap, which is how they get it, subsidized by you and me, the taxpayers. Yes, these titans of beef are nothing but welfare queens, masquerading as cowboys.

I wish we could count on the Obama administration to help out the wild horses, but we can’t. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has appointed two new pro-slaughter members of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board since June, according to the Animal Law Coalition.

The end.