Livestock industry’s campaign to get
rid of wild horses is a scam to cheat
the taxpayers
"...The livestock industry has cooked up a $#@!-and-bull story about how wild horses are the primary threat to land health in the West. The now-disgraced BLM interim director William Perry Pendley made that false assertion...
Wild horses are found primarily on Herd Management Areas (HMAs) spanning 26.9 million acres (11 percent) of the 245.7 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management, but are completely absent from the vast majority of western federal lands. Wild horses are often held at very low populations though aggressive federal roundups. Cattle and sheep, on the other hand, graze on the majority of western public lands, and hugely outnumber wild horses...
...
To sum up, federal agencies spend millions of taxpayer dollars on helicopter roundups to remove wild horses from lands where the grazing is valued at only $1.35 a month per animal, spends millions more on short-term holding and transportation, then houses them on private lands where the taxpayers get to pay an average of $60 a month per horse for the rest of their lives...
...It’s the fact that the federal government is removing the horses that are ecologically well-adapted to dry conditions of the arid West and replacing them with cattle that are suited only to moist climates and are far more damaging to arid public lands. And to top it all off, they’re pasturing formerly wild horses on private lands in areas with abundant rainfall, pushing cattle off the very lands to which they’re ecologically suited. So in the end, the public gets more cattle on public lands, more ecological damage to public lands, wild horses shifted to private lands, less-sustainable beef production, and then gets to foot the bill for this whole package of expensive mismanagement to boot.
We have a land health crisis, and a cheatgrass pandemic, on our western public lands. It’s not because of wild horses, it’s because our federal agencies are enabling ecological degradation by failing to competently manage the livestock grazing on public lands. This problem isn’t getting solved by shuffling large herbivores around the continent. It’s long past time to manage wild horse numbers sustainably on the range instead (restoring natural predators and temporary birth control show promise), and to refocus federal attention and funding on the real problem – excessive domestic livestock and the cheatgrass invasions they cause – so we can restore healthy public lands, abundant wildlife, and clean-flowing streams and rivers throughout the West."
http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2020/...aqddZs3Hk0JTR0