Posted on 11/26/2004 5:37:54 PM PST by mommadooo3
Congress Approves Mustang Slaughter
PLEASE HELP, PLEASE PASS ON.......................
Stealthily tucked within a much larger appropriations bill (HR 4818) while no one was watching, Congress approved measures this weekend to end 33 years of Federal protection for an America Treasure, our "Living Legends" - wild free-roaming horses and burros on public lands. This bill seems to have broadsided everyone, including many BLM personnel, who had drafted their own plans to handle the problem, and thought their plan would work. Since both House and Senate have already passed it, the only hope left is to get Bush not to sign it - which he will do tomorrow, unless enough public outcry can be generated within the next less-than-24 hours.
The Wild Horse & Burro Act was signed into law in 1971, after a long campaign led by Velma Johnson, "Wild Horse Annie" and thousands of school children. Congress received more mail about wild horses than about Viet Nam. In today's crisis-weary world, is this the end for America's wild horses?
LINK to bill: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/Z?r108:H19NO4-0085:e758617:247850 The BLM part is about 1/3 of the way down the page.
I would suggest to EVERYONE you can get hold of, through phone calls, e-mails, chat rooms, equestrian sites, etc, anything......get them to call the president's comment line, fax letters to the fax number, and to e-mail both the president and vice president IMMEDIATELY. Please pass on to everyone for immediate action. Currently there are over 23,000 wild horses in holding facilities within BLM and their contract sanctuaries. 1100 new horses are being gathered from the Calico Mountains this month and next. If this passes, ALL, could potentially be sold to slaughter.
President Bush president@whitehouse.gov
VP Cheney vice.president@whitehouse.gov
202-456-1111 phone 202-456-2461 fax
Calico mountains horses slated to be gathered this month. Will they go to slaughter?
Tuesday, November 23, 2004 Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Congress passes less-restrictive wild horse bill
Measure sparks concern among animal activists who say it opens door to killing
By SAMANTHA YOUNG STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON -- Aging wild horses and those that cannot be auctioned off as pets could be sold for slaughter under a bill that Congress passed over the weekend.
The legislation immediately sparked concern among wild horse advocates who said it could lead to the killing of thousands of healthy horses as the government drives to reduce herds on public lands.
Wild horses older than 10 or those that have unsuccessfully been put up for adoption three times may be sold "without limitations," at local sale yards or livestock facilities, according to the bill.
"If someone under this program can now buy 300 horses and ship them to a slaughter house people will start making money," said Howard Crystal, attorney for the Fund for Animals. "I would expect under this law we're going to have far higher numbers of horses going to slaughter."
The bill strips from federal law a clause that no wild free-roaming horse or burro can be sold or transferred for processing into commercial products.
The provision was tucked into a 3,000-page year-end spending bill that lawmakers largely completed on Saturday.
Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that funds the Bureau of Land Management, placed the measure into the bill after consulting with Sense. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., Burns spokeswoman Jennifer O'Shea said.
"We've got to get the number of animals down to appropriate management levels and keep them there, but do it in a way that doesn't bankrupt us," Burns said in a statement. "This language is a step in the right direction. It gives BLM another tool to help get this under control."
Lawmakers have grown increasingly frustrated with the BLM's handling of the wild horse program, whose costs have skyrocketed as more and more horses have been taken off the range and placed into government-run holding fa- cilities.
Giving the BLM the authority to sell those horses could solve the agency's long-standing budget problems while allowing the agency to continue gathering thousands of wild horses from the public lands, a Senate aide said.
For each horse that is placed in a long-term holding facility, the BLM spends about $465 annually, or about $6.8 million a year.
The agency estimates there are about 36,000 horses in the wild, roughly 7,000 more than the government contends the land can sustain.
BLM spokeswoman Celia Boddington declined to comment on the congressional action.
"We've not yet reviewed the language," she said.
Unlike the adoption program, in which buyers are limited to four horses and must sign an affidavit promising not sell the horse to slaughter, the new sales would not have such restrictions, Senate aides said.
BLM officials long have contended that adopters don't want to buy older horses, forcing the government to place them at the long-term holding facilities at taxpayer expense.
In fiscal 2004, the BLM adopted out 6,650 horses out of the 9,900 horses it gathered from the range. The rest were sent to long-term sanctuaries in the Midwest.
Crystal said the new law would empower the BLM to round up herds of horses for adoption, knowing that many could later be sold for profit.
"You could have an adoption of year-old horses on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with no advertising, and then sell to people at a yard sale," Crystal said.
Chris Heyed, a policy analyst with the Society for Animal Protective Legislation, called Congress' latest move "a systematic attack on wild horses."
"There is no other real other intent of dumping them into the market and slaughter is the only outlet," Heyed said.
In addition, the bill makes clear that it is no longer a crime to sell an aging or horse for slaughter, Crystal said.
There are more riding horses for sale than there are buyers.
Once a buyer gets his/her Vet bill for a minor problem on top of monthly stable fees, shoeing, tack and feed the dream quickly goes away. Q: Just who is going to buy 1000's of WILD horses, break them, etc, etal?: A: Nobody.
(2) by adding at the end the following:
``(e) SALE OF EXCESS ANIMALS.--
``(1) IN GENERAL.--Any excess animal or the remains of an excess animal shall be sold if--
``(A) the excess animal is more than 10 years of age; or
``(B) the excess animal has been offered unsuccessfully for adoption at least 3 times.
It is a totally natural thing for a dog to eat a horse. And, as someone noted, they are animals. Thin them out and leave a healthy population.
I'm not sure how I feel about this since there are good arguments for both sides. I would like to clear up one misconception, though. Slaughter horsemeat does not go for dog food, it's shipped overseas for human consumption.
So this sale of text can't be changed?
I stand corrected. It is a totally natural thing for a foreigner to eat a horse
So this sale of text can't be changed?
That's the question.... and the answer that occurs to me is, whoever took on the task of rounding them up in the first place.
You bring it home, you take care of it. BLM decided they'd rather rent to ranchers and graze cattle on public land than let wild horses run. We eliminated the predators that used to keep down their numbers because they also killed the cattle. Now there are too many horses, too many of us.
This outcome is our creation, it's as ugly as holding pens for wild horses, and about to get uglier, nothing will be changed now... it's out of the sight of most of us.
If I can't save the thousands of old trusty saddle horses that work their whole life for people but are betrayed to slaughter when they break down, I can't save the ones that have no higher contract with us than that they were in our way.
I can understand what you are saying. But these animals are not like deer. There ARE people who would take them in, care for them. Their bloodlines WOULD BE preserved. (There IS a difference between a horse and a mustang.) .
No thanks on the latter -- I've pretty much held Disney in contempt ever since realizing that the whole point of Bambi was to demonize hunters. :)
One of the points of my post, which you apparently missed, is that horses are, in fact, a native species and disappeared from the American continent because of humans. If BLM has any intelligence left, it would introduce the horse's natural predators back into its present environment (which were NOT humans, by the way), and that would take care of the problem, by and large.
In a park around here you can't kill a snake, scorpian or even a fly. All animals under protection. America public and private a big place. There has to be a better solution than thinning by slaughter.
ORECON is absolutely correct. I have not seen these horses in the US but I have seen them in Canada. They have no natural enemies and they over breed and over run the range forcing out other species. There is not room for all of them and the herd needs to be thinned, not destroyed, just thinned.
They don't have to advertise the adoptions, they make very little effort to do that now. And a swaybacked old stallion might make the perfect horse for little Jimmy if gelded and trained. They are a very smart animal.
'Course, they could have just left him on his range, where he was harming no one.
When I was a kid I used to buy it once a week for cat food at the dog and cat food store after the butcher shop quit giving away liver for free.
Just like those aborted babies.
Well, you know, there aren't thousands out there anymore. If they were just left alone, they would survive and maintain a stable population. They do not overbreed and in a couple of years, crowd out everything else. Another lie by the detractors by the way. Most bands have only a couple of foals a year, and loose the equal amount of adults to injury and death.
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