Posted on 09/20/2008 8:21:56 PM PDT by Dysart
FORT WORTH — One of Fort Worth’s hottest tickets was to Saturday’s finals of the Extreme Mustang Makeover at the Will Rogers Memorial Center. Then and in the previous three days, about 300 wild horses recently gathered from the open range (and their trainers) competed for $70,000 in prizes. Audiences were charmed.
But this week, darker undercurrents have shrouded the wild horse celebration. While about 33,000 mustangs still roam free on public lands in Western states, an equal number have been gathered up to prevent overgrazing and are currently held in corrals and pastures run by the federal government. This June, for the first time in decades, officials of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for the mustangs, mentioned euthanasia as one possible means of managing the growing numbers.
"You just can’t let this go on. You just can’t," bureau director Jim Caswell, who attended the Extreme Mustang Makeover this week to underscore the crisis, said Friday. "You’ve got to do something to deal with this problem. And we certainly need every alternative. I guess at the end of the day, this is one. It is within the scope of the law. Do you want to do it? No. But on the other hand, if you really get down to it, maybe you have to."
When the bureau first mentioned euthanasia this summer, mustang advocates around the nation responded with outrage. But even some wild horse lovers concede that the government might be running out of options.
"They don’t really have any other choice that I can see, and that’s the hard part," said Conni Canady, president of the National Wild Horse Association in Las Vegas. "We can’t sit down and say you should do this or you should do that. It would be very sad."
Proud history
(Excerpt) Read more at star-telegram.com ...
Gonna need a lot of willing folks to take these mustangs - as for the rest, should tax money be spent on this issue?
Most of the horses in the pasturing program are older than 3 years. Many of them are more than 7 years old.
The chances of doing anything useful with them after adopting them is slim.
It is long since past time that the hard reality of horse herd growth rates starts to sink in to the Wild Horse Annie types. At 17% herd size increase per year, there simply isn’t enough money, enough pasture, or enough adoptive owners to solve the problem.
And to not put too fine a point on it, there are plenty of horse out there that simply should be shot on sight. They’re barely horses any more - they look more like something that landed from Mars - short necks, big roman noses, stubby legs with big joints - terrible conformation horses are left in the herds because (drum roll please) they’re absolutely un-adoptable. So then a gather is done, they’re kicked out of the corrals back onto the range, to further pollute the genetic pool.
It is long since past time to use euthanasia as an option on the mustangs. For the hammerheads, it would be best to simply send horse conformation experts and riflemen paired together into Nevada and just shoot them on sight.
But that would be too cost-efficient and make too much sense.
Yes, tax money has to be spent on this issue, because the Wild Horse Annie types demanded that tax money be spent on the issue.
The way this used to be handled was that ranchers would round up the crap, ship them to slaughter plants. They’d take the cream of the crop and use them, or break them and sell them.
Every so often, ranchers would kick out a few stallions with good conformation and traits needed in the local herd onto the range and get some fresh blood into the herds.
But after 35 years of emotionally-laden wailing and sobbing from urban female voters on this issue, and the pandering of men in Congress to said ‘female vote’ - we have a wreck on our hands on the western rangelands, especially Nevada, southern Idaho, southeastern Oregon, western Utah, and so some extent Wyoming and Montana. But 50%+ of the problem is in Nevada.
What it will take is the 99% of taxpayers who want our tax monies spent on something other than these horses to yell at Congress “Hey! Most of these horses ain’t worth more than $50. So quit spending $4/day to pasture them!”
For $50/head, I’d hike up and down the range and humanely shoot them at the direction of a conformation expert. They make it sound as tho everyone in the west is simply infatuated with these beasts. Nope, not true. Especially after you’ve been charged by a couple of stallions while out upland game hunting...
I have a solution....
No horse lover would object to the culling of the weak, old or poorly configured mustangs...
Cull these and sell them to one of the horse flesh eating countries in the Far East...
Use the proceeds to maintain the “keepers” until adoption or the next round of culling...
If people don’t want to domesticate them and put them to use, manage them just like all the rest of the wildlife.
Yes, mustangs are not as pretty as their cousins in the show ring of Santa Barbara or the Madison Square Garden Arena. But I suspect that your adversion to mustangs goes beyond their appearance (conformation).
Perhaps what you really object to is that they consume range resources that rightfully belong to other large mammals such as antelopes, mule deer, and ranchers.
Don’t kill ‘em yet. By the time this generation of so-called political “leaders” gets done, we very well may need them to get around on.
Those herds (near the Carson District) and the herds up in the Virginia City Highlands north into the area near Lockwood are the ones kept in the nicest shape, because there are more people that see those herds than any others in Nevada.
You need to see the herds from east of Fallon to the Utah state line, from Nye County north to Idaho. Especially the herds in Lander, Eureka and White Pine Counties. Woof.
My aversion to the mustangs is that the entire program is a monstrous boondoggle. The BLM practices a “out of sight, out of mind” strategy for managing HMA’s. The HMA’s nearest the urban areas produce the most static coming into the BLM offices, so they manage those HMA’s fairly regularly.
In the very rural areas of Nevada, the BLM will allow HMA’s to build up to 10 times the AML (appropriate management level) of horses.
Here, don’t believe me. Here’s the text from a recent BLM publication I had on the Diamond Mountain HMA:
“During a capture of wild horses, conducted from August 1 through August 23, 1997, 1,397 horses were captured within and outside the boundaries of the HMAs. Of the total captured 1,177 of the horses were transported to Palomino Valley Center north of Sparks, Nevada for preparation into the adoption program. The remainder, ages 10 to 28 years old, were released back inside the HMA boundaries.
The most recent gather was completed in 2004, in conjunction with the other two HMAs within the Complex. The gather involved the capture of 643 wild horses followed by the release of 116 wild horses back to the range. Fertility control was also implemented on 86 of the released mares.
The primary colors of the horses captured from within the Diamond, Diamond Hills North & Diamond Hills South included bays, sorrels, and browns. Other colors included palomino, buckskin, chestnut, grey, variations of roan, and pinto/paint.
The current estimated population on the Battle Mountain side of the mountain range is 129 horses. The Appropriate Management Level (AML) is 151.”
What happens when you have nearly 10 times as many horses in a HMA as the AML, which is set by the BLM’s range conservation officers? ie, people with degrees in range management?
They wreck it. Completely. The BLM finally looked at how many horses were dying over the winters up in canyons and decided “eh, perhaps we oughta do something about this — the pictures aren’t pretty.” And they’re not. Come springtime, you can go up into the canyons and find dessicated horse carcasses where the carcass came straight down onto it’s own feet. The only way this happens is that the horse is up in the canyon, a big snowstorm comes in and the horse dies standing up. Why did the horses stay up in the canyon in a snowstorm like that? Because that’s where the only food was - up in the higher areas of the range, the first areas to receive any moisture come fall are up in the higher country.
Most people who see only the urban herds have never seen a hammerhead. They never see the dead come spring. They don’t see horses run deer, elk and pronghorn off of springs. They don’t get out onto the range enough to see how horses foul springs so badly that nothing will drink the dung-infested water unless they’re forced to - and then, only if the stud is far enough away that they can get in on the spring.
Again, the BLM manages the HMA’s near urban areas to make sure they continue to have public support for their idiotic program and as little static as possible.
The rural areas, where there are very few people (eg, Eureka County, with a total population in the county of about 1700 people), the BLM paints the locals as a bunch of greedy ranchers, who view the horses as mere competition for their capitalistic cattle grazing. What the BLM and the horse advocates don’t tell people (and most people are utterly ignorant of) is that a horse can over-graze pasture/range faster and more permanently than any other animal out there.
And the answer to “why?” is seen by looking in a horse’s mouth.
Quiz time: What does a horse have that cattle and sheep don’t have?
These “horse lovers” object to the silliest things.
For example, the BLM reckoned (properly, in this case) that only the younger, better-conformed horses have the best chances for adoption. So after Bob Abbey put in the latest horse adoption program in 2000, (after the huge fires of 1999), they tried to bring back the younger, better-looking horses to the adoption centers, and kicked the older horses back out onto the range.
The Wild Horse Annie yahoos complained that this was “unfair” to the older horses.
Of course, the older horses don’t get adopted. You might as well adopt an engine block that eats hay as adopt an older mustang; they’re now set in their ways and it is a very, very rare one you can turn into a ridable horse.
So the BLM had to start bringing in older horses, and of course, they wouldn’t get adopted all that much. So the older horses that won’t get adopted are what dominate the pasturing program out in Oklahoma and other places.
Next idiocy of the WHA types: when the BLM started their birth control program - when they’d do a helo gather of horses into the capture pen, they’d run the ones they were going to turn out again through a chute and give the females a contraceptive shot. It is 90% effective the first year, only about 60% effective the second year. It isn’t a solution, but it does help slow down the rate of herd growth.
Well, the BLM figured they’d inject the nags and leave the good females open.
Whoops. Now the BLM was practicing “eugenics.” (That’s what urban females call it). Farmers and ranchers call it “animal husbandry” - but what the heck do we know?
The whole program is idiotic, from top to bottom, and is a monstrous waste of money and detrimental beyond belief to the condition of the range. The horses are the #1 cause of over-grazing on the Nevada range - by far.
Yup, seems like an open season would help - the deer would taste better tho...
You’ll know the money is getting tight when waste like this finally gets cut - but I suspect it will be at the end of a line rather than the beginning.
1% of voters who are passionately committed to a cause will always prevail over the 99% who don't give much of a damn. A politician who comes out in favor of culling the herd will acquire loud and boisterous opposition. If he votes for continuing the present program or just keeps his mouth shut, nobody attacks him. This is not a difficult political decision.
Since horses evolved in North America and lived here for more than 50M years, only going extinct about 10,000 years ago, it can at the least be argued that their introduction is really a reintroduction. Especially since there is some evidence that their extinction here was partially due to human action.
Solution=dog food!
Unfortunately “buffs” and aficionado types can force other people to help pay for stuff they like, when it dosen’t make sense. NASA is another example of this...
LOL
Remnds me of that old WWII ditty
“We did it before and we can do it again”.....
MAybe they were wiped by by global warming / cooling or the like?
10,000 to 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, most of the large fauna of North America went extinct. Nobody really knows why.
The common wisdom used to be that they were exterminated by men, who entered the western hemisphere across the Bering landbridge for the first time. This never made a great deal of sense to me, as horses would seem to be a very difficult animal for a relatively small number of people armed with at most bows to wipe out. And of course recent evidence indicates people were probably around for thousands of years before this.
I tell my grandson that early car makers used dinosour skin for the seat covers, and that’s why no dinos today.
Makes as much sense as some of the other things I have read about....
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