FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts:
Vicki Tobin
630.961.9292
vicki@equinewelfarealliance.org
John Holland
540-268-5693
john@equinewelfarealliance.org
CHICAGO, (EWA), – Despite growing public outrage and the threat of more legal action, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is keeping to its announced time table of rounding up almost half (14,518) of America’s wild horses and burros in the current fiscal year.
Following the filing of a law suit to stop a scheduled gather of wild horses in the Calico complex of Nevada, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced a delay of the operation thus avoiding an expected restraining order.
At the agency’s Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board meeting on December 7, program chief Don Glenn assured attendees that his agency was “transparent” and that the public is welcome to attend the round-ups. Even as these assurances were being delivered, the BLM was secretly in the midst of a sneak attack on the herds of Buckhorn, California.
Unconfirmed at this time are reports of two other round-ups underway or completed at Coppersmith and Carter Reservoir. The latter is said to have also included eight Buckhorn wild horses.
The Buckhorn round-up, which was officially scheduled for August of 2010, was only brought to the public’s attention when the helicopter chasing the wild horses spotted six dead horses on the range.
The BLM had claimed that there were 596 horses at Buckhorn and that they were going to remove all but 60, but according to the AP only 217 wild horses were found and only 26 will be returned to the range. “This leaves yet another sterile, unviable herd.” said EWA’s Cindy McDonald, adding “This discrepancy casts further doubt on the accuracy of the BLM’s population estimates.”
“We keep hearing that the mustang population is growing rapidly but the BLM population numbers don’t add up. We continue to ask the BLM how 32,000 wild horses represent a population out of control but millions of privately owned livestock on BLM land are at appropriate levels,” added EWA’s Vicki Tobin.
According to a report by the Associated Press, the BLM stated that this latest removal of wild horses without public notice was due to an “internal communication failure”.
The 1971 Wild Horse and Burro Act is clear in its intent. The wild horses and burros are to be protected on the 54 million acres granted to them under the law. The BLM has already removed more than 20 million acres of the original land Congress allocated to Mustangs in 1971, and more than 270,000 wild horses and burros.
It has been more than three weeks since the unified call for a moratorium was delivered to the White House and the Department of Interior but the runaway BLM train continues barreling down the track. Each wild horse round-up is bringing the mustangs closer to extinction. The EWA urges every American to call the president and their elected officials to preserve the nation’s wild mustangs and ask that the law protecting our majestic heritage be upheld.
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