Please, please write to your Senators to try to stop this atrocity, and pass on to anyone you think might help.
You can find your senators here:
http://www.senate.gov/Thursday, November 25, 2004
Bill would allow slaughter of wild horses
By FELICITY BARRINGER
THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON -- In a reversal of three decades of government policy that protected all wild horses, a provision approved by Congress last weekend would allow some of them to be sold to slaughterhouses.
The provision, attached to an omnibus spending bill by Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee with responsibility for the Interior Department, requires the sale of wild horses that have been rounded up and are more than 10 years old or have been unsuccessfully offered for adoption three times. The bill is awaiting final action.
The new language appears to override an existing requirement that those buying horses for adoption care for them for a year before assuming ownership, a hedge against horses being sold for slaughter. Now, the prospective law says, unwanted or old horses "shall be made available for sale without limitation."
There are about 37,000 horses and burros running free in 10 Western states, but most are concentrated in Nevada, said Maxine Shane, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management. She estimated that at least 8,000 of the horses in captivity would be eligible for immediate sale to the highest bidder.
The fate of wild horses and burros in the West has been an emotional flashpoint and source of litigation. Horse lovers have fought to preserve and expand the herds, whose bloodlines trace back, at least partly, to the animals brought by the conquistadors in the 16th century. Ranchers, whose cattle compete with the horses for forage and water on public lands, want the 180 remaining herds thinned out.
Horse advocates were furious that the legislation passed without a public hearing. Tina Kreisher, a spokesman for the Interior Department, said yesterday, "We did not ask for this language."
The Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency caught between the two opposing forces, has for years rounded up horses and offered them for adoption and has spent increasing amounts on this program.
Before this measure, which the president is expected to sign, older or unadoptable horses in the bureau's holding facilities were returned to the range.
Rachel Buzzetti, the executive director of the Nevada Cattlemen's Association, said that the competition for forage between livestock and wild animals had intensified with the drought gripping the Rocky Mountain West.
"If you have elk on your allotment and horses, you're not going to have any cattle left," Buzzetti said, using the bureau's term for a section of public land offered to private users for grazing.
But Karen Sussman, president of the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros, said that "public lands ranching is the biggest welfare subsidy the public pays for."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/201110_horses25.html(PRWEB) September 6, 2004 -- A team of wild horse experts — under the coalition banner of The American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign (AWHPC) — is alerting the public to the fact that that America’s wild horses are being eradicated from public lands in violation of the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse & Burro Act, which protects wild horses as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.”
Special interests have been successful in pressuring the government to systematically remove wild horses from public lands — specifically the cattle industry, which wants the horses replaced with cattle for subsidized grazing. While the aggressive removal policy currently being implemented is costing over thirty million taxpayer dollars annually, in-the-wild management -- as mandated by federal law -- would save millions of taxpayers’ dollars.
Just a hundred years ago, more than 2 million wild horses roamed the nation’s public range. Fewer than 32,000 now remain, outnumbered by private cattle by about 150 to 1 on public lands; about as many -- nearly 29,000 — will be held in government short- and long-term holding facilities by the end of this year, most of them unadoptable. The government plans to capture another 9,300 horses by February 2005, with the removal campaign costing upwards of $5,000 for the capture of a single horse, in addition to the mounting costs of long-term holding. Some Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officials have acknowledged that there is talk in Washington of a one-time 'sale' or 'kill' authority to dispose of the tens of thousands of horses currently in holding facilities.
more...
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/9/prweb154955.htm 
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