Wild Horses Heading to the Gallows as Cowboy Prez Exits
As if the situation were not disturbing enough, wild horses are once again heading for the gallows. Thanks to a report just issued by the GAO, the Bureau of Land Management - tasked with overseeing the country's mustang populations - should implement euthanasia as a tool in handling wild horse populations. That means that the 30,000 wild horses now in government housing (more than are in the wild) may soon be eradicated - the result of a decades-long war against the wild horse that has reached its crescendo under the Bush administration, and is now fueled by cost-cutting hysteria sweeping federal agencies.
As I ask in my recently published book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, why are we, a cowboy nation, destroying the horse we rode in on? This is a difficult question, and now is the time to put it to rest. Surely, even considering the financial condition of the country, we can take care of our wild horses - and more importantly, can we really put a price on our heritage? (And on a side note: what bizarre, subterranean impulse led the BLM to first float the euthanasia plan on July 4th - the day on which America was born in hoofsparks - and the GAO to publish its findings on Veteran's Day - when we ought to remember our equine war partners as well: in the Civil War, for example, 1.5 million horses and mules were killed or died of illness while serving - at least 5000 at Gettysburg alone).
Please get in touch with President-elect Obama, as well as your representatives and senators, and let them know that a) the extermination of our great partner - the wild horse - is not how you would like your tax dollars to be spent; b) Congress should take a hard look at exactly why so many wild horses have been rounded up in recent years, and c) getting rid of the wild horse is un-American.
Incidentally, Obama was a backer of the anti-slaughter legislation that Congress passed a couple of years ago, shutting down the country's three remaining, and foreign-owned, horse rendering plants. This legislation was passed by a huge margin, thanks to a massive grass-roots campaign kicked into high gear after the previous official death sentence for wild horses was enacted - a rollback in the law that protects them orchestrated by former Montana Senator Conrad Burns. The original law, the Free-Roaming Wild Horse and Burro Act, was signed iin 1971 by Richard Nixon, who, in a bizarre footnote to history, quoted Thoreau in an impassioned defense of the wild horse at the signing ceremony. The Burns rollback paved the way for the current disaster.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deanne-stillman/wild-horses-heading-to-th_b_143152.html
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