Wild Horses and Madeleine Pickens

First, let's allow the Animals and Society Institute to set the scene:

How’s this for a scheme that only a government could design:

Over 100,000 wild horses roamed the Western US minding their own business and not requiring any assistance from people, thank you anyway. So let’s spend lots of time and money rounding up nearly half of them, kill and injure some in the process, and condense the survivors into holding areas.

Now those horses who once roamed free do need human intervention. Food, medical services, and caretaker personnel, for starters. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), who manages this enterprise, complains that it takes three-fourths of its $37 million horse budget just for such basics.

Under the “Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971” (the legislation that prohibits commercial capture of wild horses but mandates government roundups) the BLM must offer the horses for adoption at $125 each, sell the remainder without restriction (spelled “slaughter”), or euthanize them.

Even at such a low price adoptions have been steadily falling and holding pen density is increasing. But the BLM has been very reluctant to sell the remaining 30,000 horses to the horsemeat trade or to euthanize them because of the anticipated public outcry.

Faced with a budget crisis, though, the BLM decided that it must “bite the bullet” and begin making “hard choices” at a scheduled October 17, 2008 meeting.

The news broke a few days ago that the uber-wealthy Madeleine Pickens has stepped up and agreed to adopt the 2,000 mustangs who were about to be killed as well as possibly all, or at the very least most, of the 30,000 wild horses and burros whom the government has rounded up in federal holding facilities. Wow. How fantastic is it when someone with the means to do something incredible actually does something incredible?

There's far more on this story and on the underlying issues in the Washington Post article "A Dramatic Rescue for Doomed Wild Horses of the West."

See also the following posts:

• Animals and Society Institute: Horse Senseless - With a Happy Ending
• Creature Talk: Happy News for America’s Mustangs & Burros

By the way, we'll talk in further detail another time about the connections between cattle ranching and the killing of wildlife--on how cattle ranchers' interests always take precedent and more--but for now, I'll just leave you with this from the Washington Post: "The wild horses had become too expensive to maintain, and cattlemen argued that turning them loose would be a drain on the already scarce grazing lands of the West." And this from ASI: "Grazing rights on those public lands where the horses ran free are inexpensively leased to cattle ranchers. They complain that the horses compete with bovines for the limited forage. Some land experts disagree, arguing that cattle don’t graze far from water whereas horses roam great distances. Nevertheless, the cattle lobby is a powerful force inside government." If you take all that to mean that support of the beef industry contributes to problems such as this, with wild animals being exterminated in large numbers and/or removed from their natural habitats so that humans can have their hamburgers and steaks, I won't object.