(BLM photos)
Friends of Animals blocks contraceptive project in the Pine Nut Mountains of Nevada.
Part III of a three-part series examining winter, wildlife, & livestock. See also If “your ass is grass,” ranchers lost their butts in 2015-2016, and Winter policy favors feeding elk but starving bison.
RENO, Nevada––Even a quick glance at satellite photos suggests that the Pine Nut Mountains of Nevada might be the ideal place to test the contraceptive vaccine ZonaStat-H in wild horses.
Stretching for 40 miles southeast of Carson City toward the California border, the Pine Nut Mountains offer highly varied habitat, easy road access to keep the wild horse herd under observation, and one of the best-documented wild horse populations anywhere.
Preparing PZP vaccine dart.
(BLM photo)
PZP trial was started
A Pine Nut Mountains trial of ZonaStat-H did get started. The first 22 mares were treated in November 2010.
Encouraged by the results from that preliminary test, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management initiated the Fish Springs Wild Horses PZP Pilot Project in December 2014, working in partnership with American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign, representing a coalition of more than 60 wild horse advocacy organizations, and Pine Nut Wild Horse Advocates, of Gardnerville, Nevada.
ZonaStat-H is contraceptive vaccine based on porcine zona pellucida, extracted from the ovaries of slaughtered pigs. Called PZP for short, ZonaStat-H has been used with wild horses under National Park Service jurisdiction at Assateague Island, Maryland since 1994.
(BLM photo)
But was stopped on May 3, 2016
But, wrote Bureau of Land Management Sierra Front field manager Bryant D. Smith in a May 3, 2016 memo to staff, “Administration of PZP to [the Pine Nut Mountains] wild horses is hereby suspended, pending further review.”
“The Bureau of Land Management maintains the Pine Nut herd is seriously overpopulated. It intended to round up more than 300 horses last year before U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks sided with wild horse advocates and blocked the effort,” summarized Scott Sonner of Associated Press. “Hicks ruled that the BLM failed to conduct the necessary analysis required under the National Environmental Policy Act, and soon after the agency voluntarily withdrew its roundup plan.
FoA president Priscilla Feral.
FoA threatened to sue
The Bureau of Land Management suspended the ZonaStat-H project, Sonner explained, “after Friends of Animals threatened to sue, based on claims the drug PZP harms horses and violates the judge’s order.”
Friends of Animals and another group, Protect Mustangs, previously delayed the Pine Nut Mountains trial of ZonaStat-H with a lawsuit filed in January 2015.
Gloated Friends of Animals president Priscilla Feral, “We are extremely happy to have killed the pilot project and to put a stop to the forced drugging of Pine Nut mares with the fertility control pesticide PZP for a second time.”
Feral has headed the Connecticut-based advocacy organization Friends of Animals, founded in 1957, since 1986.
Darting wild horses.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Called darting mares “harassment”
Friends of Animals’ wildlife law program director Michael Harris told Sonner that allowing private landowners with rifles to dart mares, as was part of the Fish Springs Wild Horses PZP Pilot Project “appears to violate the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, which prohibits landowners from intentionally harassing wild horses,” Sonner paraphrased.
But whether the Friends of Animals position is consonant with the original intent of the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act is distinctly questionable––especially in application to the wild horses of the Pine Nut Mountains.
Velma “Wild Horse Annie” Johnston.
(Wikipedia photo)
“Wild Horse Annie” & Marilyn Monroe
The passage of the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act is largely credited to Velma Johnston. Nicknamed “Wild Horse Annie,” Johnston spent more than 20 years lobbying the act and earlier state legislation protecting wild horses into existence, beginning in 1950.
Also well-remembered are the roles of Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, who reinforced Johnston’s efforts in their last film, The Misfits (1961).
The Misfits was filmed in the Pine Nut Mountains and featured the Pine Nut wild horse herd, then subjected to frequent roundups of horses to be sold for slaughter by dog food makers.
Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in “The Misfits.”
The winter of ’69
But the draft Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act also won a timely publicity boost from the plight of 40 to 50 horses who in late February 1969 became stranded in deep snow along a 28-mile ridge in the Pine Nut Mountains.
The episode demonstrated the deceptively limited carrying capacity of the habitat. About 200 wild horses roamed the Pine Nut Mountains at the time, less than two-thirds of the present population. But that was still too many for the late winter conditions.
“Winds have swept the ridge almost bare,” reported Associated Press. “A series of storms scared the horses to high ground, piling up shoulder-deep snow which eventually trapped them on the rocky ridge with only a few tufts of grass to eat.”
“Down to skin & bones”
“Down to skin & bones”“They’re up to their necks in snow. They haven’t got any feed and they’re down to skin and bones,” confirmed helicopter owner Ed Counts.
Hired by an ad hoc committee of local ranchers, hunters, and sheriff’s deputies to attempt a rescue, Counts and pilot Byron Clark flew as much hay as they could to the stranded horses, buying time until a mounted posse could clear a trail along which to lead them out.
“We fed everything we could, about 35 mustangs,” Clark said.
Captured the public fancy
Stranded wild horses have died in harsh winters since circa 1600, when runaway Spanish horses repopulated the western range, eight to ten thousand years after horses last lived in North America, their evolutionary home.
The Yakima Nation of western Washington state introduced the use of helicopters to round up wild horses for slaughter in 1953.
But the use of a helicopter to save horses from deep snow was something new, and captured the public fancy. Documented by television cameras, the Quixotic rescue of February 1969 made headlines nationwide, briefly shouldering aside even the Vietnam War––and helped to make wild horses a high profile issue in Congress.
PZP introduction delayed
Developed by wildlife biologist Jay Kirkpatrick, who died at age 75 in December 2015, ZonaStat-H and other PZP-based contraceptive vaccines have been used in more than 80 species of captive hooved wildlife since 1987.
The first large-scale application of ZonaStat-H to equines covered by the federal Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, however, meaning horses living under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, was delayed until 2011 by opposition from Friends of Animals and other wild horse advocacy groups who argue that wild horse populations should be regulated only by nature, and that wild horses should be allowed to re-occupy all of the range they occupied before they became a regulated species.
(BLM photo)
Pryor Mountains test
In 2011 ZonaStat-H was at last injected into about 1,600 free-ranging mares at test sites across the U.S., chiefly in the Pryor Mountains of Montana and the McCullough Peaks region of Wyoming.
The Bureau of Land Management found that the introduction of ZonaStat-H reduced the rate of growth of the Pryor Mountains wild horse herd, a particularly politically and ecologically controversial population, by more than half.
The Pine Nut Mountains wild horse herd had meanwhile been growing since 2003, when the Bureau of Land Management rounded up and removed 320 horses of an estimated 438 horses in the 98,600-acre herd management area. This is about 25% of the total of 400,000 acres in the Pine Nut Mountains that are under BLM control.
(BLM photo)
Conflict with livestock
The Bureau of Land Management believes the herd management area habitat can sustain from from 118 to 179 wild horses, who seasonally share the range with livestock.
Wrote Wild Horse Conspiracy author Craig C. Downer in 2013, “1,511 cow-calf pairs and 12,707 sheep graze its several allotments at various seasons. This is the equivalent of over 1,000 cow-calf pairs grazing all year long,” with “a preponderance of grazing early in the season when forage is highest in nutritional value.”
In November 2005 an amended Pine Nut Mountains resource management plan threatened to cut the horse herd area by 21%. Dan Jacquet, assistant manager of renewable resources for the Bureau of Land Management’s Carson City field office, confirmed to Tim Anderson of the Reno Gazette-Journal that this “could lead to a corresponding reduction in the number of wild horses.”
“In 2010, the BLM found that the Pine Nut herd had grown to about 215 horses and proposed a roundup and PZP treatment,” recounted the Environmental News Service in February 2014. “The BLM did an Environmental Assessment at that time, and the roundup and birth control treatments were carried out” on 22 mares.
(BLM photo)
Wildfires
Meanwhile, a more immediate threat to the Pine Nut Mountains wild horse herd came from a series of wildfires associated with reduced winter snowfall and dryer summers. Both are probable effects of global warming, likely to continue as longterm trends throughout the foreseeable future.
Most damaging were the Bald Mountain fire of 2012 and the Bison Fire of early July 2013, which burned 37 square miles on the east-facing slopes of Galena Peak and Mount Siegel.
While wildfires are more-or-less routine in wild horse habitat throughout the west, they temporarily reduce the grass available to horses. When the habitat is receiving less precipitation between fires, the fires can be symptomatic of reduced longterm carrying capacity for all grazing and browsing species, as well as for the predators who help to keep the grazing and browsing species’ numbers in check.
(Beth Clifton)
Mule deer, pumas, & sage grouse
These trends are evident throughout Nevada, where the mule deer population fell from 240,000 in 1988 to 99,000 in 2015. The Nevada puma population over the same years appears to have fallen from a high of about 2,400 to as few as 1,500, with many pumas apparently migrating to more favorable hunting habitat in California.
Political pressure to cut the Pine Nut Mountains wild horse herd increased with the passage of the 2014 Farm Bill, which apportioned $32 million over ten years, explained Jeff DeLong of the Reno Gazette-Journal, “to fund conservation efforts affecting habitat for a type of sage grouse found only along the Nevada-California border, a bird now proposed for listing as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.”
The Pine Nut Mountains are considered essential habitat for the sage grouse, whose total population throughout their range is believed to be about 5,000.
Greater sage grouse
“Over the high end”
While the ground-nesting sage grouse have long co-existed with wild horses, cattle, and mule deer, grazing animals are seen as a potential threat to their cover.
But as of August 2014, a Bureau of Land Management wild horse population inventory found 332 horses in the Pine Nut Mountains, approximately twice the officially recognized “appropriate management level.”
Wrote DeLong, “An overpopulation of horses in the area has damaged the range, including valuable sage grouse habitat, and reduced availability of native forage grasses needed to support a healthy horse population.”
Elaborated Bureau of Land Management official John Neill, who was to oversee the January 2015 roundup of all 332 horses, “They are considerably over the high end (in population) and have been for two or three years. Once animals grow over that upper end, those animals are excess animals and BLM is responsible to remove them.”
(BLM photo)
200 to be “permanently removed”
Two hundred of the 332 wild horses were to have been permanently removed. “Of the 132 released back to the range, about 66 mares would receive a 22-month treatment” of ZonaStat-H, “to prevent future reproduction,” DeLong explained.
Friends of Animals’ opposition to ZonaStat-H use in the Pine Nut Mountains is consistent with the 25-year FoA history of opposition to animal contraceptives, and in particular to animal contraceptives developed with help from the Humane Society of the U.S.
In 1991, for example, a Friends of Animals campaign influenced the Humane Society of the U.S. to temporarily withdraw funding for the development of the chemosterilant for male dogs and cats which was eventually marketed as Neutersol and is now sold as Esterisol.
(BLM photo)
FoA asked EPA to cancel PZP registration
Friends of Animals on May 20, 2015 asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to “cancel the registration of porcine zona pellucida (PZP) for population control of America’s wild horses and burros, which was issued to the Humane Society of the United States in 2012.”
Alleged FoA Wildlife Law Program legal director Michael Harris, “PZP poses the risk of immediate physical damage to the dosed mares, can increase the mortality rate in foals born to treated mares after the PZP loses its effectiveness, can result in social disruptions among herds with treated mares that can damage long-term herd cohesion that is critical to the health of the animals, and places the wild horses at risk of a genetic bottleneck.”
(See also Sex, Drugs & Wild Horses, and Wildlife contraceptive researcher Jay Kirkpatrick, 75.)
Willis Lamm (Facebook photo)
Different perspective
But retired firefighter, horse rescuer, and longtime wild horse advocate Willis Lamm gave ANIMALS 24-7 a different perspective, from direct observation of horses in a herd management area just to the north of the Pine Nut Mountains.
“I have observed fertility-controlled herds in the Virginia Range of Nevada for many years,” Lamm told ANIMALS 24-7. “Several of us, as volunteers, kept photographic records of bands of horses in which some members had received PZP and others received other fertility control methods.
“Going in, we had no knowledge as to which horses had been given which form of fertility control. The mares whom we determined later were provided PZP showed no ill effects. In fact, the only observable side effects were short intervals in which they did not produce foals and developed improved body scores while they rested from gestating and nursing.
(BLM photo)
Human interference
“The social structures of the PZP treated horses were more influenced by human interference––tourists and meddlers––than by any side effect that we could attribute to the vaccine,” Lamm said. “The horses who kept to remote areas stayed socially integrated, while the behaviors of horses, treated or not, tended to be disrupted where humans imposed themselves on the bands.”
Charged American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign program director Deniz Bolbol, to Associated Press, “This is a lawsuit filed by people sitting in an office in Connecticut against the folks in Nevada doing the hard work on the ground to keep wild horses free on the range. If this group wants to help wild horses, they need to focus on the BLM’s current effort to conduct barbaric spaying of wild mares [proposed in Oregon] and the castration of stallions on the range [practiced in Utah], rather than target this type of humane birth control.”
(Pine Nut Wild Horse Advocates photo)
“Get review going ASAP”
Posted Pine Nut Wild Horse Advocates to Facebook, “We are supporting our local BLM office to get the National Environmental Policy Act review going as soon as possible. With the science behind PZP, we fully expect our program will resume. The sooner the better to keep our wild horses with their families on the range.
“The fertility control program is completely safe,” Pine Nut Wild Horse Advocates said. “We keep impeccable scientific data on darted mares and their offspring, as well as their band behaviors. There have been no disruptions and no birth defects. PZP was listed as a ‘pesticide’ simply because there was not a category for animal fertility control. It is safe and reversible. This is not an extinction program, it is merely slowing down the [herd] growth rate, and in fact, an aging mare who is darted lives longer because she is healthier.”
Pressure building for gathers
Pressure building for gathersMeanwhile, there is one certainty: pressure will continue to build for the Bureau of Land Management to remove Pine Nut Mountains wild horses from the range.
Reported Scott Sonner of Associated Press on April 27, 2016, “Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval is considering legal action to force the Bureau of Land Management to pony up some money to pay for roundups of wild horses in the state that have been put on hold because of federal budgetary constraints.
“The federal agency currently plans no large-scale roundups in Nevada this year because of budget shortfalls driven largely by the cost of housing more than 45,000 mustangs now in government holding facilities across the country,” Sonner added.
(BLM photo)
Cuts of 25% to 100% in grazing
Ranchers in Elko County, northwest of the Pine Nut Mountains, are anticipating cuts of from 25% to 100% in their Bureau of Land Management grazing allotments.
Altogether, Nevada has about 28,000 of the estimated 45,000 wild horses left at large in the 10 westernmost states of the continental U.S.
With half the total numbers of wild-born horses now on Bureau of Land Management feedlots, no wild habitat open to which to return them, and little prospect of adoption for most of them, it is increasingly likely that either Congress will allow the captive horses to be sold for slaughter, or frustrated ranchers and/or BLM personnel will shoot horses on the range or find ways to covertly sell horses for slaughter.
Beth & Merritt Clifton
Both random wild horse massacres and covert sales of wild horses to slaughter have been recurring problems throughout the 45 years that the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act has existed.
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This is the kind of debacle created when people from outside the region who don’t have direct relevant experience insist on stepping in and interfering with what took the local groups actually familiar with this range, the conditions, the animals, etc., years to negotiate – workable alternatives to “trap and toss” horse management.
BLM’s EAs generally always call for horse removals (population adjustments) whereupon for locations such as the Pine Nut Range the advocates typically negotiate a reasonable compromise behind the scenes. In this permutation the strategy was to reduce herd growth through temporary contraceptive darting and the volunteers would help address resource and nuisance issues such as horses wandering into residential neighborhoods. BLM in turn would be less rigid with respect to horses that wandered outside their specifically assigned grazing areas but were inhabiting other nonsensitive BLM acreage.
However low key solutions don’t seem to generate the same donor response as dredging up drama and creating some kind of confrontation. And this strategy works (perhaps not for the animals) because most of the horse loving population doesn’t live out on the wild horse ranges and thus are usually not able to easily distinguish between facts and fiction.
In general there are two types of animal advocates. One type subordinates his or her personal interests in order to achieve some kind of meaningful benefits for the category of animals being advocated. The other kind uses animal issues to achieve self aggrandizement and is more drawn to drama than sustainable solutions. Not accusing anyone specific of anything here. Folks can step back and see for themselves who is doing what.
Willis, your comment is right on target. I hope that anyone who had a hand in this sabotage reads it! Sadly what some are calling a victory for the horses in the Pine Nut Mountains HMA is going to translate into the suffering of the horses on that range. Thank you for your poignant and informed view.
So tragic how (so many of) the so-called smartest species on our planet is (are) so stupid, uncaring, and/or ignorant when it comes to sharing with our fellow living beings!
Thank you Willis and Animals24-7, and Deniz!!!!! A great informational summary of the actual situation here in our little part of Nevada and the wild horse crisis overall. This is the truth, straight and easy to understand. People who are always asking for answers should look here for this reality.
I agree with Willis on this also. Both of these groups don’t do any ground work for our wild horses.
In fact the president of one never saw a wild horse until she visited Nevada. Now she thinks she knows everything about them. I lived here for 30 years among the wild horses and am still learning. Mostly about how people follow these groups, without doing online research.
I am currently studying both sides of this issue, so I can understand and try and verify through my own research who is telling the most truth, ’cause there is nothing so thin as not to have 2 sides to it. My 2 problems with this are, I absolutely have no trust of the BLM and their # counts!!! And I am completely against welfare cattle period. If ranchers have more cattle than the land the actually own, then they need to downsize, just like anyone else would have to do.
Most farmers and ranchers of any scale, from sharecroppers to multinational agribusiness, rent much of the land they use. In the eastern half of the U.S., land rented for agricultural use is mostly rented from individual or corporate landholders. In the western U.S., however, much of the land has never been titled to private landholders (individual or corporate), and is instead leased by the Bureau of Land Management and other government agencies, e.g. U.S. Forest Service, Fish & Wildlife Service, Bureau of Mining, etc. In much of wild horse habitat, there would be little or no land available to farming and ranching if government land was not leased for those purposes.
I don’t disagree. What we have here is a contradiction between federal law and practicality.
It is true that BLM now relies more on estimates and projections than actual horse counts, thanks in most part to Congress cutting their funds for range monitoring. Estimates and projections can obviously be “tweaked” a whole lot easier than “hard counts.”
With respect to livestock, by law they are permitted during certain parts of the year. I have a real issue regarding the fact that most permits allow livestock to graze public lands during the germination and growing season (presumably so that operators can rest their own lands during this critical period.) So obviously some adjustments in management practices could improve the forage base for year-round wildlife and horse / burro herds. But again, those policies originate in D.C. and are most likely driven by a powerful public lands ranching lobby.
The boundaries of this “playing field” are pretty rigidly set and the current Congress is not interested in making any material changes other than dumping our public lands in favor of special interests. Ergo while it would be far more desirable to see some changes in range management strategies and use priorities – basically involving less interference with the herds – we have to be realists and look at the next best options (alternatives to trap and toss) until there is a “perfect storm” of a friendly administration supported by a friendly majority in Congress… if such may actually occur before the program totally collapses.
This is a great article and opens a badly needed discussion. And frankly, the discussion needs to be a movement. Opposition to humane non-surgical population control for animal relies on creating convenient arguments against science, making absurd claims about the regulatory process, and a true lack of concern about the outcome for animals.
Spay FIRST! is deeply involved in the research and development of non-surgical contraceptives and sterilants for animals who are otherwise at risk of suffering due to overpopulation (as opposed to for convenience for pets which is a different approval/regulatory process). It is tragic to see people from within the animal welfare community jump in with dogma that has no basis in facts and turn important steps forward into politically charged messes that take things back to the Dark Ages. Round-ups are not a humane solution. And the herds expand if not checked. Animal/human conflicts over natural resources exist and it is up to humanity to address the conflicts humanely. It can be done.
Plugging in science and technology can move animal welfare forward in ways and measures that are not otherwise do-able and at costs that are otherwise not within reach. Yet we see people who should cheer this movement on oppose it for the simple sake of doing so. And of course the best thing to do is to manufacture misinformation in order to throw a monkey wrench in the works!
The use of injected or ingested hormones to control reproduction is not new and it is not controversial, it has been a fact of life for around five decades and that is not only for people, but also for feedlot animals and dogs used for breeding. In fact, animals at risk of suffering due to overpopulation are the only animals who have not benefited from non-surgical contraception. It’s really a shame that there are people within the animal welfare community who would prefer to keep it that way.
Ruth, your perspective is in perfect synchronization with what we actually experience out on these ranges. As I posted in an earlier reply, and will now be redundant: While it is a noble objective to pursue, we’re not going to change federal land use laws and policies, at least not in the near term. Plus as Merritt so aptly explained, much of Western agriculture takes place on public lands through permits and leases.
The three currently available options are:
1. Trap and toss. Admittedly necessary during resource declines but it permanently alters the genetic profiles of the affected herds. Plus ultimately it’s financially unsustainable leading to Merritt’s headline which is not beyond the realm of possibility. So trap and toss should be a last resort strategy.
2. Permanent sterilization. It works but it permanently skews the genetic profile of the affected herds. Genetic diversity is what contributes to the success of most of these herds.
3. Temporary contraception. Labor intensive (but trained and EPA certified volunteers are willing) and mares will still contribute to the genetic profiles, but simply produce fewer foals over their lifetimes.
And yes, there are more horse-friendly range management strategies that can be applied in a few unique locations, which at times the advocates can get BLM to embrace in conjunction with other efforts (such as WAS happening in the Pine Nut Range.) But we all have to recognize that there is extreme diversity among the various western ranges not to mention that in a vast area the ranchers actually legally own / control the water (thanks to the 1952 McCarran Amendment. So the reality is that the “landscape” is not nearly as simple as some folks like to believe that it is.
Thank you for the insight. As you point out, all of the tools for humane population control are needed as none are perfect in all settings. Blindly throwing any out is unconscionable.
None of the non-surgical tools will be 100 percent effective (for any animal or people), and surgery is out of range for many animals globally. Tolerating increasing numbers of wildlife that are in conflicts with people, or tolerating unchecked numbers of street animals, will not work and will place the animals themselves into the cross hairs of conflict; they will lose, even if a particular argument prevails in one particular place.
Copying and pasting the information below after having obtained permission to do so. The people at Corolla are real wild horse management pros.
– – – – –
The wild horses of Corolla live among 800+ houses and thousands of cars on a barrier island that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. The horse habitat is shrinking every year.
When I accepted the job of the first Executive Director of the Corolla Wild Horse Fund in 2006, our new herd manager and I were shocked to observe the body condition of the wild mares.
The winters here are very and vegetation becomes sparse. On the Henneke scale for equine body condition, 5 and 6 is optimum. A score of 1 is emaciated and life-threatening; 9 is obese. After giving birth year after year, and often still having last year’s foal nursing in addition to their current foal, Corolla mares approached winter with body conditions of 2 to 3. Our mares rarely rebounded to optimum body condition even when the vegetation was lush and plentiful. Our oldest mares rarely lived past their teens and always looked thin.
PZP has unequivocally and indisputably given our mares longer and healthier lives.
Since we began responsibly managing the population, our mares have gone from body scores of 3 or lower to body scores of 5 in the winter and 6 in the spring, summer, and fall. Right now, coming off one of the harshest winters in a century, we do not have a mare with a body score lower than 4 and the overwhelming majority have a body score of 5.
There are about 24 harems and several groups of bachelor stallions. Our herd manager and I spend a lot of time in the field observing harem behavior, location and composition. We see the benefit in every aspect of our mares’ daily health and behavior after the use of PZP. Horses who have optimum body condition and feel good, exhibit more natural behaviors, and live longer.
PZP does NOT sterilize mares unless it is administered for 6 or 7 consecutive years. The goal of responsible wild horse management is NOT to zero out wild horses.
Responsible wild horse management allows mature, healthy mares to contribute healthy foals to the population. When they are too young, too old, or have already made several contributions to the gene pool, PZP is a humane, cost-effective tool to manage herd population and health.
Look at our before PZP and after PZP photos. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Karen H. McCalpin
Executive Director
Corolla Wild Horse Fund
– – –
Links to images referred to above.
1. Sample mare body condition before PZP.
http://whmentors.org/wpic/corolla_mare_01.jpg
2. Sample mare body condition following PZP.
http://whmentors.org/wpic/corolla_mare_02.jpg
It’s not surprising to see FoA spending valuable resources interfering with a program that prevents animal suffering. The organization’s leadership is sorely lacking in common sense and the ability to prioritize. What a shame to see this sterilization program halted because of another hair-brained campaign by ridiculous Friends of Animals.
At the risk of running this issue into the ground, there is another aspect to this story that folks need to be aware of. In the story the following quote appeared.
– – –
Friends of Animals’ wildlife law program director Michael Harris told Sonner that allowing private landowners with rifles to dart mares, as was part of the Fish Springs Wild Horses PZP Pilot Project “appears to violate the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, which prohibits landowners from intentionally harassing wild horses,” Sonner paraphrased.
– – –
I may appear crass in saying this, but either these folks have done no real research or they are intentionally lying to the public. Landowners have not and are not going around darting horses. Select volunteers from the area’s wild horse advocate groups have gone to Montana and have graduated from the program to be certified to administer PZP. They are the only ones legally allowed to dart and they are the only ones darting, all of which is on the public record and is generally known around wild horse advocacy circles. To suggest that landowners are running around with rifles is pure nonsense, which appears to be what this whole anti-PZP campaign is based on.