Comments

1. Willis Lamm says

   July 15, 2018 at 12:15 pm

   Thank you for producing what is one of the very few accurate and thorough reports that describes what is really happening here on the Pine Nut Range. (By the way, I’m viewing this range out my window as I type.)

   What you describe is what I’ve learned has become the Achilles’ heel of animal advocacy: individuals and groups driven by emotion, drama and occasionally self-aggrandizement, rather than by the less exciting process of seeking relevant facts and developing the most practical solutions.

   Due to its proximity to populated areas and a credible corps of competent and licensed volunteers, the management of the Pine Nut Horses should be a working model for low impact, proactive and humane approaches with respect to maintaining a genetically and physically healthy horse herd in a sustainable environment. Instead, this herd area appears to have become the poster child of how so-called advocates can charge in and undermine years of negotiations and work done by the local, experienced groups and volunteers.

   Unfortunately, a tentative deal that had been carefully crafted to reduce the numbers that BLM felt obligated to remove was once again undercut in the past few days. This interference occurred after volunteers already spent hundreds of hours in mitigation efforts, fulfilling their side of the deal. When BLM finds itself in the crossfire between opposing advocacy groups, the agency is naturally going to fall back to the published Environmental Assessment and the numbers that appear in that document, which may well end up being the case here.

   Adding to to the complexity of this issue is habitat restoration for greater sage grouse. If this subspecies makes the Endangered Species list, it will be to Nevada’s ranges the equivalent of the Spotted Owl’s impact on Oregon. What should be happening is that individuals and groups who actually want to preserve this herd, rather than seek attention and create drama, should engage with the local volunteers who are actually out on this range and develop some understanding as to what the issues and potential solutions are. Successful engagement must include practical involvement in the environmental and ecological issues, including getting involved in sage grouse habitat restoration. By working with range biologists and understanding the issues, the volunteers can help achieve mandated solutions in ways that can also accommodate a robust horse herd.

   Unfortunately, as Animals 24-7 has reported, the die may well be cast for the horses currently on this range. Therefore the only practical approach may be to strategically plan long-term in an effort to implement solutions so that five years from now there is not a need to remove and warehouse hundreds more horses.

   • AnthONY Marr says

     July 18, 2018 at 3:24 am

     Great comment, Mr. Lamm. That exact group did the same to my campaign for white-tailed deer in Ohio back in 2007 (please see my comment). If I can be of assistance to you and your group to further your campaign, please do not hesitate to call upon me.

2. susan rudnicki says

   July 15, 2018 at 2:55 pm

   Taxpayers are NOT mandated by any Congressional Act to bankroll public lands private livestock grazers. There is NO “balance” employed in a rigorous analysis when the political heft of the livestock industry is set against the interests of everyone else.
   The RETIREMENT of grazing allotments to allow damaged habitat to regenerate is done ALL the time, when Western Watersheds Project gets the evidence in court.

   • Merritt Clifton says

     July 15, 2018 at 9:11 pm

     The above comment from Susan Rudnicki was pared down from an 855-word comment, almost all of which was entirely beside the point. Indeed, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 envisioned that private ranchers grazing cattle and sheep on public lands would pay adequately and appropriately for land use, not be hugely subsidized by grazing fees kept artificially low in response to the conditions of the Dustbowl era. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 also envisioned that the Bureau of Land Management would prevent another Dustbowl by obliging ranchers to keep herd sizes within ecological limits, as the BLM largely has, having reduced the numbers of cattle and sheep on public lands by more than half since the mid-1950s, beginning long before the Western Watersheds Projects existed.
     Of note, though, is that when BLM land once retired from grazing is deemed recovered and returned to the leasable land inventory, the BLM mandate is still to facilitate cattle and sheep grazing, not to accommodate growing numbers of wild horses, bison, elk, bighorn sheep, or any other non-endangered species favored by interest groups other than ranchers. In time, the growing constituencies favoring wild horses and wildlife may gain political ascendancy over cattle and sheep ranchers. At that point the BLM mandate may finally change.
     Meanwhile, though, cattle and sheep ranchers still hold political clout enough that on July 11, 2018 U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned cattle ranchers and convicted arsonists Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steven Hammond for offenses amounting to out-and-out rejection of the authority of the BLM and other federal land use agencies. Under that circumstance, to anticipate that the influence of ranchers will be reduced in time to help any of the wild horses presently in BLM corrals or slated for removal from stressed habitat is basically daydreaming. Those horses need help now, not two, six, eight, ten or 20 years from now.

3. Tamara says

   July 15, 2018 at 5:22 pm

   It’s unfortunate that you are quoting an exaggerated population number of 82,000 wild horses on public lands.

   • Merritt Clifton says

     July 15, 2018 at 8:32 pm

     The myth that the Bureau of Land Management persistently overcounts the number of wild horses on public lands rests on two foundations. The first is that a July 1990 survey of the wild horse population on the Nellis Range of Nevada found 6,000 horses, while a January 1991 survey found only 4,300. The difference turned out to be not that the BLM had overcounted the horses, as many wild horse advocates alleged at the time, but rather that as many as 1,700 horses died from thirst and starvation in 1990-1991 after new security fencing around remote parts of Nellis Air Force Base cut off their access to water. The second foundation of the overcounting charge is that the late Michael Blake subsequently funded the first comprehensive aerial survey of the Nevada horse population, finding fewer than half as many horses as the BLM believed were there. However, Blake in the end accepted a wild horse population estimate that was 10,000 more than the low end of the high-and-low BLM projections. This is discussed in much greater detail in our obituary for Blake, How the late “Dances With Wolves” author Michael Blake earned the Animal Protection Institute “Humanitarian of the Year” award.
     Currently, ANIMALS 24-7 has just completed a 3,000-mile journey through wild horse habitat in three U.S. states and three Canadian provinces, having made comparable drives in four of the past five decades, and found that wild horses are much more easily seen in all venues than ever before. Since greater visibility tends to result from increased numbers, it is reasonable to surmise that the wild horse population on the western range of both the U.S. and Canada may now be twice what it was as recently as 20 years ago.

4. Barbara MAAT says

   July 15, 2018 at 5:53 pm

   I was always a strong advocate for PZP Then I talked with a woman who oversees a herd of wild horses in southern Colorado. (I should ask her permission to disclose her name.) She used it on a few horses and said that as a dose wore off, one mare became pregnant and had her colt in mid-winter when the baby died. She also said that the social structure of the herd becomes harmfully disturbed, and she would discontinue use.

   Another woman who runs a wild burro rescue in California has also discontinued use because the females on PZP still come into season and are mated by the males over and over and over resulting in injuries from which at least one female died. The owner said she would never use PZP again. Pregnancy is actually a recovery period in normal herd life.

   It is all complicated, and I see no acceptable solution in sight. (except the phasing out of ranching and going vegan)

   Thank you for your excellent ANIMALS 24-7 !!

   • Merritt Clifton says

     July 15, 2018 at 8:44 pm

     War stories about frustrations and failures are common during the introduction of any new technology, but encountering problems scarcely means that the technology itself should not be adopted and improved through practice. It is worth noting, for example, that some mares have always become pregnant and given birth at inappropriate times, and some mares have always been injured in mating, as noted by even the first writers who observed wild horse herds, decades before passage of the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act.
     Also of note is that another contraceptive, Gonacon-H, is also licensed for equine use. We expect to be reporting more about promising results from trials of Gonacon-H in wild horses in coming months.

5. Michael Harris says

   July 17, 2018 at 6:37 pm

   Editor’s note: 252 words have been pared from the following comment by Friends of Animals’ attorney Michael Harris for reason of redundancy. Our brief response follows.

   BLM’s plan to round up and permanently remove 575 wild horses from the Pine Nut Mountains Herd Management Area has nothing to do with Friends of Animals opposition to the use of PZP on these wild horses.

   The Fall 2018 roundup referenced in this article is being undertaken pursuant to BLM’s November 2017 Herd Management Area Plan and environmental assessment for the Pine Nut Mountains. This plan purports to authorize roundups, as needed, for a 10-year period. Unfortunately, in an attempt to avoid legal obligations to ensure public involvement in individual roundup decisions, BLM is now preparing these long-term plans for wild horse herds all over the West. These plans will authorize ongoing roundups, and also authorize the use of PZP or GonaCon.

   With respect to the Pine Nut horses, in 2015 Friends of Animals successfully challenged BLM’s failure to engage in formal notice and comment rulemaking and its failure to comply with NEPA in a decision to roundup these horses. We have likewise thwarted attempts by BLM to circumvent the decision-making process with regard to wild horses in Colorado, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming.

   Let’s not forget, BLM is now proposing to permanently sterilize 80% of the wild horse population. Let’s concentrate our blame on the agency proposing these atrocious plans.

   Michael Harris
   Director, Wildlife Law Program
   Friends of Animals
   Western Region Office
   7500 E. Arapahoe Road, Suite 385
   Centennial, CO 80108
   720-949-7791

   • Merritt Clifton says

     July 17, 2018 at 8:17 pm

     The claim that the forthcoming Bureau of Land Management removal of 575 wild horses from the Pine Nut Mountains Herd Management Area “has nothing to do with” FoA opposition to the use of PZP overlooks that if the contraceptive use that FoA blocked had gone ahead, many of these horses would never have been born. The range would be in correspondingly better condition.
     Concerning the BLM proposal to “permanently sterilize 80% of the wild horse population,” it is well established, including by some research partially funded by Friends of Animals, decades ago, that 70% is the minimum number of animals who must not give birth in any given reproductive cycle to keep the population stable; 80% is the optimal target for sterilization projects, to be sure of reaching 70% when exact animal populations are unknown. Currently the U.S. wild horse population is approximately three times the number that the BLM deems optimal for the range, and more than twice the number that many wild horse advocates asserted should be the carrying capacity circa 20 years ago, before the effects of global warming had substantially reduced the carrying capacity of most BLM lands.

   • Anthony Marr says

     July 18, 2018 at 3:49 am

     Can’t add 2 and 2, can’t connect the dots, can’t take responsibility, can’t understand the simplest scientific concept or ecological principle, can’t come up with any viable solution, and can’t see the laughability of their way, laughable, if not so tragic for the animals,.. So, what CAN they do? Destroy other people’s work. They do this very well.

6. Anthony Marr says

   July 18, 2018 at 2:55 am

   Thank you, Merritt and Beth, for the excellent and might I add, objective, article. Your denouncing the group whose name ranks high in AR literature, but only on the list of misnomers, is exactly the objective thing to do.

   Not needed, but I could add substance to it with my own subjective observation, that they make it their business to derail the campaigns of other AR groups who advocate application of Immuno-Contraception (IC) to save animals from culling and their habitat, including my own in Ohio on urban white-tailed deer back in 2007.

   These irrational and unscientific ideologues will never take responsibility for the trail of real devastation they leave in their wake. They will never own up to the lives of all the animals being culled, rather than being humanely contracepted, then left alone. If not clear enough, I am talking about the blood of the thousands of culled animals being on their hands, period.

   Not to mention the hypocrisy regarding the original purpose of that group as pointed out in the article.

   There are two non-misnomer versions of their name: one is [Foes of Animals] and other is [Friends of Foes of Animals], your choice.

   My organizations and I will support all groups and all efforts that use IC in saving wild horses from culling, and will take on the Foes of Animals should they raise their logic-challenged head again. Here is my opening salvo for what they have already done:

   One word of advice to the prospective-donors and donors to the group in question: DON’T.

   Anthony Marr

7. Craig C Downer says

   July 20, 2018 at 6:44 am

   Why is reserve design being ignored, and the “quick drug fix” which is no fix at all being adopted by so many people who seem not to honor the true and core intent of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act? To me these people lack the real vision of what this very benign and ecologically centered Act was all about and in so doing fail to honor the general public’s will on this paramount quality of life issue.

   • Merritt Clifton says

     July 20, 2018 at 8:14 am

     “Reserve design,” according to Wikipedia, “is the process of planning and creating a nature reserve in a way that effectively accomplishes the goals of the reserve.”
     The reserve design goals prescribed by Congress in the Wild Free-Roaming Horses & Burros Act of 1971 are “to protect and manage wild free-roaming horses and burros as components of the public lands…in a manner that is designed to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance,” including “to protect the natural ecological balance of all wildlife species which inhabit such lands, particularly endangered wildlife species.” The Wild Free-Roaming Horses & Burros Act of 1971 requires the Interior Secretary, operating through the Bureau of Land Management, to “determine appropriate management levels of wild free-roaming horses and burros on these areas of the public lands; and determine whether appropriate management levels should be achieved by the removal or destruction of excess animals, or other options (such as sterilization, or natural controls on population levels).”