Save the wild horses!
Introduction
In 1988, Scottie and I watched a small herd of mustangs gallop across Coyote Lake, a playa east of the Alvord Desert, trailing a curtain of fine dust in the still air. They came from the south, rumbled past a quarter-mile away, and were gone. We stood mesmerized the whole time. Minutes, hours, who could say?
If that experience was something to write home about, our first close encounter was the stuff of fiction. Or, more to the point, poetry, since I incorporated the 1992 episode in a poem written seven years later. [See the fifth entry, below.]
I was blissfully ignorant of the government's crusade to rid the West of wild horses until June, 2003, when I attended a poetry gathering in South Dakota and met Craig Downer, a wildlife ecologist from Nevada.
Our conversation over dinner that first night caused all those vaguely disquieting articles and newscasts to come flooding back. The Bureau of Land Management's periodic round-ups of Kiger mustangs. The low-flying helicopters sweeping the horses ahead. The rhetoric about the "public need" to "thin" the herds, the "good homes" the "excess" mustangs would find at auction.
Many of those horses wound up sneaking into dog food cans, or onto European dinner plates, good homes if you're in the meat packing industry. Then, the slaughter of wild horses was illegal. Now it's the law of the land.
In December, 2004, with White House approval, the cattle industry conspired with congressional Republicans to repeal the Wild Free-roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971, which declared mustangs, "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West, that...contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people."
With no hearing and no floor debate, the life work of Wild Horse Annie, who drew school children all across America to her cause, was flushed down the toilet.
Where is the public outcry? Are we, as a nation, so inured to deceit and subterfuge that we shrug at each new revelation of wrong-doing by our overlords in Washington?
Don't ask what Jesus would do. Get off your fat ass and protest! Start by directing your search engine to Wild Horse Preservation. You'll be amazed.
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Entries, in order of appearance:o Letter from Nevada wildlife ecologist Craig Downer to BLM field office manager [July 16, 2011]
o Willie Nelson: Stop the slaughter of horses [November 2, 2006]
o Guest editorial published online by BlueOregon [June 3, 2005]
o Excerpt from letter to Nevada wildlife ecologist Craig Downer [September 13, 2003]
o Excerpt from "Reading at Sam Simpson's Grave on the Centennial of his Death, June 14, 1999"
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Letter from Craig Downer protesting ongoing campaign to exterminate wild horses and burros in violation of Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971:
July 16, 2011
Mr. Roland R. Mendez
BLM Black Rock Field Office Manager
5100 E. Winnemucca Blvd.
Winnemucca, NV 89445-2921
Email: Tri-State-Calico_Complex@blm.gov
Re: Calico Mountain Complex & Tri-State-Complex Wild Horse Roundup
Dear Mr. Mendez:
I was a plaintiff in a federal case to stop the excessive helicopter roundup of wild horses that occurred in the Calico Mountain Complex during the winter of 2009-2010, as well as a direct witness to this roundup. I am also a wildlife ecologist and native Nevadan who has observed these wild horses for many years. I wish to register my protest against the renewed elimination of what is, in truth, a sparse and under-populated remnant herd of wild horses and burros in the region in question.
Your plan is an outrageous one that ignores both the rights and the well-being of the wild horses and burros, individually and collectively, as well as the general public who support them and derive a spiritual uplift from viewing them, being in physical proximity to them, or just knowing they are there.
What is most egregious about your plan is the marginalizing of the wild horses within their legal areas. You are completely ignoring one of the basic core tenets of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act where it clearly states in relation to the original 1971 ranges of the remnant herds that they shall be “devoted principally” [though not] exclusively to their [the wild horses’/burros’] welfare.
This act was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress, one of the few acts in American history ever to possess this honor. The act represents a particularly high and soulful will of America, a special sweet strain, that should be considered as a check upon certain special interests who are bent on exploiting and monopolizing the public lands and their resources—and upon milking the US taxpayers to prop up their broken-down dinosaur of a life style.
Healthy, vibrant, naturally and freely living wild horses and burros are a great moral and aesthetic presence on our public lands, as elsewhere in the world. They are innately appreciated by millions of people both in America and worldwide. We are talking about a quality of life issue here, one important to the life of the soul, and of keeping ourselves aware of and attuned to this.
I believe that the great response of people to wild horses and burros is owing both to our long and intimate association with these animals—dating back several thousands of years—and to the greater fact that there exists a great belongingness of these animals in the North American ecosystem that cries out compellingly for their restoration. In the poetic words of the North American Indians: “The grass remembers them,” and this is so true when examined from an evolutionary and ecological perspective. (Please contact me for more information including proofs of this.)
These animals are greatly valued by the general public, and their appreciation in a wild, free, and natural region to which they are suited (such as here in the West) is a natural outgrowth of their justification for being here. There is a greater truth about them which we recognize when our minds are clearer and our hearts purer that sets us at odds with those overly absorbed by short-sighted and materialistic pursuits that sear the conscience and blunt the higher spiritual awareness.
In our democracy, we depend upon our public servants to be honorable men and women demonstrating true integrity and strength of character, noble individuals who refuse to allow themselves to be bullied by certain greed-driven and overbearing special interests, in this case those who have targeted the wild horses and burros for discrediting and elimination and have nothing but negative things to say about them.
You may know who these are, but I will reiterate in case not. These are chiefly the public lands livestock grazers, or ranchers, mainly of cattle and sheep, who have and continue to monopolize the public lands and like spoiled brats are used to getting everything their way. They refuse to share even a minor portion of the public lands with the wild horses and burros.
Next on the list of enemies is the hunting establishment—people who in their blinkered quest to promote a public lands shooting gallery would have the land managed for a plethora of overpopulated game animals, chiefly deer. This they do not in order to feed themselves but to satisfy some primal urge to dominate and kill.
This they do ever-so blithely, all the while turning their backs on the wild horses and burros rather than taking the time and the thought required to truly educate themselves about these animals and their place in North America. If they would do this they would learn more about how these different types of non-ruminant-digesting herbivores, called post-gastric digesters (including the equids) actually complement the ruminants by rest rotating, greatly assisting in building healthy soils and in dispersing germinative seeds of a much greater variety of plant species when compared with the ruminant species.
And then there is their role as a prey species of the wolf, the mountain lion, the bear, etc., whose populations they bolster, just as their less degraded feces bolster the population of myriad species, from tiny soil microorganisms to dung beetles, to birds (pecking the seeds), rodents (gnawing the seeds), lizards and on up the food chain to the larger animals.
But here I enter into the Forbidden Zone of these wild horse enemies. For you see, one is not supposed to recognize these inconvenient facts or greater truths even though they stare one squarely in the face. One of these is the fact that certain factions of our society continue their all-out war on the natural predators of the public lands—mountain lions, wolves, bears, coyotes and others conveniently labeled vermin, misfits, etc., even though they too are vital components of a healthy, well-functioning and diversely balanced ecosystem, and essential parts of its checks and balances that promote greater diversity of species, each with its unique role to play, niche to occupy.
Yes, in the great community of life, each species and each individual in each species is in some special and indispensable way its brother’s and its sister’s keeper. But too many among arrogant mankind have deemed themselves to be apart from the Rest of Life and immune to any system of checks and balances.
Consequently, it is our very own species, Homo sapiens, self-proclaimed “wise guy” who continues to grossly overpopulate this planet—now arriving at 7 billion in number—and to throw regional ecosystems, including the Great Basin, and the entire planetary ecosystem off balance and out of kilter. This is how we humans selfishly imperil life on Earth. Who will dare to break out of this obnoxious mold?
Enough said, yet we must realize these things and we must put this realization into practice in how we live. And there is no better place to begin than by learning to share freedom and the land with such magnificent and deserving citizens of planet Earth as the returned North American horses and burros.
They have done so much for mankind, yet their greater place and their greater story as it unfolds is to be found in the natural life community, in the democracy of all living kinds and their majestic, age-old progress, a progress that is measured by the ticks of millenniums more so than the dimensionless and soulless nanoseconds of manipulative, control infatuated technocracy!
Learning to identify with the Greater Whole of Life and to act for its greater fulfillment—this is the paramount moral challenge that presents itself in fulfilling the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. To fail at this, as America is presently failing, would mark our moral death as a people. And I do not write these words merely for dramatic effect.
Let us not let this happen, but rather dare to make sacrifice of a lesser way of life and value system that a greater one may emerge onward and forward with a vision that spans the very ages, rather than confining itself to one short and grubbing idée fixe that smothers our greater selves and consciousness under a ton of materialism.
Rather than seeing only a target in the free-living, wild world of Nature—mere things or objects to subdue and control, to enslave or to kill, to alter and to denature—we will behold in the natural ecosystem a supreme university, a teacher of lessons ever new and more greatly emerging.
We will expect and, indeed, find some awesome and unprecedented truth unveiling itself with each new and unique rising of the sun, as well as some new challenge of vital importance to be met both individually and collectively. You will know what it is if you will only still your mind and free your heart so as to clearly perceive it—then you will know the next step you must take.
A significant and indispensable part of this timely step today is for people here in the West to learn to share the land and freedom with wild horses and burros, to live in harmony with them and to become a benign and integrated caretaker of the ecosystem that harbors them.
I vigorously protest the shameless violation of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act that is presented in the Tri-State—including Calico Mountain—Complex Proposed Wild Horse Roundup.
The current population of wild horses and burros in the 584,000 HMA acres here, which include the Granite Range, Calico Mountain, Trough Mountain, McGee Mountain and Black Rock Range HMAs, is an under-population not an overpopulation, though it is arbitrarily defined as an overpopulation to suit the agendas of certain wild horse enemies, chiefly those ranchers who continue to receive the hog’s share of the resources while the wild horses and burros are reduced to genetically non-viable populations, made dysfunctional through reproductive tampering (PZP) and unnaturally skewed sex rations (60% male: 40% female).
BLM’s merely pronouncing words such as “excess,” or “overpopulation,” or blaming wild horses/burros for damages to the environment that people, not horses, have caused will never convince the likes of truly thinking and caring people!
Since when are 732 wild horses (mid value between 572 & 952 AML limits) and 52 wild burros (mid value between 39 & 65) within 584,101 acres a fair provision when this range is legally “devoted principally” for the wild horses and burros? This is simply not the case.
Summing these figures, we get an average midrange AML for wild equids of 784. Dividing this into 584,101 acres we get 745 acres per individual wild equid. This is a nearly empty ecosystem, not a vital wild-horse/burro-containing ecosystem.
And the figure for burros is a clear set-up for inbreeding. Of the 179 burros currently in the region, none should be removed—plain and simple!
The current population of wild horses is 1,602. Summed to the 179 burros, this equals 1,781 wild equids in this vast area. Dividing 584,101 acres by 1,781, we get 328 acres per individual wild equid. Again this does not constitute an overpopulation but rather is a sparse and moderate population that should not be further reduced.
The BLM should focus its efforts, instead, on making sure the wild equids here have access to year-round water and forage, summering and wintering grounds and unfenced habitat, and can fill their niche and self stabilize their numbers eventually when their niche is filled. There are intelligent and caring ways of protecting and managing the wild equids and there are thoughtless and insensitive ways that result in turmoil, disharmony, and unnecessary suffering and death almost exclusively reserved for the wild horses and burros—ways that fly in the face of the true intent of the WFRHB Act. So the need is urgent for us to get back on track and in harmony with the true intent of this noble act.
Provided BLM defended and secured reasonably adequate water sources and reduced livestock, I estimate the complex should be able to sustain one wild equid per 100 acres without any deterioration. This would work out to 5,841 wild horses and burros—a much more reasonable and fair figure for this region.
In light of the recent major wild horse roundup in the Calico Mountain Complex, I protest any further reduction in this sparse and under-populated herd and urge a reduction in livestock in order to assign a larger and fairer standard for both wild horse and burro populations in this vast and scenic region.
I further recommend more emphasis on in-the-field preservation and management strategies such as Reserve Design to allow for stabilized, niche-filling, auto-regulating wild equid populations and the promotion of appreciative wild horse/burro studies, innovative ways of providing for and containing their populations (non-invasive ones) as well as eco-tourist viewing.
This would serve as an a wholesome alternative to the present exploit (ranching), kill (hunting), and gauge (mining) activities to which BLM gives primary support while ignoring the soul-nourishing will of all Americans that was and continues to be expressed in the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971—an act whose fulfillment we should be celebrating this year of its 40th anniversary, rather than bemoaning because of its subversion. Please respond to the important points I have raised here.
Sincerely,
Craig C. Downer, Ecologist
P.O. Box 456
Minden, NV 89423-0456
T. 775-901-2094
Email: ccdowner@yahoo.com
[Join Craig and others in protesting the policies of a federal bureau serving private interests at the expense of the public. Email Roland Mendez with a copy to Craig.]
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Willie Nelson: We have a lot to learn from horses
By Willie Nelson
Special to CNN
AUSTIN, Texas (CNN) -- Will Rogers said, "You know horses are smarter than people. You never heard of a horse going broke betting on people."
However, the horses are counting on the people more than ever now. Nearly 100,000 horses are killed annually in foreign-owned slaughterhouses in America for human consumption in other countries.
With the upcoming Senate vote on the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, Americans have a small window of opportunity to save a living legend.
Horses are all the things a truly evolved human should be. There are countless examples of their innate ability and desire to heal people.
Consider the therapeutic riding programs across the country, where horses can have more progress with children with various physical and mental disabilities than their own doctors. The most superhuman thing about horses is the contrast between their unearthly strength and inherent gentleness. Humans abuse their power while horses use theirs only for good. I'd rather be a horse.
With no disrespect to the eagle, I've always thought that the horse should be our national emblem. When horse accepted man onto his back and chose to carry his burdens, it changed the world. Horses have aided mankind through his most arduous and treacherous endeavors, from the sword to the plowshare. Humanity owes an incalculable debt to the horse. In Native American teachings, Horse enables shamans to fly through the air and reach heaven. To steal someone's horse is to steal their power.
Contrary to what some people are saying, slaughter is not a humane form of euthanasia, and these are not unwanted horses. The treatment of slaughter-bound horses is most often inhumane, and more than 90 percent of those slaughtered are young and in good health. Many are sold to slaughterhouses at closed auctions, while others are stolen pets.
Humans are not smart to eat horses. Horses are treated daily with products such as fly spray, wormers, hoof dressings, etc. These products have labels warning against use on animals used for food. Anyone with horse sense would not be exporting this toxic product.
The passage of the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (H.R. 503/S. 1915) would put in place a permanent and immediate ban on both the slaughter of horses in the U.S. and the exportation of live horses for slaughter abroad.
Thanks to the Society for Animal Protective Legislation, which started the national campaign to end horse slaughter, and to those who got involved and called their legislators, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to pass H.R. 503. But the fight is not over. The Senate will vote on S. 1915, hopefully in November. Call or write your senators today. Each week our elected officials fail to act on this bill, thousands of horses are subjected to unimaginable cruelty.
For information on horse slaughter, to read my public letter to Congress and to find your senators, go to the Society for Animal Protective Legislation.
There has never been a better time to adopt. I just adopted 11 horses from Habitat for Horses. For information on how you can adopt a horse or give to this great cause, visit Habitat for Horses.
Join me and more than 500 leading horse industry groups, humane organizations, equine rescues and veterinarians in our effort to end horse slaughter.
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o Guest editorial published online by BlueOregon [June 3, 2005]Save the Kiger Mustangs!
If the federal government's campaign of genocide against the West's dwindling herds of wild horses is allowed to broaden, as the White House thinks it should, Oregon's famed Kiger mustangs may well go the way of the dodo.
The first official acknowledgement of what wild horse aficionados have known for years appeared April 24 in a tiny Associated Press story buried on a back page of The Oregonian. They're being sold to meat processors, as they were a century ago. This follows repeal in December of a 34-year-old federal law banning the slaughter of wild horses.
Populations already have been "thinned" to the point that protection may be a moot point. It takes a certain number to insure survival, and the Bureau of Land Management, spurred by the cattle industry and other profiteers who lay claim to the federal land trust, has been rounding up mustangs for decades.
Why protect them? First, because they're wild. Second, because they're indigenous to North America. And though textbooks will tell you they died out at the end of the last Ice Age, there's a possibility they survived in small pockets and were here to greet, and mate with, escapees from Spanish incursions.
Proof of this would deal a body blow to the cattle industry. As an indigenous species with continuous occupancy, mustangs would fall instantly under the Endangered Species Act. Reserves would be set aside, as they are for pronghorn, another Ice Age survivor.
If the feds have their way, though, most people won't know what a treasure they had in their hands until it's too late. Like the dodo, the mustang will be extinct.
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o Excerpt from letter to Nevada wildlife ecologist Craig Downer [September 15, 2003]
I was startled to read in your treatise on wild horses that "the brief absence of horses several thousand years before their reintroduction by Spanish is subject to question by recent finds." It makes sense, since horses were prevalent at the close of the Pleistocene. Why should they not have survived the climate change, along with pronghorn and bison?
I've read that bison in the northern Great Basin died off during the particularly severe winter of 1799. Horses might well have survived because they knew to break ice to get at the water beneath. I'd like to know what those recent finds are.
I am fascinated by the history of horses in Oregon. I have an eohippus tooth, found in the John Day Fossil Beds on an Oregon Museum of Science & Industry expedition in 1951, when I was 14.
I also unearthed, in a small shelter cave, a ceremonial headdress fashioned from the top of a bison skull, complete with horns and hair. The adults (several of whom were among the founders of the Oregon Archeological Society that very year) put the site off limits to the 14 boys on the trip, presumably so they could keep the artifacts for themselves. I kept quiet about the projectile point I found (brown jasper with thin black inclusions resembling eyes and a mouth), so I didn't come up empty-handed!
The enclosed article appeared today in the Sunday Oregonian. It makes my blood boil to see the casual way reporters toss around misinformation spoon fed to them by bureaucrats whose sole concern is placating cattle ranchers. The statistics should cause every thinking person to shout, "Hey, wait a minute!" If the land once supported a wild horse population of 300,000 to 400,000, and is down to 2,800, why the need to round them up? What's the point beyond which wild horses will no longer be able to maintain a viable population?
Steens Mountain once was covered with tall grass, but sheep put a quick end to that. Efforts are underway to reintroduce a type of grass similar in some respects to the original, extinct variety, but the idiots running the country to ruin, through their stooges at the Interior Department, plan to back off on grazing restrictions. Two summers ago I saw areas which were on their way to restoration after years of overgrazing or riparian degradation; last summer these areas were again despoiled by cattle.
I'm curious about another point. Did the Spanish horses from which Kigers supposedly descended have zebra striping on their legs, and other characteristics in common? Have DNA tests been conducted? What if Kigers are the remnants of Pleistocene stock? What if the Spaniards captured New World horses which later escaped back into the wilds? I may be suffering from a lack of knowledge here, but I have an active imagination!
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o Excerpt from "Reading at Sam Simpson's Grave on the Centennial of His Death, June 14, 1999." Sam is regarded as Oregon's finest poet of the late 19th century. His poem "At Linnton's Shambles" decries the slaughter of mustangs to feed foreign armies.
Walt read At Linnton's Shambles and I fell
deep into debt. I felt the poet's heart
pour forth and beat with mine, the spell
a meld of passion, sullen craft, and art.
From childhood on, I've chased a vagrant star
astride a cayuse, wild upon the land.
No longer saddled by Sam's abattoir
in Linnton, or the mustangs shot and canned
to feed advancing armies, I flew off
to Kiger Gorge, Coyote Lake, the kame
below Steens Mountain where the water trough
was lined with mares and foals, and Scottie's name,
Sir Lancelot, spoke volumes of the white
rapscallion who mimed a circus horse
along the esker's serpentine, his light
played from a stream in space, the intercourse
of grace and force, the blaze of tail and mane.
We raced in tandem down the shadow side
and stumbled out upon the wind-blown plain
below the pond. With no place close to hide,
we stirred the mares, who, in their turn, dispersed
the herd. We watched the colts and fillies fall
in line, the foals tuck into pockets, nursed
to gird them for the coming flight, the thrall
of all that's mystic, greater than its parts.
Then came the dust, the light behind, the breath
like fire against the ice-blue sky, the starts
and stops, the postures of a fight to death.
We dropped, like dragons waiting to be slain,
to humble knees. The herd stampeded up
the slope. Sir Lancelot, his silver mane
and tail dissolved like crystals in a cup
of light, rose as a halo on the hill
until the poundings in our hearts wound down,
the sun shone through, the air around grew still.
I shed my shield, she jettisoned her gown,
and we made love with passion, pulse, and power,
locked with our tangled limbs in tight embrace,
observed by tumbleweed and sagebrush flower,
each with pure wonder etched across its face.
....
[Reprinted from Steens Mountain Sunrise: Poems of the Northern Great Basin]
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