Wild Horses: Advocates Speak Out for Wild Horses at BLM Advisory Board Meeting
August 20, 2014Wild Horses: Court Grants Emergency Injunction to Delay Wyoming Wild Horse Roundup
August 29, 2014Wild Horses: BLM’s Deadly Long Term Holding Solution
The Mares at Teeterville
In early June, I heard that 1500 mares that were in the Long Term Holding pasture in Kansas, in the Teeterville Complex, were going to be moved to another facility in Kansas because they were no longer allowed to stay where they had been living. Now, reports are coming in that 75 horses have died at their new facility, corrals managed by Beef Belt LLC in Scott, Kansas. The owners of the facility deny any wrongdoing and mention that the horses were old, could have been from the stress of the move, and 4-5% mortality of livestock is normal. You have to read this article in order to believe it: http://www.gctelegram.com/news/wild-horses-deaths-now-up-to-corral-managers-deny-wrongdoing/article_39bc13ef-1767-5292-9bde-45a29467d425.html
The horses, 1500 mares and 400 geldings were moved in the course of one week from the lush pastures of Teeterville to a crowded feedlot.
I saw these mares and geldings, 4400 wild horses on 32000 acres in June 2012 while on the BLM’s Long Term Holding Pasture Tour. This was the “model facility” where we were escorted all day on buses, seeing wild horses roaming free in huge, lush green pastures. The horses were gorgeous, healthy, and looked incredible as they ran by.
The mares run
On this gem of a video with BLM’s Lily Thomas narrating, describes the carefree life of wild horses who get to live thier lives in Long Term Holding – no more stress! Ample feed and water. Better than being in the wild: http://www.thehorse.com/Video.aspx?n=behind-blm-pasture-gates&vID=578
Of course, these horses met with a much crueler fate. Wild horses no longer, displaced even from their home at Long Term Holding and are treated like livestock crowded into feedlot pens, with no idea how to eat from the troughs. It sounds as though they were given the wrong food, they were overcrowded so the less dominant did not get enough to eat, and the owners of the corral and the BLM claim no wrongdoing. Just 75 horses are suddenly dead.
This is NOT how our wild horses deserve to be treated. If the BLM is going to ignore all requests, pleas, letters, publicity, lawsuits, protests, etc. of the public to stop the roundups and leave the horses where they belong in the wild the very least that they can do is to treat the wild horses in their care humanely, and care for their basic needs.
Please spread the word and write your Congressmen and Senators – this cruel “final solution” for our wild horses is unacceptable and must stop now.
Related Articles:
https://www.wildhoofbeats.com/blog/wild-horses-blm-wild-horse-long-term-holding-tour-in-kansas
7 Comments
You are so right, Carol. This handling was beyond cruel and negligent. How could they leave those old mares there? And how filthy must those feedlots have been.
I am appalled!!! These innocent beautiful animals being treated as city rats!!! What are you thinking?!!! They have been here longer than we have… DO WE HAVE TO DESTROY EVERYTHING WE CAN’T CONTROL?!!! SHAME ON YOU AND MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOULS!!! HE CREATED THESE MAGNIFICENT HORSES… WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO DESTROY THEM?!!!
I love what you all do for the Mustangs – The only way I can help is to write emails, letters and send faxes to state my opinions of how poorly the BLM is handling our Mustangs to newspapers, TV and to the elected officials of the states that are trying to get rid of the Mustangs. My website has information of how the Mustangs can earn their own living and more. My website features Utah’s Sulphur Horse but also I care about the other Western States Mustangs and the humble Hee Haws in the desert Southwest. By Sept.15, the cubelranch. website will be gone, as I am launching a new site, featuring the 10 Western State Mustangs and Burros.
Heres the thing, all the BLM has to do is nothing !!!!!!!!! and we are all happy, everytime they do something it is always wrong !!!!!! The only way for these Morons to do something right is when they do nothing , leave are damn Mustangs and Burros alone, go do something for the cattle and we all know you are doing something right !!!! Do something you know about , ohhhh wait itll be wrong anyway !!!! They cant manage Land, the only way to get it right is to get rid of the Corrupt bunch of sadistic ………………morons !!!!!! , Geeze !!!! Buearu of lieing morons…….
Once again – the great & wonderful BLM proves their complete lack of knowledge & understanding of the wild horses! If this were intentional – they couldn’t have done a better job, right? Pulling these mares (& geldings) off a lush pasture & throwing them into trucks = then sticking them in feedlots with no more care than the KBs show with their slaughter bound horses. 75 dead horses? And the only excuse they can come up with is “they were old”? These old horses would still be alive & living well if they had been left alone. This little (?) mess should never have happened. This feedlot apparently is used for COWS. Was it cleaned up before the horses were brought in? Where do they go from here? AND THIS BETTER BE TRANSPARENT!
Dear Carol,
I am very frustrated because I have found a number of documents in the public domain that trace the situation with our wild horses and burros directly the President Clinton’s decision to sign the 1992 UN CB, Article 8 (h) which originated with attempts to remove wild horses and burros (and possibly livestock) as exotics usually diametrically opposite language than that used in the 1971 WFRHA prior to the 1976 PLMPA. In 1976 both President Carter and Representative Al Gore came to Washington.This was also the year that a study attributed the climate cycles to the Milokavitch theory, but Al Gore had been a student at Harvard to one of the first scientists to write about rising temperatures in the Pacific as indicators or CO2 increase. He was at Scripps Oceanography Institute at the time, but went to Harvard in 1964, before Al Gore arrived in 1965. Interestingly, Dr. Renelle told Senator/Vice-President Gore that he had been wrong and had made a terrible mistake, but Al Gore called his long time mentor and friend “senile.” He never debated climate with anyone after this. But there is evidence through the horse as native North American species that could make the case that he has known for as long as two decades that the influence humans have on the global temperature change is minimal. This is not hard for me to believe because I was teaching English in Georgia in an Earth science magnet while Gore was “doing us in” in D.C. We even had the Olympics and the focus was on terrorism, not climate change. But seeing where different IUCN academics taught and their collusion with different NGO’s + the different geography on your side of the continental divide helps me understand why a lot of horse advocates are also “environmentalisms” in what to me with my different life experiences seems “extreme.” I have become discouraged that because many wild horse advocates do not seem to have a well grounded understanding of how science works, they are more ideologically driven by the green movement or perhaps there are other issues other than wild horses that influence them more. I don’t know. I try not to judge, but I can’t see continuing to spend my time and energy trying to persuade folks that want to pin this on the BLM, that the BLM was the last agency to be Officially brought on board. This is logical because in the beginning, the BLM’s mandate was to protect the wild horses and no doubt that when the agency was populated with people who had generations of western history in their hearts, there would have been opposition to the UN CBD on many levels because it includes livestock and domestic animals. Federal agencies have been able to conceal their use of this treaty for the most part through the takings clause in the Endangered Species Act. But none of these apply when you look at the history of North Carolina’s wild horses. Our Shackleford Banks herd in 1996 and 1997 as well as the current genetic collapse of the Corolla Wild Horse Herd, the Senate’s refusal to hear any wild horse legislation though the House has passed three bills since 2009 speak pretty loudly. The FWS chosen expert witness in the Corolla Wild Horse Protection Act Hearing in the House Natural Resource Subcommittee,had been coached by Al Gore’s scientist in 2010 in a workshop to teach anglers and fisherman how to talk about introduced——held at Mississippi State.
When I first began searching for the original source of the non-native horse narrative, info was all over the Internet if I used the word alien. This is the word that connects the non-native, exotic piece to the UN CBD and the alien, invasive, animal species as a potential threat to plants and plant products connects to the 1997 Update of the IPPC. There was a similar federal law passed between the introduction of the 19997 IPPC in March and its ratification in 2000, so Madeleine Albright persuaded the Senate that they already knew what was in the treaty so there was no reason not to ratify it. There was one, and that was that it nullified the 1971 WFRHBA without giving the American people a voice in this. It also will lead to the destruction of agriculture as we know it and the federal government will control our food, water, and health care.
Untangling this web is insane….. All I can do is say that in 1971 Congress unanimously passed the WH&BAct, as supported by the American people. How the heck do we allow our elected officials to erode this law every year without fail without the input of the American people who supported it in the first place? Transparency should be mandatory. It should be unacceptable to allow the law to be undone by special interest groups without the majority of the American people to have input and support of those changes that are eroding the protections we asked for?