Wild Horse living wild as the law intended on an HMA.

“One of the “terror tactics” of wild horse management, “if you do not go along with whatever illegal horror we have planned that forwards the agenda of my buddies, we will kill the horse.” A tactic used since I entered advocacy. That’s terror. That’s blackmail.” ~ Laura Leigh in Terror Tactics of Wild Horse Management.

At Saylor Creek in Idaho the BLM, under former national Deputy Director Steve Ellis, pushed a plan forward to create a herd of all sterilized wild horses and to use it as essentially an “on the range holding facility.” The “plan” would add other horses to the herd after non-reproductive animals die off.

Essentially this plan is a slap to the entire intention of the 1971 Wild and Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act. The legal definition of “wild” includes the phrase, “capable of reproducing itself.”

Tuesday the BLM filed an appeal  challenging a ruling in September in U.S. District Court in Idaho ordering the BLM to revise its 2015 plan. The Department of Justice (DoJ) attorneys will be using tax payer money to head to appeals court, an extremely expensive process, to defend this concept that an Herd Management Area (HMA) is nothing more than a storage facility.

In August of 2017 the Reno Gazette Journal published and article about the President’s proposed 2018 budget that called for the resumption of the sale to slaughter of tens of thousands of wild horses. In a version passed by the House slaughter became “put a bullet in their heads.” In a recently passed Senate version BLM is given an additional 5 million to manage wild horses on range, not kill them. Now that bill has gone into conference.

But what is the political agenda? (we write extensively in Terror Tactics)

RGJ piece quoting Mark Amodei (R-NV)

He mentioned a case where some wild horse advocates used the courts to shut down fertility tests being done in Oregon. (an experiment to spay wild mares)

“If we really don’t want to kill ’em – which by the way, I agree with – then we need to get seriously behind this whole birth control thing,” Rep. Amodei said, “so we can reduce those reproduction rates so they are in line with something the ecosystem can support.”

Mark is not talking about temporary fertility control, collecting data and fixing the entire broken federal grazing program. Mark is talking about one thing only, spaying.

With the Senate now proposing an additional $5 million to assist BLM in “getting it right on the range” the profit machines smell money. Those profit machines include factions where Boyd Spratling, former Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board Chair and Board of NV Dept. of Ag, pushed a mobile “spay clinic” for in field use designed by Spratling over and over and…

We think you get the gist.

This entire political game is about control. Control the decisions over resources and you control the money. The “good ol’ boy” network of backdoor deals that have even allowed severe violations of law without any penalty to the “drinking buddy” are rampant in the West.

The underlying agenda in this proposed budget of “appropriations politics” for wild horses is simply; turn over management decisions (create private agreements with ranchers and pay them for wild horses on allotments and get that spay machine funded because it makes that “cowboy hat” happy.

To make the cowboy happy we need slaughter (kill for profit), kill them outright (a privately owned cow wants to eat that grass) and slice them in spaying so they never reproduce and Boyd can make some cash.

None of this has anything at all to do with “healthy herds on healthy ranges.”

The game of control is being played out under sage grouse. The spay machine funding now heads into committee.

Are you ready to fight? If you are you really need to read. Fancy PR machines, facebook attack memes, and reactive advocacy will not get in front of this. Please read the article from August: https://wildhorseeducation.org/2017/08/26/terror-tactics-wild-horses/

“Wild horses already have a sanctuary, it’s called an HMA. An HMA is not a holding facility, it is not a place for profit driven interests. An HMA is where the “wild” wild horse, a protected resource, is to be managed as integral to the landscape.”

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