The title of this piece may have you say “of course they are not.” 

That obvious distinction has been lost on media, the public and legislators. 

Wild horses are public land management. 

When the media, and others, spin this into a story focused on symptoms, not core problems, wild horses get into serious danger.

The public understands the intense corruption and multiple ethical investigations into public lands issues like National Parks. Getting them to understand wild horses are a part of the same, not a domestic animal issue, is hard.

It is critical that advocates for the wild hold them accountable to the wild. The wild horses, the wild ones, are counting on you.

It’s time to hold the myth makers, and those that manipulated the myths for personal gain, accountable. 

The BLM Report to Congress will drop into debate in about two weeks. That Report needs intense scrutiny. The content needs scrutiny. More importantly, the content creators need a hard look before one word is read.

Action item is both above, and below, article. We urge you to take the action and find time to read the article. 

TAKE ACTION:

Send an email before you begin your workweek, or put on your list and make a call during the week. 

Find your Representatives. (find them here: http://govtrack.us)

Ask for:

A serious investigation into corruption, waste of tax payer funding, intimidation in the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program.

Start an investigation into the BLM Report to Congress, and all those involved in the creation of the report. 

Before they open that report and read one single word, they need to know who bought and paid for it. The public deserves to know, before wild horses pay a permanent price.

Both men that were the Deputy Directors of BLM, while this report was being utilized by BLM and incorporating documents created by corporate interests, need intense scrutiny. The two men are John Ruhs and Brian Steed. 

In addition, all involvement of Brian Steed with these alliance members, as he sat as Chris Stewart (R-UT) Chief of Staff and then moved the agenda from the helm of the BLM, need more than a “notation,” it needs a close look. 

We, the public, demand accountability and the end of sweeping wild horses aside in political debate, by regulators that are bought and paid for (gifts, promotions, job security, campaign contributions, etc).

If you want to help them? The problems exist before a helicopter flies; afterwards we see all the symptoms, not the problems.

Advocacy has been reeling since the reveal of an almost 4 year long, alliance; HSUS, ASPCA, Return to Freedom, the Public Lands Council, the Cattlemen’s Ass’n etc.  (you can see some of the dangers HERE). This began in 2015 and hit the trail hard in 2016. Think about the last 4 years, what you were told and what they were already doing, before you read on… 

The “plan,” in a nutshell, is a perpetuation of a broken frame of a multi million dollar government program and increasing subsidies to address symptoms.  It fixes nothing. However, this is also part of political poker, by primarily domestic animal policy organizations and public land ranchers, to gain ground on their focal bills.

Wild horses are being traded to big Ag that is their opposition on domestic animal issues. Each species must be protected under the laws and reality each faces. Each matters. Wild horses are not a piece on a game board. Politics have made them a throw away, a marketing concept, and created a conversation based on a lie.

The “alliance plan” will not just increase temporary fertility control it: creates the largest removal numbers of wild horses per year since the Act was passed, entire (or partial) sterilized herds, guts NEPA… and so much more. None of this has anything to do with where this program is actually broken, just symptoms.

Wild horses deserve more than that.

None of the organizations supposedly representing wild horses went to this table with any range data of their own besides a few fertility control studies. All of their premises and sales pitches are based on the data provided to them by our opposition, not gained themselves. They take the broken frame that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has been pointing out since the 1980’s. They just build more money into it, fix nothing. It is bad, built on broken, and twisted again by big money politics.

Another multi species organization (that has the same CEO as HSUS had when this began, Wayne Pacelle, who left HSUS last year) is now in a steering position to what is being placed into media outlets as opposition to this “alliance.” But he is steering it toward domestic and political issues using a few phrases and points that address land use, but that is not the number one point he is trying to get the media, and public, to repeat. They are pushing domestic bills and a few orgs on that list have never really done anything for land use (wild horses).

This is a masterful, multi million dollar, machiavellian, multi year, strategy in politics. It all has very little to do with the truth of wild horses.

It is a betrayal to the wild, all of it is. (you can read more HERE)

Water haul for livestock further deteriorates a stressed range. An area in the Diamond HMA that is often quoted by a filmmaker that has marketed himself onto the pages of National Geographic as an expert in wild horses… and he is not.  It’s become about marketing., not facts.

The Table

“fast info” by Laura Leigh, WHE founder

I’m sitting here pounding out comments on the third EA I have tackled just this weekend. None of them are “wild horse roundup EAs,” the ones you see all the comment sign on sheets for online (I’ll write again about why that is not actually part of process, and use a new legal decision that states just that, soon). These are a combo buffet; one on hard rock mining, one on water quality and one on oil and gas. I have two more due tomorrow to finish.

These “proposed projects” have been coming so fast the last few years that I have not written many articles about them. I’ve just done them, am doing them, and waiting for a time to write about it. I think it’s a good time, now.

As I was litigating issues surrounding access and abuse at roundups (today I am still the only person in history to do that. This is stated to point out that organizations in the alliance like HSUS, ASPCA, have not once taken abuse at roundups to court) I was looking at how to address issues for wild horses. Not how to build a big shiny organization with a conference table, but where does change take place? The “big money orgs system” was not helping, it was in the way.

Wild horses are wild under law until transfer of title under law. The majority of that conversation occurs on the range and in land use planning. I found a huge vacant seat where the wild horse community should have been.

As an example, as the Greater Sage Grouse conversation began the opposition, noted as “at the table with advocates in this alliance,” filled the room, the livestock industry (mining). Not one of the “advocate organizations” in the alliance were present. (In fact, none of those in the “advocate opposition letter”  were there either. I was, that is how I know they were not there.)

Earlier this year there was a huge working group organized by the Department of Interior (DOI), that was essentially required to comply with a court order gained by an environmental organizations win. Invitations went out to environmental groups that have been commenting on oil and gas projects proposed on public lands. I was the only one from specifically “wild horses” I saw on the guest list. (I’ll write more about this later as this moves into open meetings)

That is a fast example of the “table” for wild horses. None of those that went and played political poker with wild horses lives were at the real table, fighting for them. Instead for the last four years they were “negotiating” a political deal with the payoff focused on a domestic bill (they essentially admit as much). They sat at the table with those set to decimate the wild horse, holding hands and pushing paper around with the opposition, making deals for everything but the wild, wild horse.

Wild horses are a public lands issue, they are not dogs and cats. The public is extremely confused by symptoms (after capture) and management (before capture). Work done before capture is complicated and does not make a fast “the truck is coming!” type action item.

Wild horses are the only animal in the nation defined by the land it stands, not what it is biologically. The “land it stands” is where all the games are happening to play to “short straw” the wild horses on forage allocation, boundary lines, water and how many wild horses the federal government will manage on range (AML). (as an example: wild horses in holding are a symptom of a failure to address land use.)

Did wild horses really deserve to played by animal orgs to gain ground on a domestic bill, up sales of PZP and create a subsidy for payment off the backs of those captured?

We are not at a time in history where they ever needed to go to a table to negotiate against “killing wild horses.” This plan actually brings us closer to that, opens the door for it. They are in the way of this fight, have been in the way for years and years. They (corporate advocacy) have become the largest obstacle to progress.

That is why we are working so hard to get YOU to read, understand and be really careful what you write to your Congressman.

If you are not careful? You will get that form letter back on domestic bills and wonder why your representatives do not listen to you about wild horses. 

The opposition to wild horses at the public lands table is often the livestock industry. 

The livestock industry is also, most often, the opposition to domestic animal bills. 

On the domestic animal political  front we have dogs and cat bills, transport bills, meat safety bills. None of that is about wild horses, or even close.

The opposition to those bills is the same we face in wild horses.

They are playing a horse trading game… your wild for domestic. Those two sets of laws do not even live in the same law book, do not exist under the same agencies and have no business just being treated as “business for profit.”

It is that simple. Do not fall for it.

Big Picture

The public easily recognizes that we need a serious investigation into the corruption that lays the foundation for things like the push to destroy National Monuments, like Bears Ears. The public sees the influence of big money for profit in regulations surrounding drug companies, insurance bills, oil and the multiple ethical investigations against cabinet members that use their personal relationship with these interests to further regulation changes.

The pending BLM Report to Congress that will drop in between 5-30 days? It needs to be taken seriously.

Not just the content (BLM trying to wiggle out of responsibility to NEPA, sterilization, the numbers removed, the budget for PZP etc), the creation of the content itself, needs scrutiny.

Every hand that touched that report needs to be disclosed (many of the orgs in the “alliance” will be listed).

Not only the “who,” but the “how.”

Congress needs to see campaign contribution lists from individuals and entities mentioned and involved in the report (and so does the public).

Correspondence needs scrutiny between any of these members and the two key acting BLM Deputy Directors during it’s creation: John Ruhs (now Idaho BLM lead) and Brian Steed (who sat as Chief of Staff with Chris Stewart, Republican Congressman from Utah, who was actually one of those that created the first run of this at Congress in 2017 from his position in Stewarts office).

The pending BLM Report to Congress, if an investigation is done, will be a map into solving the actual BLM wild horse and burro program at it’s foundation.

All of the problems that wild horses face come from the manipulation of the system in politics since it’s inception.

I have seen just  a small part of the original survey work. If you saw it you would weep. The entire program is a lie.

WE NEED TO STOP this effort that is “selling of the wild horse.” 

We can. Get louder than you have ever been.

When the Report to Congress drops in a few weeks? get even louder. 

~~~~~

TAKE ACTION:

Send an email before you begin your workweek, or put on your list and make a call during the week. 

Find your Representatives. (find them here: http://govtrack.us)

Ask for:

A serious investigation into corruption, waste of tax payer funding, intimidation in the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program.

Start an investigation into the BLM Report to Congress, and all those involved in the creation of the report. 

Before they open that report and read one single word, they need to know who bought and paid for it. The public deserves to know, before wild horses pay a permanent price.

Both men that were the Deputy Directors of BLM, while this report was being utilized by BLM and incorporating documents created by corporate interests, need intense scrutiny. The two men are John Ruhs and Brian Steed. 

In addition, all of the involvement of Brian Steed with these alliance members, as he sat as Chris Stewart (R-UT) Chief of Staff and then moved the agenda from the helm, need more than a “notation,” it needs a close look. 

We, the public, demand accountability and the end of sweeping wild horses aside in political debate, by actions of regulators, bought and paid for.

~~~~~