Senate Hearing on Wild Horses; A Criminal Enterprise

By Laura Leigh on July 14, 2019

We are blaming the wild horse for a deeply corrupted system that destroys water, land and looks for something to blame.

ACTION item at the bottom of the page.

Wild Horse Organization Calls Senate Hearing a Criminal Enterprise

Washington, DC — OnTuesday there will be a “hearing” on wild horses in the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands . “The purpose of the hearing is to examine long-term management options for the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program.” (HERE)

“The hearing is a crafted public relations stunt. There is not a single voice on the panel that works in wild horse advocacy in any substantial fashion. This is a parade of those that exploit the words “wild horses.” This panel reads like a RICO board for a criminal enterprise, not a representation of the reality of wild horses.” stated Laura Leigh, President of Wild Horse Education.

Senator Mike Lee (Chairman, R-UT) and Ron Wyden (Ranking Minority, D-OR) will make opening Remarks.

The panel:

Steve Tryon (Representing BLM), J.J. Goicoechea (Eureka county, Public Lands Council, NV Depy of Ag), Ethan Lane (Cattlemen’s Ass’n lobbyist, Chairman of the “Protect the Harvest” spinoff organization National Horse and Burro Rangeland Management Coalition), Eric Thacker (SITLA, Utah State University professor where former Deputy Director of BLM, Brian Steed, was just hired), and Nancy Perry (a paper pusher lobbyist for ASPCA that has never spent real on-ground time in the West and never even litigated against abuse of wild horses, never engaged in land use planning), are the hand picked panel to determine the fate of your wild horses.

Each member of the testifying panel already sits in agreement on how to divide the wild horse budget into further subsidies, as stated by Representative Chris Stewart (R-UT) in a House hearing. Stewarts “Path Forward” has already come under scrutiny for violations of ethics obligations. Brian Steed, BLM Deputy Director prior to Corey Hammond, was Chief of Staff for Stewart, worked directly on the lobby document and then carried it forward from his chair in the BLM.

“This hearing is a most foul example of how high politics are played by multi-million dollar corporate interests, aided by elected officials, that represent nothing but efforts to create more subsidies. The proposal solves nothing, is not based on facts, and in no way represents the public at large.

The tag-line, ‘horses wont be killed en mass’, is such a shallow attempt to paint the destruction of our wild horses in a positive light because it is part of the proposal, just two years away. The entire plan proposed by this panel will compound the problem and in less than two years they will claim, again, that wild horses need to be killed.

However, in two years time our herds in the wild will be decimated and the symptom of the failure to address the real causes of range degradation will continue. Our wild horses will be in cages, or butchered through sterilization, and our public lands will continue to be destroyed by profit driven uses. Every name, on this so called witness list, will make a nice fat paycheck off the carnage. It sounds like organized crime to me.

What we need is a hearing on corruption in the wild horse program, not another parade of millionaires pulling the strings of politics.” Laura Leigh

Further information:

It is interesting to note that Wild Horse Education, the only organization in history to litigate against inhumane conduct, gained a massive First Amendment victory that gained daily access to roundup and more, was not invited to the Reno summit of organizations “deal making” held in Reno this summer. WHE is Nevada based, yet organizations from DC, California and Colorado were invited. (Could it have something to do with our litigation record and actual range data?)

In a 2016 Hearing in the House blatantly false testimony was given and never challenged (site specific instances of misrepresentation of locations of images and reasons for range degradation) and the “Extremism Movement” have many of the same people and agenda points. https://wildhorseeducation.org/2017/05/17/posttruth-a-few-wild-facts-you-should-know-in-these-dangerous-times-part-one/

The “Plan” created by those on the witness list, when combined with the BLM Report to Congress coming next month, spells the destruction of NEPA and the Wild Horses and Burros Act. https://wildhorseeducation.org/2019/04/26/blm-report-to-congress-10-years-to-aml-1971-with-a-sour-twist/

You can call the committee members and ask that the hearing be postponed and an equal number of actual wild horse advocates placed on the panel. There are many advocates that have in-field, in the courts, in land use planning, experience. Every one would be more than willing to bring concrete, professional and factual rebuttal to this panel. FIND SUBCOMMITTEE HERE.

~~~~~~