In 5 short days the second half of the fiscal year 2024 roundup schedule begins. More than 10,000 wild horses and burros will be captured from now through October 1.

• BLM claims they have a welfare policy. They violate it, fail to enforce it and play word games instead.
• BLM is prohibited from driving wild horses with a helicopter 6 weeks before and after foaling season. But BLM fails to define foaling season using data, manipulates foaling season times with fertility control drugs and fails to monitor changes.
• BLM is required to do a Motorized Vehicle Use Hearing annually to take testimony and address issues. BLM has never released any response, analysis or revision to practices.
• Each year we document unsafe flying, hotshot use simply to speed up loading, horses choked down during roping and so much more.

Over a decade of onsite documentation and Freedom of Information Action Act (FOIA) team investigative work has clearly demonstrated that, on average, 12% of wild horses and burros that cross into the jute wings of a trap will die in the next six months. That translates into 1 in 9 of the wild horses and burros you see captured this season will die in BLM care in six months. 

Winnemucca tour 2024, BLM facilities provide no shade or wind barriers. BLM requires adopters to provide shelter and a lack of shelter from the elements on range is used as a reason to “zero out” a herd. But BLM does not require shelter in their own facilities.

The House of Representatives has 41 committee meetings scheduled for this week. Five of the meetings are subcommittee markups for appropriations bills: Commerce, Justice Science; Department of Labor, Health and Human Services; Department of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development; Interior and Environment; and Energy and Water. After passing the subcommittee, the bills will soon be considered by the full committee and then advance to the chamber floor before the August recess.

You can help urge Congress to create an incentive for BLM to move through the final hurdle to make the policy truly enforceable. Just click HERE. 

Below: Video recap of the last roundup of the first half of the fiscal year 2024 schedule.

Please call your representatives in the House: (202) 224-3121. Every member from subcommittee, to committee, to the full floor, will have an opportunity to propose an amendment to the budget. Ask the aide to relay a message: “Please amend the 2025 Appropriations bill for the Department of Interior to include an incentive for the Bureau of Land Management to undertake rulemaking to create an enforceable welfare policy. No matter your stance of how wild horses and burros should be managed on the range, can’t we all agree that we need an enforceable welfare policy? Thank you.” 

Below: It is still peak foaling season on many ranges right now. BLM fails to identify actual foaling seasons with data. Last year, just in the first heat index rise of the Antelope Roundup, 14 wild horses died including two foals from dehydration. BLM has no parameters for Heat Index or Air Quality (the metrics used by your weather man to tell you it is unsafe to walk your dog in the heat). Heat Index rises correlate with catastrophic death…. but BLM simply will not take public input and create enforceable standards equal to those used in veterinary medicine today.

Many of you are sending us the responses you are getting from your representatives. The responses fall into 2 categories: 1) A response that keys in on the use of the word “humane,” but then says they are supporting expanding temporary fertility control. 2) A letter that basically says we need to remove all horses and resume slaughter, but we need to be “humane.”

If you do get a response in writing, it will have a contact listed on the letter. Call or write that listed contact info.

You can respond something like:

“In your response letter to my request that you propose to amend language in the budget bill for BLM to undertake rulemaking for an enforceable welfare policy  you state that you are committed to finding humane and non lethal measures for population control of wild horses and burros by the BLM.

Did you know that the BLM does not have an enforceable welfare policy for capture and off-range corrals?

Hotshot (electric prod) still being used to speed up loading. This includes electric shock use on the face and neck, even on youngsters.

While politics continues to impede actual reform, ten thousand more wild horses and burros will suffer from now through October 1 (the end of the fiscal year). When the schedule comes out for 2025, your money will again be used to add 15-20K more onto the schedule as Congress claims they all take a stand for what they see as “humane.” Yet not one single member of Congress, as they listen to high paid lobbyists with high dollar agendas, has proposed any actual funding specifically for enforceable welfare rules.

Below: Last fiscal year, summer roundups kicked off at Reveille. No crowds of observers, only us. BLM put out a big press release that switching a rapidly aging herd due to PZP use every three years and removals of young horses over the last 13 years, was being switched over to GonaCon. BLMs vision of “expanding temporary fertility control.”

Politics, politics, politics. Politics have always ruled the world of wild horses and burros and not the reality of the range or data and truth. From the passage of the Act that, in order to get a law passed, set wild horses and burros up as the only species managed as wild to be set behind artificial boundary lines in the nation. As the grab for public lands by private industry increases, wild horses and burros became the only animal that cannot leave and zero mitigation is ever done for that habitat loss.

Politics and word-smithing continues to swirl in the world of politics and shortchange our wild ones every single day in every single way.

While everyone uses the word “humane” to bolster their position, not one of them is talking about creating a set of enforceable welfare rules to prevent unnecessary death and suffering.

Can’t we all agree that we must have enforceable rules to prevent needless suffering and death?

PLEASE as these Appropriations bills are set to begin moving quickly out of subcommittee and into the full floor debates… SPEAK NOW.

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Thank you for keeping WHE on the frontline in the fight to protect and preserve our treasured wild ones!