Editor:

Concerning the Star-Tribune Editorial Board’s comments titled “Emotion shouldn’t rule debate on wild horses” (July 19), I contend that a healthy dose of passion may be priceless, when combined with improved federal law (Restore Our American Mustangs Act, or H.R. 1018), and data-run scientific management.

Please click on photo to comment on letter

Politics and zeal walk hand in hand, while hard science endeavors to raise blurred biases closer to reality. The Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program has failed, due to perennial underfunding, conservative politics, disdain for activists, and lack of rock-solid science.

Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., has consistently allowed political motives to rule her decision-making, without reading the rich history of the wild horse protective movement or examining legal issues with an oil-immersion microscope. Factual errors in her statements are clearly reflected in this editorial piece, as though she had written it herself.

How easy to pronounce wild horses “feral” intruders on the American landscape, when not a shred of evidence is presented. Published mitochondrial-DNA and paleontological data substantiate not only 57 million years of evolutionary history for the Family Equidae in North America, but the presence of the caballoid horse prior to late-Pleistocene extinction. The American Museum of Natural History and The Science and Conservation Center at ZooMontana concur. Wild horses are a reintroduced native wildlife species in North America. Period.

This editorial fails to mention that censusing to create legal herd areas, after the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act passed, began in 1974, during just one season of the year, disregarding herd migration. The ROAM Act endeavors to re-establish millions of legal acreages gone astray. It also disregards immunocontraceptive (fertility) control, available to the BLM for more than 20 years but not implemented scientifically.

Lastly, Appropriate Management Levels, set by range monitoring and horse counts, are questionable on many Herd Management Areas. Gov. Dave Freudenthal and the BLM may thump their Microsoft Excel sheets as though the Almighty had created them, but this program is dysfunctional, and only the ROAM Act will begin the healing process. Let emotion, improved law, and good science triumph.

PATRICIA M. FAZIO, Ph.D., Cody

Statewide coordinator, Wyoming Wild Horse Coalition