“It’s the cattle and the ranchers who have a lot of power and they don’t want the horses competing with the cattle for the grazing.’’
SUNDRE, Alta. — To the advocates of Alberta’s wild horse population, the only thing preventing an inhumane annual cull is a tent, coolers of food and the few dozen people who stream into a rural makeshift campsite.
This is where the most dedicated will stay, despite the arrests of five of their comrades on Tuesday.
“I think the wild horse cull is completely irresponsible,” said Shannon Mann, a horse advocate from Calgary who has taken residence in the camp for the past two weeks.
Click Image to Enlarge
The Alberta government recorded a wild herd as large as 1,000 horses this year, prompting it to offer 200 permits to allow farmers, hunters and ranchers to capture the creatures, which have no natural predators. Once caught, they can do what they will with the animals — advocates claim the majority are sent to slaughter.
Ms. Mann said the province’s numbers are wrong, and suggests the population would be better managed by relocation or contraception. She and other advocates insist the horses aren’t a real problem to anyone but local ranchers.
“It’s the cattle and the ranchers who have a lot of power and they don’t want the horses competing with the cattle for the grazing.’’
To thwart the capture, the activists — Almost 40 have passed through the camp — use any ATV to cart bales of hay across the icy bush to circumvent the locked gate that keeps gawkers off untamed crown land. This is the only way, they say, they can encourage the scraggly flock of feral horses to stay away from the hay in traps. An ally in Spain donated money for winter food.
The fight between wild horse lovers and permit-bearing ranchers and farmers came to a head on Tuesday, after a local rancher captured several horses in a corral.
“I said ‘Please give us the opportunity to find a suitable home under any conditions you set so the horses go to slaughter.’ He said ‘I can’t agree to that,’ so we moved the camp closer to see what horses he got,” Ms. Mann recounted.
There were three, she said. She believed one horse had been injured.
After the group edged closer to the corral, the rancher called RCMP, who told the activists to stay back. Ms. Mann said the police gave them conflicting answers about where to go and, eventually, the situation escalated.
Five people were arrested and charged with mischief, she said.
“The next thing, they were coming out in handcuffs.”
The RCMP was not able to confirm the arrest or the charges by press time on Wednesday.
The permits are in effect until Friday, and Alberta is likely to fall well short of its goal. One of the licence-holders says the actual number will probably be around 20.
“I’ve just caught a few so far,” said Bryn Thiessen, 54, who runs Helmer Creek Ranch near Sundre and has one of the licences.
“I can’t foresee reaching the goal given the shortened capture season and the fact that nobody else has bothered. Other guys who have trapped in the past didn’t bother applying.”
Mr. Thiessen said he’s managed to bring in three horses so far and another permit-holder, a friend of his, has captured a dozen…(CONTINUED)
Click (HERE) to read the story in it’s entirety, view video and comment
Related articles
Categories: Horse News, Horse Slaughter, Wild Horses/Mustangs
Straight from the Horse's Heart 
A “Horse Hater” is a “Horse Hater” no matter where they live. What makes humans so callous and mean?
LikeLike
alot Of Nerve That Scumbag Theissen Has. pastor Of A Church Generally Lives Of The Parishioners.. Wonder Who is Paying For His Ranch… I Hope The Three Horses Get Away From Him. He’s Doing The Devils Work, Not God Work, That’s For Sure. I Wish The Activists WellBut I Wish Mr. ThEissen Nothing But Hardship For His Actions!
LikeLike
Professional tour guides and photographers, not to mention a recent fly-over of the region paid for by citizens, attests to the fact there is nowhere near 1,000 horses in the area. The video testimony by the ‘handle-barred’ cowboy stating that the population needs to be controlled demonstrates the arrogance of man thinking he can do a better job than nature. Too often they forget they are the ‘guests’ in a land nature provided for creatures other than cattle or sheep. They are the ‘aliens’ and need to learn their manners. If forage gets thin then they need to pull cattle NOT horses.
LikeLike
Bravo!!!!!!!!!! Steve you just said it all !!! I Thank You !!!!!!
LikeLike
Way to go , Canadian advocates.
Steve, you are so right.
LikeLike
So proud of the activists braving the authorities and the elements.
LikeLike
This smells of Duquette and his “friends”, dont discount the hatred of the horses And Animal supporters/advocates he still is promoting his slaughter em all, all advocates are horse starvers routine. He has followers that are as narrow minded as his perspective. They also do not read very well either as he still.gleams one liners. Although he is still fighting the HSUS because they are the largest political lobby against the nutballs ie…calvary group, the radical horse harvesters (kill buyers), and land hungry American cattle men ( invasive species living in old west).
LikeLike
OK – here’s a bombshell but it’s an interesting dynamic – lets analyze it.
(Start with an open mind)
Positives:
The management is being done at the local level;
The horses are being bait trapped (it appears to be humane);
The rancher has the facilities in place for this as well as the ability to dart horses with contraception;
No need for traumatic huge expensive private contract helicopter round-ups;
Only a few horses have been captured;
No need for expensive short & long term holding;
Some of the horses are being adopted out and the Rancher “appreciates” the qualities of the wild stock and is enhancing his domestic stock with it, And so;
There is some commercial benefit in it;
The captors and advocates are meeting on-site, face-to-face, nobody’s been shot but a few have been detained & charged with something;
Negatives:
Horses are removed from the wild;
Some of the horses are sent to slaughter;
Advocates are arrested, maybe taken into custody and jailed;
The whole operation costs everybody time and money.
So, where should it go from here ?
Through legislation:
Ban slaughter, especially the capture of wild horses for the purpose of selling for slaughter;
Return unadoptables to the range and maybe buy-out AUM’s on a per head basis – in other words swap out a cow/calf pair for a horse at face value. (this gives a financial incentive for the rancher to manage wild horses instead of cattle and starts the “Reserve Design” process)
Bait trap, cull for adoption, and start contraception all to be done at the local level;
Get funding for independent census and use all three sources; ranchers, advocates, & govt.
LikeLike
LM, good, forward-looking thoughts here. The flaw I see is that buying out AUMs (you don’t mention who would be paid) is zero incentive for ranchers, they would still lose potential profits and for those with tight margins the idea would be roundly opposed. I’m not weighing in on the right or wrongs here, just that a simple buyout still hits the pocketbooks of many who presumably are not all high-rolling corporations. Better answers will find a way to find buy-in for all stakeholders, where the losses would be offset (and more) by the gains in changing the existing system. As it stands now, there is a financial incentive to prioritize high-profit cattle over horses and the environment, and to sell horses for profit with little to no costs incurred.
LikeLike
The rancher would receive the value of a cow/calf pair, whatever the market value is, for giving up the AUM to a wild horse. It would be paid annually – not sure by whom, but sort of like a government LT holding contract.
LikeLike
LM, I’m not sure what they pay in Canada but in the US that is only $1.35 per month. What a buyout means to a rancher is that cow/calf unit cannot be pastured, and therefore probably wouldn’t be bred, raised, and sold. So the loss is thousands of dollars (a good bred cow will sell nowadays for $1-2k, or sometimes much more) in lost opportunity costs which $1.35/month wouldn’t begin to offset.
Subsidized grazing (at least in the US) constitutes a market advantage that isn’t easily remedied. A simple grazing buyout would probably put a lot of small ranching businesses underwater so there is no incentive for them to agree.
LikeLike
Sorry for not making myself clear. It’s NOT a grazing fee buyout (thats a bogus number anyway because even the private market rate of $20 per month doesnt cover the damage to the range and the value of the grass) I’m talking about buying them out at the market value of a cow and/or calf. In other words, instead of raising a cow/calf on the range the AUM would be dedicated to a wild horse. Divide the value of a cow and/or calf by 12 months and that IS the actual market monthly value or commercial cost of keeping one animal on free-range grass. And, because there is less collateral work involved; I.e. calving, no supplemental feeding, no losses to factor in like predation that monthly fee is probably negotiable. I mean, there are many ways to make it an attractive, financially rewarding option for a resident rancher. Plus it’s a guaranteed monthly stipend w/out the if’s, and’s or but’s of a volatile beef market.
LikeLike
Oops, Not sure if I ckd the follow-up comments box
LikeLike
LM, this may be a start, but a typical rancher keeps a cow and she is bred back while she still has her calf at side… so making one annual payment is still not an incentive to a rancher since he would still have fewer in his herd each year under your scenario, and would lose the following year’s calves as well, for essentially the lifecycle of the cow. Bred heifers are held over each year to have calves in the pipeline to sell the following autumn at weaning. Market prices fluctuate week by week, too, so there’s no incentive to sell now and lose a potential gain later. Beef prices are high and aiming higher now so there is an incentive to produce more, not fewer, cattle, and grazing them cheap over the summer means ranchers can avoid feed and labor costs (mostly) and let the home pastures rest and recover from any winter feeding operations.
Calving isn’t a negative, it’s a necessity in the ranching business model so every cow that’s breathing is kept pregnant or is shipped for slaughter if she’s not producing. Another problem is in valuing a cow/calf unit and dividing by twelve. This only works if you have say, steers of all the same age you would sell off each year in lots, but again the business model assumes fattening them over the summer on cheap grass, not having to be fed in drylots.
So while I appreciate your logic it still provides no incentives for ranchers to buy in to abandoning cheap grazing.
A better approach may be to have the costs of grazing actually resemble a fair market price for starters, then make the leases more competitive (and available more often) so others could bid for them and either graze horses, or nothing at all and let the land recover. Another approach may be to raise the grazing fees to a fair market price then take the difference between that and the formerly subsidized low rate and use that to pay for grazing areas specifically for horses only.
Just my two bits.
LikeLike
Thanks for the “two bits.” Its good to think outside the box. BLM bashing is boring – time to move on. BTW – I recommend reading “The Horse Lover, A Cowboy’s Quest to Save the Wild Mustangs” by Alan Day, brother of Sandra Day OConnor (former Supreme Court Justice). The book has just been published. See fb group Colorado Wild Horse & Burro Partners (COWHBP) for details or The Cloud Foundation website might also have the link. 🙂
LikeLike
This is a global battle and it calls for a global coalition.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/alberta/Five+protesters+arrested+Sundre+horse+capture+site/9550796/story.html
“One of the senior citizens arrested who walks with a walker, she was handled pretty roughly during her arrest.”
Five protesters charged after arrests at Sundre horse capture site
By Amy Glass, Calgary Herald February 26, 2014
Five protesters who were arrested near the site of a controversial horse-capture pen near Sundre have been charged and released, according to a spokeswoman for the group.
Shannon Mann, who has been camping near the site since Feb. 16 but was not arrested, said the three women and two men who were taken into custody by RCMP on Tuesday were released later that night and are facing mischief charges.
Mann said the group is expected to appear in court on March 31. They are currently trying to get in touch with a lawyer to handle their case.
“They tried to call legal aid, at least two of them did, and there was no answer,” Mann said Wednesday morning.
“One of the senior citizens arrested who walks with a walker, she was handled pretty roughly during her arrest.”
LikeLike
Dear Louie, OMG a woman with a walker handled roughly, there is safety in numbers and Im not talking 300 Im talking thousands , this is what needs to be done !!!
LikeLike
They should be promoting this as a pilgrimage site of miraculous births… since by the population chart supplied they are claiming a 44% population rise in a single year, from 2012 – 2013. Are any ranchers running their own horse herds in these areas?
LikeLike
Also have to keep in mind that there are predators in the wild areas where the horses live which is going to take as many horses as they can kill and eat. Canada as far as I know hasn’t killed off most of their predators like the US has been doing for the past 100 years. I certainly don’t believe the high numbers of wild horses that was counted. Who actually did the count? There could have been animals added to the count like the BLM has done for years to placate the ranchers to ensure a roundup. This one rancher only caught 3 horses and the other 12, I know this is a large area but give me a break. If there had been more they would have been spotted. I don’t think they could find anymore. This could be the reason that no one other than these two guys was interested.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on "OUR WORLD".
LikeLike
I have to comment a bit about the complaint one of the permittees had about horses hanging out on the roads. First, why wouldn’t they when the snow is deep? When I traveled a few times across western Canada in winter it was common practice to turn owned horses loose along the highway to fend for themselves all winter, since the only available grass was in the right of way. That’s where I saw the most grazing wildlife, too, not crossing the road but grazing the shoulders.
The complaint about a few horses causing a traffic problem strikes me as remarkably petty also since Elk on the highways are expected and promoted as a tourism draw. Yes there are probably some accidents but how about comparing wildlife occasionally on the road to numbers of drunk drivers, which when I lived up that way increased dramatically every hour past 10 pm.
LikeLike
Saying these horses have ‘no natural enemies’ is absurd. In Alberta cougars, wolves and grizzlies will all actively hunt wild horses especially the old, sick and young, unless they’ve been ‘culled’ from the area too. Nature itself also culls in the winter, or with a flooded spring river or lightning strikes in the summer.
This ‘cull’ is just more of the same crap that has the mustangs in the US at risk of extinction – ranchers leasing from the government and thinking that every blade of grass belongs to them. If there is room in an area for 2000-4000 cattle, there is room for the supposedly 1000 (though more than likely much fewer) horses too. The horses do not compete with elk or mule deer, and because they’re nomadic, they do not foul water holes, unlike cattle.
Leave the horses and their predators alone. If a rancher doesn’t want to lose livestock on land they are leasing, they can invest in livestock guardian dogs, keep your cows at home, or quit your bitching.
And no – I’m not a bunny hugger or a tree-sitter. I eat meat, I fish and I hunt – I also know what’s right, what’s wrong, and I sure as hell know greedy when I see it.
/rant.
LikeLike
I think there may have been some sections of the PNAS Report that might help prevent this travesty.
T
LikeLike