Call to Action from The Cloud Foundation and Wild Horse Freedom Federation
BLM captives without shelter ~ photo by Carol Walker of Wild Horse Freedom Federation
Last December Carol Walker, Director of Field Documentation for Wild Horse Freedom Federation, traveled to and issued a photographic report on the recently imprisoned wild horses at Salt Wells Creek:
Her findings were so disturbing and inhumane that it landed her a personal interview on CNN:
https://rtfitchauthor.com/2013/12/18/carol-walker-with-jane-velez-mitchell/
Likewise it attracted the attention of another wild equine advocacy group, The Cloud Foundation:
So being that many of you have asked what YOU can do to help, the Cloud Foundation and Wild Horse Freedom Federation are asking YOU to:
- Share the information above far and wide
- First thing Monday Morning CALL; Begin with your Senators and Representatives, then the President–all found in the “Contact Elected Officials” link below. CALL & EMAIL & please use respectful language.
- Remind them this is an election year. These are common sense, fiscal and humane issues that concern you and thousands of others.
- Ask them to investigate why BLM rejects an offer of working together with free materials and free labor to solve a problem in Rock Springs, WY.
- Explain that the BLM removes these horses, taking away their freedom and families. With no place to put them, they are left in short term holding.
- Winter is NOT over in Rock Springs–40 MPH winds and deep snow can continue for another 2 months.
- If you wish to contact the Wash. DC offices of the BLM officials involved, please respectfully contact them here: jguilfoy@blm.gov, 202-912-7260; eroberso@blm.gov, 202-208-4896.
Here is the link to Contact Your Elected Officials
On behalf of the Cloud Foundation and Wild Horse Freedom Federation we hope that on this upcoming Monday we ALL can and will make a very definitive and decisive difference.
Keep the faith!
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Categories: Horse News
Straight from the Horse's Heart 
Reblogged this on hocuspocus13.
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Will do!
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Information that our congressmen should be given:
For starters, these Wild Horses should be REMOVED from this facility and RETURNED to their Legal Herd Management Area/Areas
https://rtfitchauthor.com/2014/02/12/a-biologists-response-to-the-blms-wild-horse-problem/
A biologist’s response to the BLM’s wild horse “problem”
By Robert C. Bauer
REPRODUCTION, MORTALITY, AND OVERPOPULATION IN WILD EQUIDS by ROBERT C. BAUER, B.S. in Biology
The rangelands, however, can easily sustain not only the wild horses and burros existing out there now, but also every one of those in holding facilities, which now number well over 40,000.
The truth is that every one of those wild horses and burros in holding facilities,
if released back to the areas from which they were taken, along with those in the wild, would help bring the balance back to the rangelands, a balance that is so very vital!
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Many times the debate is between cattlemen who are paying rediculously low fees for cattle grazing and do not want wild horses eating their graze, and the folks who love our national heritage and want to see wild horses, burros and bison back on our wildlands. We can do both, with proper management AND a government who keeps the ranchers in check! I know of one rancher in New Mexico who at one time had 1 millions acres for 200,000 cattle and thought any wild horse was one too many! We need to make sure that ranchers respect the horses, and bison right to graze our public lands!
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Our congressmen should also be given this Legal Declaration.
This roundup was in violation of the LAW
“BLM’s tentative agreement here does the opposite and instead prioritizes livestock over wild horses, by proposing to remove hundreds of wild horses from the Wyoming Checkerboard without reducing livestock numbers – which, in my view, is contrary to the laws governing BLM’s actions as those mandates were explained to me and administered during the decades that I was a BLM official.”
https://docs.google.com/file/d/15XxDMsR1HKkjS_tWEb4QDIEKvMwrrSoiWlxlFWfbkLe8-boHU1lBYiuqd6pH/edit?pli=1
DECLARATION OF LLOYD EISENHAUER
Katherine A. Meyer
Meyer Glitzenstein & Crystal
1601 Connecticut Ave., N.W.
Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20009
(202) 588-5206
Timothy Kingston
408 West 23rd Street, Suite 1
Cheyenne, WY 82001-3519
(WY Bar No. 6-2720)
(307) 638-8885
Attorneys for Defendant-Intervenors
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF WYOMING
Rock Springs Grazing Association, Case No. 2:11-cv-00263-NDF
Plaintiff,
v.
Ken Salazar, et al.,
Defendants,
DECLARATION OF LLOYD EISENHAUER
I, Lloyd Eisenhauer, declare as follows:
1. I live in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I am a former Bureau of Land Management
(“BLM”) official with extensive experience in the Rawlins and Rock Springs Districts in Wyoming and intimate familiarity with the public lands under BLM management in those areas. I have reviewed the consent decree proposed by BLM and the Rock Springs Grazing Association (“RSGA”) in this case and provide this declaration based on my longstanding knowledge of, and management of, wild horses and livestock grazing in the Rock Springs and Rawlins Districts.
2. I grew up in Pine Bluffs, Wyoming with a livestock and farming background, served in the Marines for four years, and then owned a livestock business from 1952-1958. I enrolled in college in 1958, studying range management. From 1960-1961, BLM hired me to assist with collecting field data for vegetation assessments and carrying capacity surveys related to livestock and wild horses. These surveys were conducted in the Lander, Kemmerer, and Rawlins Districts. When I graduated in 1962, BLM hired me full-time to serve in the Rawlins District in Wyoming, where most of my work focused on grazing management involving sheep, cattle, and wild horses. From 1968-1972, I was Area Manager of the Baggs-Great Divide Resource Area in the Rawlins District. In 1971, the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was enacted, and in the spring of 1972, on behalf of BLM, I conducted the first aerial survey of wild horses in Wyoming, recording the number of horses and designating the Herd Management Areas (“HMAs”) for the Rawlins District. After a stint as an Area Manager with BLM’s Albuquerque, New Mexico office, in 1975 I took over as the Chief of Planning and Environmental Analysis in BLM’s Rock Springs District for three years. I was the lead on all planning and environmental assessments. During that time, I also served as the Acting Area Manager of the Salt Wells Resource Area, which is located in the Rock Springs District. In 1979, BLM transferred me to its Denver Service Center to serve as the Team Leader in creating the agency’s automated process for data collection. I received an excellence of service award from the Secretary of the Interior commending me for my work as a Team Leader. In 1982, I became the Head of Automation in BLM’s Cheyenne office, where I managed and implemented the data collection and processing of various systems related to BLM programs. I retired from BLM in 1986, and have stayed very involved in the issue of wild horse and livestock management on BLM lands in Wyoming, and have written articles about the issue in local and other newspaper outlets. I have won various journalistic awards, including a Presidential award, for my coverage of conservation districts in Wyoming. Along with a partner, I operated a tour business (called Backcountry Tours) for six years, taking various groups into wild places in Wyoming – without a doubt wild horses were the most popular thing to see on a tour, in large part due to their cultural and historical value. I also served six years on the governor’s non-point source water quality task force.
3. Based on my longstanding knowledge of wild horse and livestock management in the Rawlins and Rock Springs Districts, and in the Wyoming Checkerboard in particular, I am very concerned about BLM’s agreement with RSGA, embodied in the proposed Consent Decree they have filed in this case, under which BLM would remove all wild horses located on RSGA’s private lands on the Wyoming Checkerboard.
4. The Checkerboard is governed by an exchange of use agreement between the federal government and private parties such as RSGA. However, due to state laws, property lines, and intermingled lands, it is impossible to fence the lands of the Wyoming Checkerboard, which means that both the wild horses and the livestock that graze there roam freely between public and private lands on the Checkerboard without any physical barriers. For this reason, it is illogical for BLM to commit to removing wild horses that are on the “private” lands RSGA owns or leases because those same horses are likely to be on public BLM lands (for example, the Salt Wells, Adobe Town, Great Divide, and White Mountains HMAs) earlier in that same day or later that same evening. Essentially, in contrast to other areas of the country where wild horses still exist, on the Wyoming Checkerborad there is no way to distinguish between horses on “private” lands and those on public lands, and therefore it would be unprecedented, and indeed impossible for BLM to contend that it is removing all horses on RSGA’s “private” lands at any given time of the year, month, or day, considering that those horses would only be on the strictly “private” lands very temporarily and intermittently on any particular day .
5. Traditionally, BLM officials (myself included) have understood that, pursuant to the Wild Horse Act, wild horses have a right to use BLM lands, so long as their population numbers do not cause unacceptable damage to vegetation or other resources. In stark contrast, however, livestock (sheep and cattle) have no similar right to use BLM lands; rather, livestock owners may be granted the privilege of using BLM lands for livestock grazing pursuant to a grazing permit that is granted by BLM under the Taylor Grazing Act, but that privilege can be revoked, modified, or amended by BLM for various reasons, including for damage to vegetation or other resources caused by livestock, or due to sparse forage available to sustain livestock after wild horses are accounted for. BLM’s tentative agreement here does the opposite and instead prioritizes livestock over wild horses, by proposing to remove hundreds of wild horses from the Wyoming Checkerboard without reducing livestock numbers – which, in my view, is contrary to the laws governing BLM’s actions as those mandates were explained to me and administered during the decades that I was a BLM official.
6. While I do not agree with every management action taken by BLM over the years in the Rock Springs District, I can attest – based on my longstanding employment with BLM and my active monitoring of the agency’s activities during retirement – that BLM has generally proven capable of removing wild horses in the Rock Springs District, including by responding to emergency situations when needed and removing horses when necessary due to resource damage.
7. Considering that wild horses exhibit different foraging patterns and movement patterns than sheep and cattle, and also than big game such as antelope and elk, no sound biological basis exists for permanently removing wild horses from the Wyoming Checkerboard at this time. In particular, wild horses tend to hang out in the uplands at a greater distance from water sources until they come to briefly drink water every day or two, whereas livestock congregate near water sources and riparian habitat causing concentrated damage to vegetation and soil. For this reason, the impacts of wild horses are far less noticeable on the Checkerboard than impacts from livestock.
8. In addition, because livestock tend to eat somewhat different forage than wild horses (horses tend to eat coarser vegetation such as Canadian wild rye and other bunch grasses, whereas cattle and sheep mostly eat softer grasses), there is no justification to remove wild horses on the basis that insufficient forage exists to support the current population of wild horses. Also, because cattle and sheep have no front teeth on the front part of their upper jaws, they tend to pull and tear grasses or other forage out by the root causing some long-term damage to vegetation, whereas wild horses, which have front teeth on both their front upper and lower jaws, act more like a lawnmower and just clip the grass or forage (leaving the root uninjured), allowing the vegetation to quickly grow back. These differences are extremely significant because if there were a need to reduce the use of these BLM lands by animals to preserve these public lands, it might be cattle and sheep – not wild horses – that should be reduced to gain the most benefit for the lands, and which is why BLM, during my time as an agency official, focused on reducing livestock grazing.
9. BLM’s agreement with RSGA states that RSGA’s conservation plan limited livestock grazing, primarily by sheep, to the winter months to provide sufficient winter forage. This is a good example of “multiple use” management, since wild horses and sheep have very little competition for the forage they consume and the seasons during which they use parts of the Checkerboard. During winter, sheep use the high deserts and horses utilize the uplands and breaks (i.e., different locations) for forage and protection. During the summer, when sheep are not present, wild horses use various landscapes on the Checkerboard. This multiple use should continue for the benefit of the livestock, the wild horses, and the public and private lands involved.
10. I am also very concerned about BLM’s agreement with RSGA to permanently zero out the Salt Wells HMA and the Divide Basin HMA, leaving no wild horses in those areas that have long contained wild horses. I have been to fifteen of the sixteen HMAs in Wyoming, and to my knowledge none has ever been zeroed out by BLM. It is my view, based on everything I know about these areas and the way these public lands are used by wild horses and livestock, that BLM has no biological or ecological basis for zeroing out a herd of wild horses in an HMA that existed at the time the wild horse statute was passed in 1971, as is the case with both the Salt Wells and Divide Basin HMAs. And, again, because the wild horses have a statutory right to be there, whereas livestock only have a privilege that can be revoked at any time
by BLM, there also is no authority or precedent, to my knowledge, for the agency to zero out these two longstanding wild horse herds simply to appease private livestock grazers.
11. The zeroing out of wild horses in the Salt Wells and Divide Basin HMAs is also concerning because it would mean that, in those two longstanding HMAs, there would no longer be the “multiple use” of these public lands as required by both the Wild Horse Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Currently, while there are other uses of this public land, such as by wildlife, hunters, and recreational users, the two primary uses in those HMAs are by wild horses and livestock. If BLM proceeds with its agreement with RSGA to zero out wild horses in those HMAs, the only major use remaining would be livestock use, meaning that there would be no multiple use of those BLM lands. Not only will that potentially undermine the laws that BLM officials must implement here, but it has practical adverse effects on the resources – multiple use is very beneficial for the environment, and particularly for sensitive vegetation, because different users (e.g., livestock, wild horses) use the lands and vegetation in different ways. When that is eliminated, the resources are subjected to an unnatural use of the lands which can cause severe long-term damage to the vegetation. As a result, zeroing out these herds would likely bedevastating for the vegetation in these two HMAs, because livestock would be by far the predominant use in this area.
12. Turning the White Mountain HMA into a non-reproducing herd, as the agreement between BLM and RSGA proposes to do, is also a farce, and violates the meaning of a wild and free-roaming animal. This is essentially a slow-motion zeroing out of this HMA, and is inconsistent with any wild horse management approach I am familiar with that BLM has implemented on public lands.
Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1746, I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.
Lloyd Eisenhauer
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Thanks rt…great iinfo Louie. Rt consider it done…..
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Will call.
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Will call thanks
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You bet I’ll call! I’m sick of this rogue agency that believes and acts like they are above all law. Thank you, Louie C., and as always, R.T.!
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Reblogged this on Wonder and Whimsy, Beauty and Soul.
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Reblogged this on "OUR WORLD".
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Thanks to Carol Walker and RT for sharing the information we need to hopefully help make a difference. With free materials and free labor being offered, why the refusal when the horses are in such need?! It makes no sense. Lloyd’s Declaration certainly did, however; with facts no one can deny.
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will do.
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Thanks for the info! Refusing free offers of help is the last of last straws!
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My letter (to Guiifoyle and Roberson and Bolstad and the members of the WH&B advisory board and the president and my representaives etc…) included quotes and links but it started off like this:
“You are born wild and free roaming – born in the wild, into a wild family and your whole world is wild and free. Then you are kidnapped from your homeland and family and everything that has been your whole world from the day you were born is stolen from you and you are deposited in a small barren corral. You will never know freedom. You will live as a prisoner the rest of your life even though you are innocent of any wrongdoing.” Followed by the photo by Carol Walker.
If you did not have time to send letters or call today – please do it tomorrow.
jguilfoy@blm.gov, eroberso@blm.gov, dbolstad@blm.gov,
Board Members:
mustangs@infowest.com, rubyredhorse@gmail.com, timotico@gmail.com, jstephen@yakama.com, bspratling75@gmail.com, callie.whbab@gmail.com, rebray@csupomona.edu, jlfalen@gmail.com, rdanvir@ari-slc.com,
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Beautiful and well written! Made my calls, but many were left with leaving messages. Thanks for posting the Board Members email addresses. The lack of concern for their welfare, especially when free materials and labor are being offered, is very troubling and sad.
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I refuse to vote for anyone that is a part of this horrific animal abuse!
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Why are the horses being made to suffer?
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The public was NOT included in the negotiations and subsequent agreement between the Department of Interior and the RSGA. The implementation of the Proposed Action was against the law and resulted in numerous violations of Wild Horse protection and land use planning laws.
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