“The BLM uses a lame excuse to round up more wild horses near a remote highway. BLM should re-locate the wild horses farther from the highway on this 280,000 acre HMA (see map HERE), or to another HMA. Instead, the BLM seems to be exceeding its authority by removing the wild horses PERMANENTLY from public lands. The BLM auctioned off older mares captured last summer from Sulphur, Utah, to someone in Oregon for $25 with free delivery to misc. sites – including some VERY questionable locations that have been known to have kill-buyers lurking. ” – Debbie
SOURCE: The Salt Lake Tribune
BLM to round up wild horses near remote Utah highway
By BRIAN MAFFLY
Bureau of Land Management wranglers will return to Utah’s West Desert in February to remove dozens of wild horses congregating along a remote highway.
Federal land managers say the horses are a danger to themselves and motorists.
Suspected collisions killed three horses found dead along State Road 21 last winter, according to Chad Hunter, a range and wild-horse specialists in BLM’s Cedar City office.
“We were able to remove 30 head last summer. There were additional horses in the area that we tried to move away. They have moved back in,” Hunter said. “We have excess numbers and they are looking for space.”
The agency is fast-tracking an environmental review of the roundup, which is connected with a multiphase project to pull hundreds of horses from Utah’s Sulphur Herd Management Area, a 280,000-acre block straddling Millard and Beaver counties.
Last week, the BLM initiated an Environmental Analysis of a proposal to reduce the herd’s numbers to between 165 and 250 horses. This year’s estimate for the herd is 718, Hunter said, and that doesn’t include this year’s foals.
Wild horses are a contentious issue in Utah’s West Desert and Nevada, where ranchers and county commissioners complain the BLM is allowing horses to overrun the range, which leaves less forage available for cattle.
Animal-welfare advocates allege that cows, which far outnumber horses, are degrading the range. The BLM needs to allow wild horses room to roam rather than continually rounding them up for long-term storage at enormous public expense, advocates say.
In the middle of this struggle is the BLM, which is under pressure from the state to remove horses. Land managers hope contraception can become a more prominent tool in the agency’s wild horse and burro program, which has relied heavily on controversial helicopter gathers.
The BLM tries to adopt out horses, but most spend the rest of their lives in corals. Some mares are returned to the range after they are given a contraceptive.
The agency soon will be accepting public comment on its proposal to pare down the Sulphur herd, which was the subject of a roundup in 2010.
“This is a 10-year plan to get the herd to the appropriate management level as we get funding, and it includes fertility control,” Hunter said.
But the removal of some 100 horses along State Road 21, a narrow strip of highway connecting Milford and Garrison, cannot wait. The February roundup will target a lonely 10-mile stretch in Millard County just west of the Desert Range Experimental Station, where the Pine and Snake valleys meet. The area is just outside the northern margin of the Sulphur HMA.
Categories: Horse News, Wild Horses/Mustangs
Straight from the Horse's Heart 
THE BLM IS FILLED WITH A BUNCH OF WANNA BE COWBOYS. THEY USE CRUEL AND SADISTIC MEASURES TO ROUND UP WILD HORSES THAT SHOULD REMAIN WILD. THERE ARE SO FEW WILD HORSES LEFT, THEY SHOULD JUST BE LEFT ALONE IN THE WILD. THE CATTLE OUTNUMBER THE HORSE 1,000 TO ONE, AND THAT IS A CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATE. THE GREEDY CATTLE RANCHERS ARE BEING EVEN MORE GREEDY AS EACH DAY PASSES. OUR WILD HORSES ARE AN ICON IN THE WEST, AND SHOULD BE LEFT THERE IN PEACE !!!
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Since the 1971 WFRHB law appears to have been fractured by the 2005 coming into force of the International Plant Protection Convention, calling for an immediate repeal to the IPPC or to the inclusion of the horse as alien, invasive terrestrial vertebrate, grazing herbivore rather than a native species could render the treaty invalid–and without the treaty, there should be no legal authority to enforce all the RMP’s that were put into place in 1993 or shortly thereafter—at least as soon as 1996 when the Clinton administration knew that the FAO would include Article 8 (h) in the IPPC. They needed 10 years to use the resource management plan to plan the wild horse and burro lands and possibly livestock grazing off the land if the horses were covered under federal law.
Another possibility may be to use the language that Congress used in the original law when they declared the horses living monuments to the history of the West. I don’t if anyone has tried to use this approach in the past, but I read an article about law suits seeking to undo President Clinton’s designation of so much land in Utah as a national monument where this was discussed as it related to the inappropriate use of the Antiquities Law and other laws that are federal law through treaty but are inferior to federal law. Just a couple of thoughts
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Don’t you know that these rounded up wild horses are s cash cow to the BLM? Hell, you said it yourself…enormous expense to tax payers… If they don’t get the money, they ship them over the border for slaughter along with every one that they can sneak out without people noticing. Dammit, wake up and smell the coffee…
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Utah 41-6-38. Livestock on highway
(1) A person owning or in possession or control of any livestock may not willfully or negligently permit any of the livestock to stray or remain unaccompanied by a person in charge or control of the livestock upon a highway, both sides of which are adjoined by property which is separated from the highway by a fence, wall, hedge, sidewalk, curb, lawn, or building. THIS SUBSECTION DOES NOT APPLY TO RANGE STOCK DRIFTING ONTO ANY HIGHWAY IN GOING TO OR RETURNING FROM THEIR ACCUSTOMED RANGES.
Why should this be any different for wild horses, particularly in a remote area?
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Very excellent point!
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I don’t understand why they can’t relocate them farther out in the range! They do it with other wildlife why not the horses, that’s what they are wildlife NOT livestock!! Wildlife that’s suppose to be on the range, NOT holding pens, that’s for livestock!
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Exactly!
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When will there be a mass awareness of what’s going on? When will the rest of the brainwashed people ever do anything? They won’t. This is a very sad world but until a large group of people stand up to these bastards, nothing will happen!
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You are all right, the BLM is wrong and have been wrong….inmost of what they do , and they know it and they do it and our president knows it and lets it go on and on.
Call the white house and protest 1 202 456 1111 leave a message.
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Its disgusting that they do what ever they please without any accountability. It appears if the European Union enforces their regulations both Mexico and Canada will not be receiving any horses from the US. So what will be their plan then? I hope the new regulations put the auctions and the “killer buyers” out of business. Again, these states are not void of being a state within the US, which means all the Wild Horses and Burros belong to all of us not individual states because the animals reside there! Although we have many national parks in the Midwest, we do not allow livestock owners to run their animals on that land. Why do they think they are entitled to do this out West?
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