‘In my most Outraged Opinion!’ by R.T. Fitch
“Is it just me…?”
Secretary Zinke and BLM Plan for Wild Horses and Burros
For years we U.S. Taxpayers, who have decried the excessive removal of protected wild horses and burros from their rightful range, have been deluged with bogus numbers, bad science and just plain bull crap by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and their deep pocketed bed-fellows. Today, we are seeing it reach new heights and becoming even more toxic for the wild horses and burros; it has to stop
It’s bad enough that we have a long time horse slaughter advocate, Ryan Zinke, appointed as Secretary of the Department of Interior, (Remember back in 2009 when Montana Rep. Zinke promoted “Red” Ed Butcher’s bill to legalize horse slaughter plants in Montana? Now he has the reins of the DoI and already is attempting to send wild horses and burros in holding and on the range into mass graves.) But now we have Horse Eaters of the past crawling out from underneath their moldy rocks in an effort to taste the blood of our iconic symbols of the west.
In a recent ‘news’ article, long time Horse Hater and former member of the BLM’s rigged Wild Horse & Burro Advisory Board, Callie Hendrickson has reared her horse killer head and assumed the thorny throne of chief disseminator of rumor, innuendo and trumped up numbers.
“The bottom line is we have pushing 100,000 excess horses and we have to do something,” she said.
What the hell? 100,000 excess horses, where did you dig up that number? Have you actually been sitting out on the range with your iPad and taking notes or is that, obviously, a number that was just pulled out of your backside as a matter of convenience?
Nobody, and I mean nobody has an accurate account of how many horses are on the range and the BLM has no interest in counting. Wild Horse advocates who spend time on the range estimate anywhere from between 27,000 to 36,000 wild horss are still on the range and most of the whittled down herds are no longer genetically viable due to the BLM’s unlawful practice of ripping herds apart in direct violation of federal law. So what makes you so special, Callie, and who made you the SME on a subject that you know nothing about.
Oh yeah, and what the crap does “excess horses” mean? What is the definition and where is the data to support such BS? (being rude to bulls, here) This is just the sort of misinformation that the BLM and Zinke are laying on Congress and the Senate in an effort to have the wild horses an burros killed.
Zinke is asking Congress to remove the limits on destroying healthy, unadopted equines or selling them for slaughtering and processing for commercial products; gotta love it and this is all going on in plain view and little is being done to counter it. Where is the outrage?
Hendrickson said public lands will support 27,000 of the animals, but there are 72,000 out there not counting this year’s new foals, as well as another 47,000 in holding facilities, which costs taxpayers $50 million a year for feed and care. Every year, another 15,000 wild horses are being born, she said.
More BS as the numbers change and continue to climb every time you read an article in mainstream news. Where are the documented sources and where is the data? The only number that is close to correct is the number of horses that have been stripped from their rightful range where costs were ZERO, ZIP, NADDA and now are held in herds of broken families waiting for their lives to end. Easy fix; put them back on their rightful range, where you took them from and now allow welfare cattle to graze, and put the cows back on the cattle ranches. Cost = ZERO! Cows on ranches, wild horses on wild horse ranges…simple; make sense?
The horses and burros are coming up to a cross roads as we have never had, at any one point in time, such a concentrated effort to kill all of the horses in holding and murder the remaining horses and burros on the range. That reality is with us, right now.
We must stop this, we need to put this debate behind us and educate our legislators on the fact that the BLM and Zinke are feeding them nothing but Fake News, misinformation and pure unequivocal lies.
The threat is real, the fix is in our hands…please click (HERE) for more information on how to help and make a difference, we can make it happen. We HAVE to make it happen.
Categories: Horse News, Horse Slaughter, Wild Burros, Wild Horses/Mustangs
Straight from the Horse's Heart 
Reblogged this on Equine Preservation of North America -EPONA.
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It is about to become even harder to fight for the wild one’s with Sinclair Broadcasting spewing their rhetoric as well. #cutthecord Here is the list of stations that will be broadcasting more “fake news” soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
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Wow – does the word “monopoly” come to mind? I deliberately do not watch Fox news – but sadly seems they are getting their agenda across – no matter what anyone says!
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Sinclair bought our local stations. They repeat annually same exact news stories, you know feed the news starve the truth.
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Some SINGLE grazing allotments allow 10,000 sheep on public lands, in a single area.
We all know the “27,000” horses figure was nothing but an estimate made in the 1970s, and is was identified as an estimate even then, but somehow has become set in stone as though real scientists had really counted all the wild horses and burros roaming our public lands back then, which did not happen.
The carrying capacity of our public lands us far from 27,000 wild horses and burros, even when the legal horse areas have been reduced by nearly half since 1971. Does anyone believe if all our wild horses are gone through attrition, disease, PZP and removals that other species (including livestock) won’t immediately fill the vacuum? That is, if nobody sells of the water rights first.
The 1971 law REQUIRED an accurate census, which still doesn’t exist. Modeling is only modeling, not field data, and modeling should not be used to exterminate living, breathing, free-roaming and federally protected species owned by the public.
Any useful census would also include accurate and current accounting for all other uses of public lands in the West, including livestock grazing, mining, logging and all forms of recreation. Anything less is folly or suspect opinion, and should not be used to inform life and death decisions made on our behalf and at our expense. We can and must demand more from our public employees!
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If we have so-called “starving horses” on public lands, welfare ranchers should know better than to have their cattle graze on the same land. I guess they don’t care if their cows starve.
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Hooves, the livestock grazing generally is allowed only during the prime growing season – to ensure they get the most abundant forage, while wild horses and burros must survive there year-round. No decent rancher will ever let their stock starve, but if the claims horses are “starving” are true, they damn only the BLM, who has the authority to rescind, revoke, or modify grazing leases, and it seems nearly all our remaining legal wild horse and burro areas also contain prime-season grazing leases.
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For those who want to write the Senate Appropriations Committee the address is: int@appro.senate.gov Supposedly, the staff will read the e-mails and forward them to Sen. Murkowski. The senators are still working until August 7 or the 13th before taking recess; decisions will be made in Sept/Oct. They have been getting e-mails regarding the request to decrease BLM’s budget. The other senators on the committee are here: https://www.appropriations.senate.gov/subcommittees/interior-environment-and-related-agencies
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Here is the DOI Budget for 2018 Page II-1 shows the requests and Page II-4 is the justification in their eyes. https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/uploads/fy2018_blm_budget_justification.pdf
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Thank you RT for continuing to have “THE OUTRAGE “……..and keeping it alive thru this blog. ….may it continue to grow louder and forceful …..until every wild horse and burro is safe…..
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DEPARTMENT OF INTERIOR/MISSING MONEY
Missing from President Trump’s budget: Funds for California’s earthquake early warning system
By Rong-Gong Lin IIContact Reporter
The budget document posted on the U.S. DEPARTMENT OF INTERIOR’S website did not elaborate on the reason for cutting the alert system, saying only: “This elimination would end USGS efforts to implement the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system.”
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-trump-budget-earthquake-early-warning-20170525-htmlstory.html
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This is so outrageously painful, I truly don’t follow anyof their reasoning, their fake numbers, etc. All I know is I am with you & following you, & passing the news around. Go in Peace, my brother.
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Talk by Michael Blake, Dances With Wolves author/filmmaker, at Stop-the-Roundups press conference preceding a national meeting of the federal Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board.
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In 2016 I submitted a request to California Fish and Wildlife to list our state’s wild horses as distinct population segments based on local fossil evidence. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife Karen Miner Environmental Program Manager (Karen.Miner@wildlife.ca.gov) responded “ “ When and if available scientific information convinces the experts that determine the checklist of native species to North America that Equus caballus should be considered as an indigenous species, they will make the change in the next revision to the list, and then we would take that fact into consideration for inclusion on our state animal lists.”
The process for rewilding wildlife horse and burro herds is through Resource Management Plan AMENDMENTS.
(Mountain States v. Hodel) The court found “ In structure and purpose, the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act is nothing more than a land-use regulation enacted by Congress to ensure the survival of a particular species of wildlife noting that wild horses and burros are no less “wild” animals than are the grizzly bears that roam our national parks and forests.
The first case to challenge the 1971 FREE ROAMING Wild Horse and Burro Act was in the 1976 case of New Mexico v Kleepe. Justice Thurgood Marshall, representing the court’s unanimous opinion, found the Free Roaming Wild Horse and Burro Act to be Constitutional, and that the Property Clause gave Congress the power to protect wildlife (horses and burros) on the public lands, state law notwithstanding.
Subsequently in 2009 United States District Judge Rosemary M Collyer, stated “ It would be anomalous to infer that by authorizing the custodian of the wild free-roaming horses and burros to “manage” them, Congress intended to permit the animals’ custodian to subvert the primary policy of the statute by capturing and removing from the wild the very animals that Congress sought to protect from being captured and removed from the wild.”
CA has 45, 864,800 acres of federal lands and 100,206,720 acres of State Lands. The US federal government owns 640 million acres of land and about 28% of the nation’s total surface, 2.27 billion acres. Wild horse/burro populations constitute less than one percent of wildlife and livestock grazing on the public domain.
The available habitat may not be competing with Mining and Ranching
Please consider The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976(FLPMA) which provides for additional habitat as ACECs, which facilitates the need of special management attention. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_of_Critical_Environmental_Concern.
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http://www.kunc.org/post/seminars-steamboat-presenter-tackles-fake-news-era-viral-deception
Seminars At Steamboat Presenter Tackles Fake News In An Era Of Viral Deception
By Tom Ross
Kathleen Hall Jamieson speaking at the first Seminars at Steamboat talk, July 10, 2017.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson kicked off the 15th season of the Seminars at Steamboat by kicking the term “fake news” to the margins in favor of a far more loathed affliction – VD.
“By virtue of saying ‘fake news,’ we ask the question, ‘Well, what is real news?’ and you invite people to label everything they disapprove of as ‘fake news,'” Hall Jamieson said earlier this year during an interview on CNN. “As a result, it’s not a useful concept. What are we really concerned about? Deception. And deception of a certain sort that goes viral.”
The term “viral deception” can be abbreviated as VD, Hall Jamieson deadpanned before her audience in Steamboat Springs, Colo. And more than fake news, VD is something society doesn’t want or need. But her play on words was also created as part of a deliberate strategy.
“I thought we needed to break the label, ‘fake news,’ and put it in a context that makes you think about it differently. Hence VD. I don’t want it. I don’t want to transmit it. I don’t want it given to me, and I don’t want to give it to anyone else,” Hall Jamieson said, earning loud laughter from her overflow audience in the Steamboat Music Festival pavilion.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson kicking off the 15th season of the Seminars at Steamboat with a talk about fake news. Music: “When I’m With You (extended version)” by Scott Holmes
A professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the co-founder of the non-partisan website FactCheck.org, Hall Jamieson is intent on furthering the ability of individuals within society to learn to recognize the patterns that reveal viral deception. She also wants citizens to recognize their own vulnerability to deceptive news reports that do not originate from legitimate journalists.
One of the most egregious examples in recent years, she said, was a false report in a British publication insinuating that First Lady Melania Trump may have worked as an escort in the 1990s. The publication was sued and paid $2.9 million to settle, in addition to publishing a retraction.
But President Donald Trump also plays the viral deception game.
“What Trump specializes in is shifting the burden of proof,” Hall Jamieson told her CNN interviewer. “Making a charge with no evidence and then asking for an investigation shifts the burden of proof.”
In order for people to recognize their susceptibility to misleading and false news reports, it’s necessary to recognize humans beings have a natural tendency to look more favorably upon messages from people who think like they do, Hall Jamieson said Monday night.
“We have human vulnerabilities that can lead people to struggle to process (information) in certain circumstances,” she said.”About one in four people report sharing fabricated news. Why? At the time, they were in a like-minded group.”
It’s also the case with human nature, that people perceive accuracy in messages they have heard repeatedly. It will take an effort by earnest people to combat the proliferation of viral deception in print and electronic media, according to Hall Jamieson.
She believes it’s important for voters to learn to recognize the patterns of political ads on television, especially those campaign ads, for both Democrats and Republicans, that attract viewers with statements of fact, but ultimately misrepresent the truth.
“The most deceptive ads are those that begin with statements that are plausible and even accurate,” she said, but “when you recognize the pattern, when you see the first inaccurate statement, you think, ‘deceptive.'”
Hall Jamieson said both Facebook and Google are becoming more proactive in helping their users to recognize and reconsider viral deception when they stumble upon it. FactCheck.org is working with Facebook to alert the social media outlet’s users that a particular link or story has already been refuted before they share it.
And Google is adjusting search algorithms to make recommendations based on whether or not they have been fact-checked, rather than routinely pointing searchers to the most popular sites that pertain to their inquiry.
Finally, in response to a question from a member of her Steamboat audience about whether society can survive the era of viral deception, Hall Jamieson recalled the political turmoil and disinformation of the Vietnam War era from 1968 to 1972.
“Some of the experts were not telling us the truth and that is problematic in a democracy,” she said. “We got through that, and that’s why I’m confident that we can do this now,” she said, but it will require “arming an informed, caring public to recognize pernicious speech,” when they encounter it.
This article was originally published by Steamboat Today on July 10, 2017.
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Really good article, Icy and I did comment on it. She’s saying what we all have been saying & writing for some time – only, for us, its mainly about the wild horses & burros.
I do have to say I no longer hide my feelings under a bushel basket!! Maybe thats because I’m getting to the point where I really dont care whether someone else agrees or not! Guess thats what old age does for you. Wish I had learned that a long time ago, know what I mean?
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I noticed Callow slipped out from under her rock and followed the slime trail to her 1 zillion ga billion wild horse stats. Boy they just can’t stop wanting to Roast wild horses. They cannot count, they are unable to track their own printed lies, they induce arguments and try to discredit everyone that’s against them. Gosh this is shaping up like a spaghetti western. We have The Wild Horses, the lowly Sherrif unable or unwilling to Control the band of foul playing bad guys who also were known to live under rocks and we now have to mount up and ride in to convince the Sherrif (Congress) to save the day. Seriously folks we are the Only Voice, America speaks for these horses and the Sherrif (Congress) isnt lowly….they are Very Powerful. We have to remind them Cowboys didn’t shoot a horse until every effort to save its life was exhausted and no matter how many times Chris Stewart waves a skeletal photo that means instead of killing healthy horses and shooting an ematiacted one, we have to Convince Congress to pull out every stop including feeding that one horse Stewart awesome a proud animal abuser would. You feed the starving, you find work and homes for the healthy. You don’t give up because oh my there’s in their fake news too many horses. If you are a Rancher and you have too many then you can choose to kill yours. This is serious, these are a handful of unverified cattle ranchers, Not professional horsemen attempting to condone violence towards an incredible number of horses they don’t own or have any property rights to. These men and women condoning violence which is death because a horse starved in indicative of animal abusers. It’s their MO. Abusers such as these including Chirs Stewart and Callie appearing to have a love for something they want to kill off is narcissistic and appalling. The facts are as follows. When a horse is starving ….you feed it. It’s thirsty ….you water it. These same abusers who want to kill the wild horses scream there’s no natural deaths on the range for horses, they have No oredators. That’s absolutely incorrect….prohorse slaughter and the Bureau wanting to kill them are Definite definitions of predators. No, these horses do not deserve abuse so let’s stop these abusers. Period. Zink e should recuse himself from the issue sin e he is sworn to uphold the Wild Horse and Burro Act and remove himself from assisting in their destruction or step down from his position It’s A DIRECT conflict of Interest.
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Did you notice USA today, CNN Fox etcetera published the House Voted for horse slaughter but didn’t print the Senate was Voting against it? Omission of the facts creates a false story as well.
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Go online & look at the Paulick Report (thats where I found an article by the American Horse Council) AND wrote a comment – since the Council “has no position” on horse slaughter! Article could use some more comments, I think.
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Hope this isn’t fake news, because its good news:
“After years of investigative work by the Animal Welfare Foundation, its partners in Uruguay, and hundreds of thousands of SumOfUs members like you taking action, Merck, Sharp and Dohme (MSD) has cut all ties with horse blood farms in South America!
Together, we’ve moved a pharma giant. Together, we are a force to be reckoned with. But we cannot stop here.
Cruel horse blood farms will still operate as long as there are pharma companies willing to buy their products — and the next big player could step in and take over the business MSD has left behind.
Will you share our campaign against IDT Biologika with your friends? The more we are, the better our chances of getting IDT Biologika to stop working with these torturous blood farms as well.
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Dear Friends,
Big pharma is making huge profits from the torture of horses. Thousands of horses are raised purely for the purpose of having their blood extracted and sold — with dire consequences.
It’s a sickening business that the SumOfUs community has been standing up against for months. And together we just scored a major victory against it! Pharma giant Merck, Sharp and Dohme (MSD) cut all ties with the most notorious blood farms we know about!
Now we need to stop the next big player — IDT Biologika — from stepping in and taking over the business MSD has left behind.
Can you help?
Click here to sign the petition.
Blood farms in Uruguay and Argentina de TSB|AWF, Animal Welfare Foundation.
PMSG STELLUNGNAHME, MSD Animal Health (“PMSG statement”, in German), 12 July, 2017.
Pferdeblut in der Schweinezucht (“Horse blood in the big industry”, in German). MDR Kultur, 31 January, 2017.
Turning Horse Blood into Profits, The Dodo, 2 October, 2015.
Blood farms, Animal Welfare Foundation.
Wie Pharmakonzerne mit Pferdeblut Geschäfte machen (“This is how pharmaceutical companies turn horse blood into profits”, in German), Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 29 September, 2015.
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SumOfUs is a community of people from around the world committed to curbing the growing power of corporations. We want to buy from, work for and invest in companies that respect the environment, treat their workers well and respect democracy. And we’re not afraid to stand up to them when they don’t.
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Reblogged this on "OUR WORLD".
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