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1. Is there an announcement or introduction of the new members? Looking for a list of who will legally be on the board during the meeting, and their specific areas of expertise. I believe there are three new members?

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   • Here are some links:

     https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-names-3-new-members-national-wild-horse-and-burro-advisory-board

     https://rtfitchauthor.com/2018/09/29/blm-appoints-barry-l-perryman-a-member-of-the-2017-utah-slaughter-summit-to-the-blm-national-wild-horse-burro-advisory-board/

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     • Thanks! Had read here of Perryman but not the other two.

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2. Well, I sat here & read or skimmed thru last years meeting & what was said. Didnt get to watch the whole thing last year. One thing I really got out of it is Ben Master’s continuous push for killing “excess” wild horses. That appeared to be his main objective on the Board. He pushed it again & again. Not that others were all that hesitant, either. Ginger made a lot of points – every time she could. Her term is up in March, 2019!!! It seems that Weikel & Wohl are re- appointed again. After going thru most comments & reading most of this – frankly, I’m more frustrated than I was before! This “board” – as it has been – is nothing more than a bulldozer to push thru equine extinction.

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   • A person on the board that is part of the unwanted horse coalition…..that is aka for bringing back horse slaughter in the United States! I did an extensive research paper on slaughter for an Equine Science Class and listened to alot of their ideas. Mustangs are not unwanted horses…buffalo are not unwanted, COWS are unwanted!!!!

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3. Ed Abbey called it the “Bureau of Livestock and Mines.” Less creative writers call it the “Bureau of Land Mismanagement.” It sometimes calls itself “the nation’s leading conservation agency.” Whatever you call it, the Bureau of Land Management manages more land than any other entity in the United States.
   If it is also true that, as a Sierra Club book once said, BLM lands are the “lands no one knows,” then the BLM itself is the agency no one knows. Most western environmentalists, for example, have focused on the more glamorous Forest Service or Park Service.

   People active in public lands issues know that the BLM manages about 264 million acres of land–the lands “left over” after homesteaders, timber companies, land developers, states, the Forest Service, Park Service, and other private parties and agencies took the lands they wanted. They know that most BLM lands are used for grazing, that it has negligible timber outside of western Oregon, and that the Bureau also manages mineral rights on both its land and most other federal lands.

   But how many people know that BLM managers get to spend some of their oil and gas receipts on range improvements? How many know that a large share of BLM timber receipts goes to the Bureau of Reclamation to subsidize irrigation? How many know that Congress recently let the BLM keep salvage sale receipts to spend on “ecosystem health”? And how many know that BLM payments to states range anywhere from 4 percent all the way to a whopping 90 percent?

   Each of these decisions represents a bit of pork, a favor Congress handed out to some special interest at everyone else’s expense–and, often, with a serious environmental cost as well. Yet even though the BLM manages nearly one-third more land than the Forest Service, the agency remains largely unknown to the general public.

   This is partly true because the BLM tends to be fairly secretive about what it does: Research for this issue of Different Drummer took much longer than expected because the BLM sometimes takes months to provide information that the Forest Service hands out in an instant.

   Despite delays, Different Drummer presents reports on several aspects of the BLM. First is a detailed paper on BLM timber outside of western Oregon. This article, which was originally prepared for the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, finds that several BLM districts are cutting far more timber than they can sustain. Then come reports on BLM recreation and minerals, and a proposal by Andy Kerr to reform BLM (and Forest Service) grazing policies.

   This issue also contains a comparison of receipts and costs on each of the 60 BLM districts. The analysis shows that most districts lose money on all of their major resources: timber, grazing, minerals, and recreation. No one in the BLM seems to care about these losses; no one even keeps track of revenues vs. expenses.
   This is not surprising, since Congress has always focused on physical outputs rather than profitability. This has allowed the Bureau to become wasteful and inefficient. Even if physical outputs were an appropriate goal, those outputs could be produced at a far lower cost.

   The BLM’s numerous environmental problems–conflicts between mining and water, grazing and recreation, and timber and wildlife–can all be traced to this disregard for efficiency. Managers with incentives to efficiently produce the resources with the greatest value would manage to avoid such problems.

   The BLM is far from a model agency. Yet its failings derive directly from Congress and only Congress can fix it. We conclude with a proposal for reforming the BLM. But any reform would be an improvement as long as it gave agency managers an incentive to reduce costs and increase the value of the resources in their care.
   http://www.ti.org/blmintro.html

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4. The BLM and Grazing

   The 1946 debates over the Grazing Service led the Secretary of the Interior to combine that agency with the General Land Office to form the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM inherited the Grazing Service’s mission of managing the public domain while it was still public and the General Land Office’s mission of disposing of the public domain. In the eyes of some cattlemen, it was a temporary agency only necessary until they could gain title to the public domain.
   But the Bureau survived and managed to hold on to most of its lands until 1976. In that year, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), which ended the policy of land disposal. This law–which was largely written by the BLM–attempted to bring that agency up to Forest Service standards by prescribing inventories, a planning process, and sustained-yield and multiple-use management.

   FLPMA also readjusted the distribution of grazing fees, with 50 percent going to range improvement. Two years later, the Public Rangelands Improvement Act helped ranchers by fixing grazing fees well below market levels with a grazing fee formula that is still used today.

   http://www.ti.org/blmintro.html

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5. I’m listening to the Sage Grouse as well as the desert tortoise that lives in the frickin desert ruse and aren’t cows more destructive to their habitat than horses? The Sage Grouse and Wild Horses were together before any humanity were here as well as INTRODUCED COWS.

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   • I’ve seen a video from a camera documenting a Sage Grouse nest which shows a cow eating the eggs. Can’t get more destructive than that!

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