By Carol Walker as published on Wild Hoofbeats The Wild Horse Herd is still there but so are Hundreds of Privately Owned Sheep In the last month, I have visited and photographed the horses of Sand Wash Basin on two trips. I had the wonderful experience of having […]
WICHITA, Kansas — Deep in the heart of The Flint Hills, the ground gives warning of what is coming; thousands of horses, more wild than their name could ever suggest, thundering across Kansas in a spectacle many don’t even know exists.
A new federal assessment of rangelands in the West finds a disturbingly large portion fails to meet range health standards principally due to commercial livestock operations. In the last decade as more land has been assessed, estimates of damaged lands have doubled in the 13-state Western area where the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) conducts major livestock leasing.
An American court has rejected a decision of the US Bureau of Land Management to ignore submitted scientific evidence in its decision-making process over plans to castrate wild stallions.
WASHINGTON (CN) – The Bureau of Land Management “may not simply remain studiously ignorant of material scientific evidence” just because an email error delayed its receipt of the evidence, a federal judge has ruled.
WASHINGTON, DC – Bureau of Land Management Director Robert Abbey announced today that he will retire from public service at the end of May to rejoin his family full-time in Mississippi. Appointed by President Obama in 2009, Director Abbey’s three-year tenure in leadership of the nation’s largest land management agency marks the culmination of a 34 year career of state and federal service.
Washington, DC – May 10, 2012 – The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has rejected an attempt by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to withhold and ignore critical scientific evidence in its decision-making process for the implementation of a precedent-setting plan to castrate wild stallions. At issue were expert declarations submitted to the BLM from leading experts in wild horse behavior and biology outlining the devastating impacts of castration on the health and natural behaviors of wild free-roaming stallions and wild horse herds.
It surely cannot be easy these days being Joan Guilfoyle, the (relatively) new director of the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program. On the one hand she works for a federal agency, the Interior Department, which is largely beholden to the powerful industries it is supposed to regulate. And on the other hand, she is responsible, under federal law and policy, for ensuring the survival and management of the nation’s wild horses at a time when relentless political and economic forces threaten to decimate the herds.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is investigating the shooting deaths of nearly a dozen federally protected wild horses and offering a $10,000 reward in connection with the four separate incidents reported in California and Nevada since the beginning of the year, agency officials said Monday.
Officially, anyway, the news that the BLM is finally willing to consider a public-private partnership with wild horse advocate Madeleine Pickens is a good thing. After all — as reported in this space many times — the federal wild horse and burro program is a dismal failure. So any proposal that might reinvigorate the program, do a better job of caring for the mustangs and the public range, while also saving millions of taxpayer dollars, is a step in the right direction, even if it is a small step. In that sense, the BLM deserves a round of applause.
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