BILLINGS, Mont. (April 5, 2012)—Yesterday, BLM issued their Decision Record to permanently remove up to 40 young Pryor mustangs from their home in the mountains of southern Montana. The bait-trapping operation would begin no earlier than June 4th and could continue until September 30th.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Billings Field Office today released the Environmental Assessment (EA) and Decision Record for a 2012 non-helicopter gather of wild horses within the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range (PMWHR). A 30-day appeal period will begin today and end on May 3, 2012. The EA analyzed the effects of the decision to conduct a non-helicopter gather to remove excess wild horses within the PMWHR. The field office received about 1,000 individual comment letters and 63 unique comments on the preliminary EA, and considered those in making the final decision.
As part of its responsibility to manage and protect wild horses and burros, the Bureau of Land Management, in collaboration with the USDA Forest Service (FS), is soliciting bids for several contracts that will help manage wild horses and burros located across the western United States. The contracts are for a new bait trapping method that is intended to relieve areas of excess wild horses and burros where helicopter drive trapping is not an effective method. The bids are the first of their kind, in that they involve six zones across the West, with a potential for multiple contractors simultaneously bait trapping animals over an extended period of time.
After the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rounds up our wild horses off of our public lands, they corral them in short term and long term holding facilities. In many instances, the horses are forever removed from public access.
In what seems to be BLM’s attempt to avoid bad publicity for denying public access and lacking transparency, the BLM may throw the public a few crumbs and offer a rare and very limited “dog and pony show” tour of one of the facilities.
Now, instead of letting us (members of the public) who are paying for this fiasco and for their salaries) walk along the paths, as they did in the past, they want to round us up and hold us within the confines of a wagon.
(Unedited) ~As part of the Bureau of Land Management’s ongoing effort to engage volunteers in the stewardship of U.S. public lands, BLM Director Bob Abbey announced today that he has approved nearly $300,000 in the current fiscal year for 12 projects aimed at improving Western rangeland conditions where wild horses and burros roam. The on-the-ground work will also support the BLM’s forthcoming strategy to put its national Wild Horse and Burro Program on a sustainable path, as called for by the Government Accountability Office and members of Congress.
Two Nevada men called “boneheads” by a U.S. judge when he sentenced them to six months in prison for shooting federally protected mustangs may be headed back behind bars for illegal trapping.
Once again I am proud to report that my wife, Terry, has several photos that have been selected by the nominating committee of the Equine Ideal: Winter 2012 Photography Contest as finalists in their annual online competition. In the past she has won honors for a head shot of a rescued horse (click HERE) as we, with Habitat for Horses, released him at Willie Nelson’s ranch on his first day of adopted bliss. Last year she won ribbons (click HERE) for a shot of the famed wild horses of the Pryor Mountains and this year she is up for ribbons on two different head shots of our very own Pele who was rescued from a slaughter auction through the efforts of Habitat for Horses. Pele is half quarter horse and from the neck up he is pure wild horse, we can see the beauty that heralds back to his wild roots as he glides across our pastures in play.
In March 2011, Lisa Friday’s video camera made a difference. On a late winter day, Friday visited a herd of wild horses penned at the Bureau of Land Management’s Butterfield/Herrimen holding facility in southwest Utah. What she saw there, and what she lawfully recorded, was appalling. “Never in my entire life have I seen animals in such squalor,” she said this past weekend from her home in Virginia. “There was no place for any horse to escape.”
The appointment of Callie Hendrickson to a board that helps shape the federal government’s wild horse management plan has touched off a frenzy of petitions and protests by horse advocacy groups. They say the Grand Junction woman is a defender of ranching interests who’s endorsed commercial slaughter of “excess horses” on public lands.
The Secretary of the Interior has, for the second time in a row, selected an openly pro-horse slaughter person to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board. Callie Hendrickson, an anti-wild horse activist, pro-horse slaughter proponent, has been selected to represent the interests of the ‘General Public’ on the board.
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