Please Do Not Tap On the Glass

I almost can’t believe what I just read in the Washington Post. Madeleine Pickens, wife of billionaire T. Boone Pickens, intends to purchase all 2,000 of the wild mustangs scheduled for euthanasia by the Bureau of Land Management as well as “most or all of the 30,000 horses and burros kept in federal holding pens. Lifelong animal lovers, the Pickenses just a few years ago led the fight to close the last horse slaughterhouse in the United States.”

Mrs. Pickens has arranged with the federal government to continue caring for all the horses and burros until she finds a suitable piece of land out West for them to live on.

The news that Pickens and others intend to adopt the wild horses and burros was celebrated by animal rights groups, several of which were preparing legal challenges to prevent the government from putting the horses to death.

“Of course, I’m thrilled, obviously, that these horses are getting a reprieve,” said Shelley Sawhook, president of the American Horse Defense Fund. “At the same time, we need to address the basic issue of how these animals got in this position in the first place.”

How did the wild horses of the American West end up as a problem and not a national treasure?

CATTLE FARMING.

This next bit should come as no surprise: “The federal government has been rounding up wild horses since the 1980s, putting them in holding facilities and offering them for adoption to horse lovers, who promise not to sell them for slaughter. But the roundups became aggressive under the Bush administration. As of June, BLM was holding 30,088 animals, more than triple the 9,807 held in 2001.”

Wild Mustangs in the Desert

I guess Dubya has oil buddies and cattle farming buddies. Are these the same farmers who are currently leaving their herds to die of starvation and thirst because they can’t afford to feed them?

Don’t you see the connection between the destruction of our ecosystems and the institutionalized eradication of our wildlife for the sake of a McDonald’s hamburger? You can make another choice. You can choose to save lives instead of causing suffering and death and destruction.

Virginie L. Parant of the American Wild Horses Preservation Campaign, a coalition of about 45 groups, said the BLM does not use a scientifically sound method to estimate the size of horse herds or the number of horses that can be sustained on the range. That makes the roundups arbitrary, she said.

What’s more, about 19 million acres of land where wild horses once roamed have been removed from the program, reducing the amount of land available to the horses and increasing their concentration elsewhere.

For now, I’m grateful to Mrs. Pickens for saving the lives of all those horses and burros and I hope she will use her influence to get the land laws changed and restore balance to our wildlife and wild places.

s.

Filed under: animal rights, wildlife conservation Tagged: | mustangs, pickens, wild horses