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Galloping doubts about BLM
wild horse sales ordered by Congress
WASHINGTON D.C.—The Bureau of Land Management and the buyers themselves
tried to depict the first sales in a mass disposal of wild horses mandated
by Congress as “rescues,” by “sanctuaries,” but horse
rescue veterans are not all buying the dog-and-pony show.
The sales are required by a stealth amendment to the 1971 Wild and Free
Ranging Horse and Burro Protection Act introduced by U.S. Senator Conrad
Burns (R-Montana) in November 2004. The Burns amendment orders the BLM
to sell “without limitation” any horse in custody who is 10
years of age or who has been offered for adoption three times without
a taker.
About 8,400 of the 24,000 horses already in the BLM captive inventory
were made immediately eligible for sale, and many of the remainder will
be eligible by the end of the year. The BLM is also continuing to capture
horses, with the stated goal of reducing the U.S. wild horse population
from about 37,000 to circa 28,000.
The very first transaction, 200 wild mares sold to the for-profit firm
Wild Horses Wyoming, raised concern—especially after rancher Ron
Hawkins, one of five partners in the venture, told the Laramie Boomerang
that “There’s a viable agri-product that will come out. These
foals [expected from the pregnant mares] will be marketed, and we’ve
got some tremendous marketing ideas…We’d like to get some sponsorship
dollars to place these foals down in Third World countries or in Mexico
where a little village may need some horsepower to clear a field or to
run a pump and produce water.”
Responded Willis Lamm of Kickin’ Back Ranch Wild Horses, a wild horse
rescuer for more than 25 years, first in California and now in Nevada,
and a cofounder of the Alliance of Wild Horse Advocates, “Mexico
is the #2 producer of horsemeat world wide. One has to stop and smell
the horses here. Why form a for-profit corporation to acquire horses for
charitable purposes? Why would someone breed animals to mitigate an overpopulation
problem?
“Wild
Horses Wyoming acquired only mares and plans to breed,” Lamm continued.
“The only honest market for these animals involves head-to-head competition
with the BLM adoption program. Without having established an honest market
for the offspring of 200 head, Hawkins is reportedly looking to acquire
a total of some 5,000 head. Assuming only a 75% conception rate, that
would put 4,000 colts onto the market each year.
“The state of Wyoming has no livestock welfare laws,” Lamm added.
“There is already a major and expensive pony rescue underway in Wyoming
after a large number of animals died. If Wild Horses Wyoming acquires
a huge number of animals and starts to go under, we will have yet another
large scale animal disaster, this time precipitated by our Federal government.”
Under scrutiny, Hawkins told Casper Star-Tribune environmental reporter
Whitney Royster, “We’ve never committed to send horses anywhere.
All we’re doing is searching and seeking out all avenues,” Hawkins
insisted. “We’re not going to sell them to someone who is going
to be abusive to them. Wild Horses Wyoming has no plans to send them to
Mexico or Third World countries. It’s only an avenue we are searching.”
Hawkins’ partners include Fort Collins realtors Sean Mater and Bill
Clark. Both confirmed to Sandra Cherub of Associated Press their intent
to acquire as many as 5,000 wild horses.
Repeal
bills
“There
are dozens of slick operators out there,” Lamm cautioned. “Some
have apparently already seen how they can profit from acquiring cheap
taxpayer-subsidized horses and still stay just on the legal side”
of bills pushed by animal advocates who hope to repeal the Burns amendment.
The bills include HR-297, introduced in January by U.S. Representatives
Nick J. Rahall (D-West Virginia) and Ed Whitfield (R-Kentucky), which
would restore to all wild equines the full protection of the 1971 Wild
and Free Ranging Horse and Burro Protection Act; a companion bill, S-576,
by Senator Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia); and HR-503, the American Horse
Slaughter Prevention Act, which would “amend the Horse Protection
Act to prohibit the shipping, transporting, moving, delivering, receiving,
possessing, purchasing, selling, or donation of horses and other equines
to be slaughtered for human consumption, and for other purposes.”
As ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, HR-297 had 41 co-sponsors, S-576 had none,
and HR-503 had 70, after attracting 228 in the previous Congress.
Tribal
buyers
Native American tribes were the first wild horse
buyers in the Dakotas. Paying just $1.00 per head, Rosebud Sioux president
Charles Colombe bought 210 and Three Affiliated Tribes chair Tex Hall
bought 400, reported Samantha Young of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“There are plenty of cowboys here and they are willing to try and
break the horses and train them,” said Todd Fast Horse, executive
secretary to Colombe, hinting that many of the horses might be used in
rodeos.
Fast Horse said that horses who could not be broken would “roam free
alongside buffalo on tribal pasture lands,” Young wrote. Each of
20 tribal communities receiving horses will be allocated 25 acres of range
per horse from the million-acre Rosebud Sioux Reservation land trust in
South Dakota, Fast Horse promised.
Some of the land is now leased to non-tribal ranchers. “The only
loss to the tribe would be lease income, but providing something for the
children is more important,” Fast Horse told Young. “Every tribal
reservation is the same. There’s nothing for the kids. We need something
constructive to take them away from TV and video games.”
The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikira nations, forming the Three Affiliated
Tribes of North Dakota, plans to resell wild horses for $25 a head, MHA
Buffalo Enterprises tribal ranch manager James Pete Hale told Young.
Wrote Young, “The tribe will require buyers to sign an affidavit
modeled after a BLM adoption contract, promising to keep the horses for
at least a year. Asked if the horses could then be sold to slaughter,
Hale said, ‘Indians do not believe horses should be killed. We never
take old horses to sale. Normally we let them die of old age.’”
This is true of most of the Lakota, who were the dominant horse culture
of the northern Great Plains in pre-settlement times. The Rosebud, Mandan,
Hidatsa, and Arikira nations are all remnant Lakota bands.
Historically, however, some of the the so-called “dog-eater”
Lakota bands, considered a lower caste, followed the horse tribes on foot,
at a discreet distance of about a day’s ride, and scavenged what
they left, including wounded bison not found by the mounted hunters and
dead or injured horses.
After the surviving remnants of the Lakota and other northern and western
tribes were herded into reservations, where band and caste identity were
blurred or lost, “dog-eaters” often assimilated more easily
into agribusiness, finding off-reservation jobs in the livestock and slaughter
industries. Some became purveyors of wild horses to slaughter.
Friends
of Mustangs
Friends
of the Mustangs member Chris Egelston made the symbolic first purchase
of a wild horse offered for sale in Colorado, a 20-year-old mare whose
foal Egelston adopted in October 2004. The mare was placed with someone
else at the same adoption event in Grand Junction.
“She was voluntarily returned to the BLM last month when her owner
failed to take care of her,” explained Grand Junction Daily Sentinel
reporter Sally Spaulding. “Jim Dollerschell, wild horse program director
with the Grand Junction office of the BLM, made Friends of the Mustangs
aware of the situation. The volunteer group helped gather 68 horses from
the Little Bookcliffs Wild Horse Range last October,” including the
mare and foal.
By the third week of March 2005, the BLM had sold 824 of the estimated
8,400 wild horses who were released from protection by the Burns amendment.
“The BLM estimates there are 37,000 wild horses and burros living
on public lands in 10 Western states, almost 9,000 more than the land
can sustain,” summarized Samantha Young. But the wild equines share
the range with nearly four million cattle.
Dartmoor
precedent
U.S.
wild horse enthusiasts fear that “marketplace conservation,”
favored by the White House and western Republicans, will quickly thin
many mustang bands below viability. Britain has relied upon “marketplace
conservation” to preserve Dartmoor ponies, the last indigenous wild
equine breed in the British Isles, but since Britain joined the European
Community, giving British farmers access to continental horsemeat markets,
the results have been catastrophic.
“Forty years ago the number of ponies on Dartmoor stood at 30,000.
It could now be as low as 1,500. The problem is there are not a lot of
economic reasons to keep these ponies,” Dartmoor Pony Heritage Trust
cofounder Elizabeth Newbolt-Young recently told The Daily Telegraph.
Only about 500 Dartmoor ponies are not crossed with Shetland ponies and
other domestic breeds, Newbolt-Young estimated.
Sanctuaries
Conrad
Burns has insisted all along that the idea behind his amendment to the
Wild & Free Roaming Horse & Burro Act was simply to expedite the
transfer of wild horses from BLM custody to nonprofit sanctuaries.
Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue, of Lancaster, California, bought 13 at $1.00
each, founder Jill Starr told Michael Milstein of the Portland Oregonian.
Never spending less than 72% of total expenditure on fundraising plus
administrative costs [including “professional fundraising fees”
declared on IRS Form 990 filings but claimed as a program expense], Lifesavers
is among a constellation of animal charities with similar spending patterns
which have been represented in recent years by firms owned or controlled
by fundraiser Bruce Eberle. The Wise Giving Alliance recommends that combined
fundraising and administrative expense [including all “professional
fundraising fees”] should not exceed 35%.
Lifesavers on February 1, 2005 discontinued involvement with Eberle, whose
firms have produced recent mailings for several other equine charities.
Some members of the Alliance of Wild Horse Advocates argue that the entire
wild horse advocacy community should begin vigorous fundraising so as
to be able to take more horses.
Willis Lamm, who is also a former Lifesavers board member, calls that
“Dream stuff. As if the wild horse and burro groups are going to
be able to raise some $8 million per year to hold horses in sanctuaries.”
“I don’t think there is enough room in the system for all these
horses or all the others they’re going to bring off the range,”
agreed Starr.
Points out Lamm, “The wild horse groups couldn’t even get organized
to help Jean-Marie Webster with the Slick Gardner rescue,” involving
about 300 wild horses from Nevada whom Gardner was convicted of neglecting
at several California sites. Life-savers took some of the horses, as did
other sanctuaries, but Webster ended up with most, according to Lamm.
“Webster is shelling out around $900 per day to feed those horses,”
Lamm continued. “That’s a huge outlay, even for someone with
means. Where is all of this fantasy money? When we can adequately fund
the animals now in private care, we can consider some of this pie-in-the-sky
stuff,” Lamm said. “Until then, and especially with the volume
of mail some of us contend with daily, we need to distill what we distribute.
“Our solution, whatever it may be, can’t be such that it drains
the animal charity well,” Lamm emphasized. “Even if we could
raise the funds for these animals, any significant inroads would be at
the expense of other worthwhile animal programs and projects.
“Even if there was some magical outpouring of new donor money,”
Lamm added, “there isn’t a sufficient longterm revenue stream
to maintain these horses. What happens when the money runs short? We will
have created the thermonuclear equivalent of the Slick Gardner mess.
“An alternative model that can be cost-effective,” Lamm allowed,
“involves organizing grassroots volunteers to provide foster care
for animals until they are adopted. These types of projects can be extremely
beneficial when properly designed and managed, but they too can get complicated,”
Lamm warned. “I can’t recall the numbers of times we’ve
had to go in and recover animals belonging to other organizations when
their foster system broke down. In most instances, foster care is effective
only for short-term rescue, and the organizing groups need to have credible
placement strategies, not assume that animals can stay in foster care
indefinitely.
“I’ve dealt with enough dead and dying horses to last a lifetime,”
Lamm reminded. “Almost all of those animals suffered at the hands
of ‘rescuers.’
“Shifting
gears, the BLM has thousands of horses who are in longterm holding but
have not reached sale age,” Lamm warned. “I’m concerned
that if we somehow manage to successfully absorb all the current sale
horses, some folks will say, ‘See, that wasn’t so bad,’
and drop the sale age down to five or six. We need to be visibly engaged
in a strategy for these ‘middle-aged’ horses.”
Agreed Humane Society of the U.S. vice president for legislation Mike
Markarian, “We’re not in the position of privately funding new
sanctuaries to clean up the government’s mess. We need the BLM to
let the wild horses roam freely on the public lands. The public lands
should be viewed as sanctuaries for these horses,” Markarian told
Smantha Young of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Merle
Edsall
“We
have sanctuaries ready to go on line on the Crow Reservation in Montana
and in the grasslands of Sonora, Mexico,” Montana rancher Merle Edsall
wrote to Conrad Burns on March 21.
“Our agent in Texas was able to obtain an electronic copy of Merle
Edsall’s letter to Senator Burns,” Lamm explained before making
it public.
Edsall in 2002 proposed to relocate up to 10,000 BLM horses to the northern
Sonora desert in Mexico. This very dry region, which already has a small
wild horse population, is heavily traveled by would-be illegal immigrants
to the U.S. and the “people-smugglers” who help them cross the
border.
Partners in the horses-to-Mexico scheme included retired McDonnell-Douglas
vice president Philip Edsall, Sonora rancher Humberto Hoyhos, and Johannes
von Trapp, one of the younger members of the family whose story was told
in the 1963 film The Sound of Music, who went on to build the Stowe ski
resort in northern Vermont.
National Wild Horse and Burro Program group manager John Fend stalled
the Edsall scheme in August 2002 by advising that moving horses to Mexico
would illegally remove them from the protection of the 1971 Wild and Free
Ranging Horse and Burro Act, and would therefore require Congressional
action to implement.
The Burns amendment was the requisite Congressional action.
“Mr. Edsall’s plan seems like a benign solution to rancher/mustang
conflicts on the surface. The likely outcome is much grimmer,” opined
the Humane Society of the U.S. in a 2002 alert. “In 2001, 626,000
horses were slaughtered in Mexico,” HSUS noted.
“Edsall says he wants to build a wild horse tourist attraction,”
summarized Deanne Stillman in the February 16, 2005 edition of Slate,
“but once they move south of the border, it would be impossible to
monitor what happens to them. Edsall may also have influenced the Burns
rider,” Stillman wrote. “The language in the Burns rider was
the exact same wording floated by Edsall at a meeting of the BLM’s
Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board in February 2004 in Phoenix.”
Edsall in his March 21 letter to Burns began by complaining that the BLM
is spending too much time and money trying to place horses with adoption
groups instead of simply selling them to him.
“Many of us believe a new ‘adoption’ program was not the
intent of the sale authority legislation,” Edsall wrote.
Edsall told Burns that he had notified BLM wild horse program manager
Jeff Rawson that his partnership would “buy all remaining eligible
horses on the condition BLM pay the holding costs for one year.”
That would require the BLM to pay Edsall close to $2 million if the horses
were kept on the Crow Reservation, or about $1 million if they were divided
between the Crow Reservation and Sonora, based on estimates that Edsall
gave to Perry Backus of the Montana Standard.
“The savings over the present $1.25 [per horse day] paid for long-term
facilities funded by BLM is obvious,” said Edsall.
At the per day cost of keeping a horse of less than 75¢ projected
by Edsall, the profit potential per horse at the present slaughter auction
price of about $1.00 per pound would be close to $1,000.
“Our deal with the Crow is dead," Edsall told the Billings Gazette
on March 31, after the BLM refused to be stampeded into selling horses
to him.
“Edsall and his company, ETH Inc., had signed a letter of intent
with the Crow tribe in February to pay the tribe more than $1 million
per year to look after 4,000 wild horses.,” the Billings Gazette
reported.
Hardly anyone believed Edsall had actually lost interest in horsetrading.
Slaughter
link
“Due
to the public’s outcry against a perceived ‘slaughter’
authority,” Edsall continued to Burns, “many people in the West
are fearful of legislation in the House and Senate,” specifically
HR 503, the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, “which threatens
to eliminate the horse packing industry. The projected impact of this
action will cost the private sector $124 million the first year,”
Edsall claimed, “and will increase astronomically each year thereafter.
The effect on the sales of horses of all breeds is incalculable, as is
the effect on the wild horse adoption program.
“As you are aware,” Edsall continued, “I spoke with Nevada
Senator John Ensign’s office regarding a western constituency which
desires to support legislation to halt such a threat. Senator Ensign’s
bill addresses banning horsemeat used for human consumption, a conciliation
which should be offered to the American public,” Edsall said.
The Ensign bill has not yet been introduced. Ensign introduced an unsuccessful
attempt to repeal the Burns amendment late in the last Congress.
“We feel the momentum for humane legislation will assist in the passage
of the Montana disposable lands action (MDLA),” Edsall added, “which
we hope to join to this legislative proposal. Each bill is a component
of action required to ‘save wild horses.’”
The “Montana disposable lands action” is a bill to authorize
the sale of BLM-leased federal grazing land to the current leaseholders,
who often pay much less for grazing rights that the estimated free market
value.
Thus the Edsall “save wild horses’ scheme would convey horses,
land, and funding to a handful of established landholders, who then might
sell the horses, or their foals.
“We have assured the Montana Governor’s office of a desire for
our company to provide opportunities for other tribes,” Edsall went
on to Burns. “Reno Charette, the Director of Indian Affairs, has
requested that I speak with all the tribal leaders of Montana in Governor
Schweitzer’s office on March 23,” Edsall said. “This presentation
is timely for the newly formed Montana Bureau of Indian Tourism. BIA regional
director Keith Beartusk has stated that the Wind River Reservation in
Wyoming will also be a site which may offer a large expanse of land.
“Like the Sonora business plan states, any sanctuaries which we propose
with the Indian Nations will also have tourism and internet adoption components,”
Edsall said.
Noted Lamm, “This letter may be an interesting reference point,”
especially “if Senator Burns again denies any involvement with Mr.
Edsall.” —Merritt Clifton
“Wild
Horses Wyoming acquired only mares and plans to breed,” Lamm continued.
“The only honest market for these animals involves head-to-head competition
with the BLM adoption program. Without having established an honest market
for the offspring of 200 head, Hawkins is reportedly looking to acquire
a total of some 5,000 head. Assuming only a 75% conception rate, that
would put 4,000 colts onto the market each year.