by Carol Knight Watson
from Animal People, November/December 2013 by Kim Bartlett, Merritt Clifton
Data showing how many horses have been sold to slaughter per year, nationwide, can be extrapolated from readily available public records going all the way back to 1850. Throughout this time, coinciding with the advent of railways that enabled brokers to transport animals long distances to slaughter, the overwhelming majority of horses sold to slaughter have been either those at the end of their working utility to humans or the unwanted surplus from speculative breeding. Speculative breeding rose rapidly as a source of horses sent to slaughter as employment of horses for transportation declined.
| Tara, Amber's daughter |
To horses used to being handled by humans and being hauled among shows, racetracks, and breeding venues, the journey to auction and slaughter does not obviously differ much from any other. But the terror of horses unused to humans, as they are swooped upon and driven by helicopter, then trucked to be killed, is evident to almost any observer.
Currently about one percent of the horses exported from the U. S. to slaughter are wild horses, according to data collected in 2009 by the Unwanted Horse Coalition. The Wild, Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 nominally protected wild equines from being sold to slaughter but only those wild equines who inhabit public lands under the authority of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The law allows the BLM to round up “surplus horses” for “adoption,” a system which has been notoriously abused from inception.
After about 25 years of frequent exposés of high-volume "adoptions” to killer-buyers, the BLM tightened adoption procedures enough to slow the volume of wild horses going illegally to slaughter. But the adoption market is so weak and the livestock industry pressure to remove horses from leased grazing land is so great, that throughout the present century the BLM has had more wild horses in holding facilities––now about 49,000––than the estimated 40,000 who remain on the range.
A 2004 stealth rider to an Interior appropriations bill attached by former Montana U. S. Senator Conrad Burns appeared likely to reopen high-volume commerce in BLM wild horses for slaughter.
(Editor’s note: This rider lifted the prohibition on the sale of wild burros and horses for commercial purposes:
Sec. 142. Sale of Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros (a) In General. Section 3 of Public Law 92-195 (16 U.S.C. 1333) is amended . . .
. . . (e) Sale of Excess Animals. (1) In General. Any excess animal or the remains of any excess animal shall be sold if (A) the excess animal is more than 10 years of age, or (B) the excess animal has been offered for adoption at least three times. (2) Method of Sale. An excess animal that meets either of the criteria in paragraph (1) shall be made available for sale without limitation, including through auction to the highest bidder, at local sale yards or other convenient livestock selling facilities, until such time as (A) all excess animals offered for sale are sold; or (B) the appropriate management level, as determined by the Secretary, is attained in all areas occupied by wild free-roaming horses and burros.
This amendment was added without discussion or agreement of the public or the rest of Congress. Taking advantage of his position as chair of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, Senator Burns slipped the amendment into the 2005 Consolidated Appropriations Bill Conference Committee Report without the knowledge of Congress and without the opportunity to debate or strip it off by vote, since committee reports cannot be amended. The Bush Administration and, apparently, Nevada Senator Harry Reid, Senate minority whip, were fully aware of the measure and allowed it to be added despite the fact it violates Senate Standing Rule XVI, although the latter denies this claim.
When it was signed into law on December 16, 2004, about 8,400 wild horses and burros immediately became eligible for sale. When the public found out, they were outraged and demanded an explanation. Senator Burns’ answer: “I think what we should do is put some language in this thing that allows the BLM to sell excess wild horses. I’d prefer to sell ‘em to whomever. Maybe some of them will end up going to slaughter.”)
The Burns rider, however, has been suspended since 2005 by language included in annual Interior appropriations bills.
The Wild, Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 never applied to wild equines on private property, state land, or non-BLM federal land, including land managed by the U. S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the armed forces, and Native American tribes.
The wild burro rescues from National Park Service property that made The Fund for Animals famous in the 1980s, were the signature actions of Wild Burro Rescue in the 1990s, and for which Peaceful Donkey Sanctuary has become known more recently, all resulted from this Congressional omission. Each burro rescue was triggered by National Park Service threats to shoot wild burros as an alleged invasive species––and, indeed, many burros were shot in each case before the animal charities stepped in.
Instead of shooting wild equines, other land-holding agencies have mostly just quietly rounded them up and sold them to slaughter from time to time. Seldom have these roundups and sales attracted more than transient notice, but that changed abruptly in mid-2013 when the Navajo Nation Department of Agriculture issued a statement in support of the Valley Meat Company application to slaughter horses. The statement alleged that 75,000 wild horses on Navajo lands are contributing to the ecological damage done by several years of worsening drought and acknowledged that some Navajo had already been rounding up and selling wild horses at auction, aware that some might be bought for slaughter.
In October 2013, however, Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly and former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson “reached an agreement in principle in which the Navajo Nation would suspend horse roundups and halt the sale of Navajo horses to horse processing plants,” reported Katherine Locke of the Navajo-Hopi Observer. “Shelly said the tribe will pull back its support for the plant and suspend horse roundups,” Locke continued, “while it works with the Foundation to Protect New Mexico Wildlife and other groups to develop and implement alternative policies to manage feral horse populations. Possible solutions include equine birth control, adoption, land management, and public education.”
Elaborated Jeri Clausen of The Associated Press, “Richardson and actor Robert Redford created the Foundation to Protect New Mexico Wildlife in July 2013 to fight efforts to slaughter horses.”
Meanwhile in northern Nevada, former Florida state senator Joseph Abruzzo in August 2013 brokered a deal on behalf of Saving America’s Wild Horses founder Madeline Pickens that enabled the Triumph Foundation to buy 150 mustangs who were to have been auctioned by the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe. Endowed by Chesapeake Petroleum board chair Victoria McCullough, the Triumph Foundation paid $193 apiece for the horses, who were to be distributed among many different rescue charities. Another 167 horses were auctioned to probable slaughter.
The American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign spent September and October 2013 trying to prevent the Fish and Wildlife Service from sending 252 wild horses taken from the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada to Stan Palmer of J&S Associates in Pelahatchie, Mississippi. Palmer claims to be an adoption broker; the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign contends he is a “slaughter middleman.”
“According to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s own investigation,” the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign charged, “Palmer and J&S cannot account for the whereabouts of as many as 202 of the 262 horses received under a previous contract with FWS to ‘adopt out’ Sheldon horses. In fact, one Alabama man who Palmer ‘adopted’ horses to admitted to selling ‘a bunch’ at a livestock auction. The FWS investigation also raised questions about J&S’ care for horses in its possession.”
But the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign failed to win a restraining order against the transfers. The Fish and Wildlife Service “concluded that 112 of the 262 horses J&S received from 2010 to 2012 were placed with ‘suitable and appropriate adopters,’” summarized Scott Sonner of The Associated Press in September 2013, after U. S. District Judge Miranda Du denied the restraining order. “But it acknowledged the disposition of 82 animals placed with one adopter was uncertain, with at least some of those horses being sold by the adopter. J&S did not provide documentation for the disposition of 65 horses, but it appeared they were being held on pastures owned by two private individuals in Mississippi.”
In November 2013, the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign asked the U. S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to investigate the Fish and Wildlife deals with Palmer.
A 451-page National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council report in June 2013 pointed out that “The current removal strategy used by BLM perpetuates the overpopulation problem by maintaining the number of animals at levels below the carrying capacity of the land, protecting the rangeland and the horse population in the short term but resulting in continually high population growth and exacerbating the long-term problem. As a result, the number of animals processed through holding facilities is probably increased by management.”
The National Research Council findings urgently need to be incorporated into a comprehensive new wild horse (and burro) management policy, no longer centered on horse removals to placate ranchers who are currently pasturing 8.9 million cattle on the same lands: 223 cows per horse.
Also to be taken into account is that at the passage of the Wild, Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, wild horses (and burros) had few significant predators. The act accordingly reflected a perceived need to manage wild horses (and burros) in absence of predation. Wild horses (and burros) are now among the prey of increasingly abundant pumas, wolves, and, in the northern Rockies, recovering populations of grizzly bears.
Further, at the passage of the Wild, Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, development of effective contraceptives for wild horses (and burros) was still only a theory. Wild horse contraception is now a thoroughly tested technology, licensed and available for use wherever appropriate.
All of these factors need to be taken into consideration. And this time the new national wild horse (and burro) management policy needs to cover all public land where wild horses (and burros) live, not just the 179 BLM “wild horse management areas” scattered across 10 western states with vast expanses of other public land in between.♦
No comments:
Post a Comment
We are interested in your suggestions and knowledge in every area of our work to help the animals.