
Photo taken at the Montgomery Pass Wild Horse Territory in Mono County., Calif., by Meg Frederick
The Bureau of Land Management today posted an updated schedule of its plans to permanently remove 10,444 wild horses and burros from our public lands from April 1-Oct. 30. By comparison, the BLM plans to treat with fertility control and then release just 209 mares back onto the range.
Congress must demand that the BLM immediately begin the transition to safe, proven and humane fertility control as its main management tool in order to keep America’s wild horses and burros on the range, where they belong.
The BLM must implement fertility control to stabilize herd growth so that removals, which decimate family bands and herds, can be brought to an end, and off-range holding, which costs millions of dollars more each year with less and less space for captured horses, phased out.
Lawmakers have begun providing funding for fertility control to slow herd growth, and its use now enjoys both strong public and broad stakeholder support. Yet, the BLM maintains it will use fertility control only after it reaches the low, arbitrary population targets, called “Appropriate Management Levels,” which it has set for itself.
The agency’s history shows remaining fixated only on capture-and-removal management will not succeed. Population modeling by ecologists shows that, too.
The BLM’s goal is to reach a combined Appropriate Management Level of no more than 26,785 total wild horses and burros in 10 Western states. The agency estimated that 73,520 were living on the public rangelands it manages as of March 1.
Most captured wild horses will end up alongside more than 64,000 warehoused in government facilities, 23,000 of them in often overcrowded corrals.
TAKE ACTION: Send a letter to your members of Congress urging lawmakers to press the BLM to implement fertility control
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