The following is from the American Wild Horse Campaign:

News & Alerts

We have an update on the plan that’s threatening wild horses: Billed as a compromise, the plan is nothing short of a surrender on the wild horse issue to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and livestock industry lobbying groups.

The plan calls for the removal of 130,000 wild horses and burros from their homes on our public lands over the next ten years. That’s more wild horses and burros than exist today!

Contact your Senators and Representative and demand that they oppose language in FY 2020 Interior Appropriations legislation to implement the “Path Forward for Management of BLM’s Wild Horses and Burros” plan promoted by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), ASPCA and Return to Freedom.

The plan would almost triple the number of wild horses and burros held in captivity at taxpayer expense, at a cost of close to $1 billion over the next decade, without any guarantee for their long-term safety. It reduces wild horse and burro populations to the BLM’s extinction-level “appropriate” management level.

90% of the wild horses and burros left on the range would be subject to “fertility control,” which, given the extreme population reductions envisioned, could spell the end of many herds. The ASPCA (a co-signer to the plan) even acknowledges the plan could allow for surgical removal of the ovaries of wild mares – something the National Academy of Sciences warned was “inadvisable for field application” due to risk of bleeding and infection.

Causing further danger to the herds left on the range is the proposed sex ratio skewing of 70% stallions to 30% mares – an unheard of manipulation of a wildlife species that, by the BLM’s own admission, causes increased aggression between a large number of stallions fighting for a small number of mares.

So what doesn’t the plan include?

Any reference to livestock, and the massively larger impact that cows have on grazing land in the west. It also fails to mention the massive cost to taxpayers for the subsidized public lands livestock grazing program.

Please contact your member of Congress today, and let them know of the dangers to wild horses hidden in this plan. The markup hearing for the House Interior Appropriations Committee is Wednesday, so please don’t delay!

If this plan gets implemented, it could mean the beginning of the end of wild horses in America. We have to act NOW.

Thank you for standing with us in this crucial fight.

– The AWHC Team

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