Stop BLM From Hiding Barbaric Experiments
This Action Alert comes from the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign.
These are America’s wild horses. They belong to us. We must be able to see what our government is doing to them and expose this cruelty to the public and Congress in order to STOP IT.
Just today, attorneys for the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign and The Cloud Foundation sent a letter to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Oregon demanding our First Amendment right to observe and document the gruesome sterilization experiments the agency intends to conduct on beautiful and innocent wild mares at the BLM’s holding corrals near Burns. The letter, states:
“This is a highly controversial project and the BLM has received thousands of public comments in opposition to it. Not only is this a matter of significant public concern, but also it is precedent setting. Never before has the BLM performed invasive surgical sterilization procedures on federally-protected wild horses in experiments that could lead to a program-wide policy of releasing sterilized wild horses on the range….Given that these experiments will form the basis of this program-wide policy, public documentation of this project is essential to the public interest.”
If the BLM denies our request, we are prepared to file suit in federal court to uphold our First Amendment right to observe these experiments.
Once again, we have asked the BLM to drop its plans to surgically remove the ovaries of 100 mares through a blind and archaic procedure called “ovariectomy via colpotomy.” The majority of mares used in the experiments will be pregnant, and removing their ovaries will cause many to lose their unborn foals.
The National Academy itself warned against the procedure due to the severe health risks it poses to wild horses. Aborted foals and deaths from bleeding, infection and evisceration (protrusion of bowels through surgical incisions) are in store for these poor mares, but the BLM does not care.
This is critically important….especially since the BLM says it is doing the experiments in part to determine whether they are “socially acceptable.” Only by documenting and exposing this cruelty, can we stop the BLM from implementing these atrocities on more wild horses, including those still roaming free on the range!