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Wild Horses Facing Slaughter Under Proposed New Government Regulations
Simple protections for animal welfare is something that extends to all political spectrums. In my involvement with dog rescue groups, I've been struck by meeting key volunteers who devote their lives to animal welfare yet are staunch conservatives politically. While it doesn't make much sense to me, I do not let that conversation get too far as we have a focus on the animals and can work together on that. I've "joked" to current and aspiring politicians that they could win votes by taking action towards animal rights and rescue. As simple as that, support for a candidate can take off. That's why stories like the one summarized here and fully described at the source below should shock and anger all sides of every aisle we have.
Controversy has broken out over the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) practice of using helicopters to herd horses off public lands and sometimes permanently put them into holding facilities in an effort to control their population. Now the government is considering culling these animals for the first time in nearly 50 years, putting the lives of thousands of wild horses at stake.
Culling the animals means lowering the number of them -- killing horses.
Most of the U.S.'s estimated 75,000 wild horses live on public lands, usually vast expanses that the government controls in the American West. Although the land seems limitless, the BLM says the resources here only allow for the survival of a certain number.
Resource management is an issue because a lot of the land is leased to ranchers who need less horses so they can enhance their operationes, ie their profits.
The BLM controls one-eighth of the country's landmass, but leases over 60 percent of it to ranchers. Since their livestock rely on the same resources the wild horses do, some ranchers want the wild horses pushed off the land entirely.
After the wild horses are rounded up....They’ll get put into a long-term holding and that means they get shipped to the Midwest. BLM has contracts with ranchers back there that pays them so much per day to keep the horses..... costing taxpayers about $50 million annually.
In the Trump and Republican 2018 budget, they propose to change this system to save money by allowing horses to be killed. As usual, money drives all Republican decisions.
It's an expense that the U.S. Department of Interior sought to address in its 2018 budget by lifting regulations that prevent slaughtering wild horses.
The BLM is part of our Department of Interior and their role in this is to protect the horses. Instead they are asking Congress for permission to kill them. We have a lot of wild horses being stockpiled that the taxpayers are paying for and their solution is kill them.
"Eighty-four percent of Donald Trump's voters oppose the slaughter of wild horses, and a very narrow band of people are for it because they profit from it," said Chris Minakowski, a lobbyist and policy analyst.
I guess that last quote goes back to my initial point about broad support for animal welfare.