Open Letter from Ginger Kathrens

Open Letter from Ginger Kathrens: Our Wild Horses are Slaughter-Bound

Please contact your Congressmen now!
Appeared first on www.cloudfoundation.org

The threat to our public lands in the West is real. The Secretary of the Interior sees little value in preservation. Rather he seeks to maximize revenues from ever-expanding oil and gas and mining operations, while propping up the money pit known as welfare ranching.

So where does this leave America's wild horses and burros and other wildlife who rely on public lands managed by Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM), long jokingly referred to as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining? (The "joke" has become chillingly real.)

Interior has ordered BLM to empty out wild horse and holding corrals by selling 25 horses at a time with no questions asked to any buyer. These are wild horses who once roamed free at little cost to the public. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to diagnose the outcome for these helpless wild horses who have lost freedom and family and will now make the ultimate sacrifice. They will end up dying a horrific death in Mexican and Canadian slaughterhouses.

Despite a prohibition on such cruelty by the Interior Appropriations Committee, the Interior Secretary has mandated that the horses must be sold. All BLM public holding facilities must comply, whether they like it or not.

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Humane Advocate, BLM National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board
Director, The Cloud Foundation


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www.savingamericashorses.org

Wild For Life Foundation is an all volunteer nonprofit charity dedicated to saving, protecting and preserving wild and domestic horses in need. Fed ID 26-3053458

BLM closes controversial wild horse holding facility

WASHINGTON (Oct. 14, 2011) – The Cloud Foundation exposed inhumane conditions for captured wild horses and burros at the Herriman facility outside Salt Lake City, Utah, in March 2011. The footage and report, shot and compiled by Foundation advocate Lisa Friday, showed horses knee-deep in a mixture of muck and manure. As a result of bringing the inhumane conditions to public scrutiny, BLM will be closing the facility for the winter with plans to close it permanently in the next two years.

“We are pleased BLM is finally taking the formerly wild horses out of the inhumane Utah facility before they would be subjected to another winter,” states Ginger Kathrens, Executive Director of The Cloud Foundation. “But it is regrettable that BLM acted to rectify an inhumane situation only after it was exposed in Lisa’s video.” 

Kathrens maintains that further transparency is needed in order for BLM to regain the trust of the American public, which includes allowing the public access to all short term and long term holding facilities on both private and government property. Many facilities, including all long term ones, have virtually no public access.

In Fiscal Year 2011 (Oct. 1, 2010-Oct. 1, 2011) BLM spent over $48 million to hold over 41,000 wild horses and burros in these facilities, many of which are on private property and not available for public scrutiny.

Currently there is no way for the public to verify the numbers or conditions of the animals in many of these facilities. Nor is there any accurate census of wild horses still remaining on the range. Using BLM’s own numbers, wild horse advocates maintain there are far fewer horses remaining on the Western ranges than BLM is reporting. 

Concludes Kathrens, “In order to build trust, there must be more transparency in the way BLM is managing America’s wild horses and burros both on the range and off.”

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