http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/features/wild-horses-euthanasia/ This is a pretty good article on the situation as well. People just hear "Euthanasia" and knee jerk into the "OMG no don't kill the horses, these people are evil assholes!" mode or "They're in the pocket of cattle ranchers, that's why they're killing them!" instead of actually trying to understand the situation. I'm a huge animal lover and do animal rescue myself but I also understand animal management and wildlife ecology. When you have a HUGE population of animals that has vastly outgrown their area it can be devastating to the ecosystem and animals themselves. When there are so many they overgraze the area, then they're going to starve and also starve other species as well.
"So, I joined the board to help find sustainable solutions for improving rangeland health. For 40 years, all the BLM’s dealings with the skyrocketing wild horse population has been like putting Band-Aids on a broken arm.
The situation has gotten worse. Right now, we have 75,000 horses and burros living in the wild in a very delicate ecosystem that can support only 27,000 horses. On top of that, we have another 45,000 horses that were rounded up to prevent overgrazing, and now they live out their lives in holding pens and on leased pastures. The BLM is spending two-thirds of its annual budget, $50 million, caring for them. Think about the environmental: the amount of water to grow all that hay, the fuel used for trucking it around. It’s superexpensive and environmentally irresponsible.
Is it even humane to keep wild horses in holding pens? I don’t think so. We need every tool available, including euthanasia, to get the wild horse population back to living entirely where they belong: in the wild." - From the linked article
This isn't from someone who is lazy or hates animals and just wants to kill them because it's the easiest way to solve a problem. This isn't fucking PETA, who euthanizes animals out of some combination twisted logic and extreme laziness. This is from a man who adores them but recognizes that sometimes you can't save all individuals in a population and is instead looking at the larger view of making sure the population as a whole can stay healthy and sustainable for generations to come.
Other choice snippets: " Back in the day, the BLM went out and calculated that there was enough grazing for between 280 and 500 horses. The current population out there is 3,600 horses, about seven times the appropriate management level. It’s gotten so bad, the BLM has taken away most of the grazing from the livestock operators in the area because there is not enough grass.
We had some rangeland scientists with us who explained what’s happening. All the animals on the land want to eat the most palatable grass, with the highest amount of nutrition. If you have a tremendous amount of animals on the landscape, pretty soon those priority foods-the “ice-cream” crop foods-all get eaten. Then they go on to their next favorite food, then their next. Over time, we lose the high-quality native species that provide food for pronghorn and deer, as well as horses; and provide habitat for threatened species like sage grouse. Invasives like cheatgrass take over, choking out the native species, turning the rangeland into monoculture."
"Even if we tripled the amount of acreage available to wild horses, they’d fill it up in 10 years, and we’d have the exact same problem as we do now, except that we’d have a tremendous increase in horses. "
Read the whole article. It is very good and gives a deeper look into why they made this recommendation. They're looking at the whole ecosystem and looking to maintain the health of the wild horses as a population. This is more than the lives of a small set of individuals. I want to save all of them too, but more than that I want to have wild horses and pronghorns and sage grouse and a variety mix of native wild plants instead of monocultures.
"So, I joined the board to help find sustainable solutions for improving rangeland health. For 40 years, all the BLM’s dealings with the skyrocketing wild horse population has been like putting Band-Aids on a broken arm.
The situation has gotten worse. Right now, we have 75,000 horses and burros living in the wild in a very delicate ecosystem that can support only 27,000 horses. On top of that, we have another 45,000 horses that were rounded up to prevent overgrazing, and now they live out their lives in holding pens and on leased pastures. The BLM is spending two-thirds of its annual budget, $50 million, caring for them. Think about the environmental: the amount of water to grow all that hay, the fuel used for trucking it around. It’s superexpensive and environmentally irresponsible.
Is it even humane to keep wild horses in holding pens? I don’t think so. We need every tool available, including euthanasia, to get the wild horse population back to living entirely where they belong: in the wild." - From the linked article
This isn't from someone who is lazy or hates animals and just wants to kill them because it's the easiest way to solve a problem. This isn't fucking PETA, who euthanizes animals out of some combination twisted logic and extreme laziness. This is from a man who adores them but recognizes that sometimes you can't save all individuals in a population and is instead looking at the larger view of making sure the population as a whole can stay healthy and sustainable for generations to come.
Other choice snippets:
"
Back in the day, the BLM went out and calculated that there was enough grazing for between 280 and 500 horses. The current population out there is 3,600 horses, about seven times the appropriate management level. It’s gotten so bad, the BLM has taken away most of the grazing from the livestock operators in the area because there is not enough grass.
We had some rangeland scientists with us who explained what’s happening. All the animals on the land want to eat the most palatable grass, with the highest amount of nutrition. If you have a tremendous amount of animals on the landscape, pretty soon those priority foods-the “ice-cream” crop foods-all get eaten. Then they go on to their next favorite food, then their next. Over time, we lose the high-quality native species that provide food for pronghorn and deer, as well as horses; and provide habitat for threatened species like sage grouse. Invasives like cheatgrass take over, choking out the native species, turning the rangeland into monoculture."
"Even if we tripled the amount of acreage available to wild horses, they’d fill it up in 10 years, and we’d have the exact same problem as we do now, except that we’d have a tremendous increase in horses. "
Read the whole article. It is very good and gives a deeper look into why they made this recommendation. They're looking at the whole ecosystem and looking to maintain the health of the wild horses as a population. This is more than the lives of a small set of individuals. I want to save all of them too, but more than that I want to have wild horses and pronghorns and sage grouse and a variety mix of native wild plants instead of monocultures.
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