Wild Burros of the Owens Valley, originally uploaded by Snap Man.
The House voted Thursday to prevent the government from selling off for slaughter any wild horses and burros that roam public lands in the West.
The 277-137 vote would restore a 1971 law preventing the Bureau of Land Management from selling the animals for commercial processing.
The protection was removed in 2004 when former Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., inserted a measure in a spending bill allowing their sale. Read more
I hope they’ll be looking into alternative ways of keeping the populations down, such as making it easier to adopt these critters, immunocontraception, etc. About a quarter of the mustangs and burros rounded up never find homes…
Actually, the BLM pays $16 million of its $21 million annual budget to Kansas and Oklahoma cattlemen to warehouse the rounded up horses on pastures there. Those horses they do not try to get adopted, and send about 6,000 to 10,000 per year to slaughter.
In 2008 the BLM decided to send more per year to slaughter, based on extremely faulty counts of horses in the Herd Management Areas, and even more faulty reproduction estimates.
This is becaue the cattlemen want to graze even more cattle on the land, in response to high feed prices caused by the corn ethanol scam.
Visit the http://www.delcaminoequestrian.com/wordpress blog for more current facts.