Wild Horses Survived World War I, But They May Not Get Past Bushco

While Laura Bush was getting laughs awhile ago for making a joke about her hubby jerking off horses instead of milking cows, something more sinister was happening. George Bush was actually destroying horses - and has been, all summer, even as he vacations cowboy-style at his spread in Crawford, Texas.

I refer specifically to wild horses, which the Interior Department under Bush appointee Gale Norton has been rounding up by the thousands in order to funnel into its malfunctioning adopt-a-horse program, which now serves as an official way-station to the slaughterhouse. A few days ago, the situation became even more dire, with a press release from Gale Norton obliquely announcing the impending doom behind the headline, "Wild Horses and Burros Need Your Help."

This is a terrible and shameful situation which the agency itself has caused. What's worse is Gale Norton doesn't really want your help because the press release appears to not have been widely disseminated, or perhaps not picked up by the MSM, which would not be a surprise, and likewise not surprisingly, it is not on the agency's website. But it has been picked up by various equine organizations, which is how I got the news

Early this year, Congress gutted federal protections for the wild horse that were in place since 1971 - please click here for my Slate article on the history and politics of the mustang in America and how this legislation was won under Richard Nixon and then undone under George Bush.

Due to an outcry from thousands of citizens all over the country (including truckers who haul livestock to slaughter, school children, dozens of wild horse rescue organizations), the Bureau of Land Mangagement - the agency that oversees wild horses and burros in the Interior Department - granted mustangs a temporary reprieve, pending passage of an anti-slaughter bill. It cleared the House but failed in the Senate (and by the way, members of both parties have blood on their hands).

Now we are back at square one and here's what this means: the wild horse - which survived World War I and the pet food industry and then retreated into the Nevada desert to hide - may not make it past the Bush administration.

The press release from BLM may well mark the beginning of the end. Besides asking for help that it doesn't want, like other such press releases from the agency under Bushco, it's filled with outrageous lies. Among other things, the agency touts its policy of rounding up horses during times of drought. "See how kind we are?" is the idea. The fact is, no other animals are rounded up en masse to give them a drink of water; most of the wild horses rounded up because of drought are not returned to the range, and often ranchers fence off water sources from wild horses and burros, making them accessible only to cows, thereby causing a man-made drought in which the mustangs die of thirst.

But what makes this press release more alarming than others is that it comes on the heels of the recent BLM rollback of grazing restrictions (based on yet another "fixing" of facts to fit a desired outcome), which I recently wrote about on this site; here's the link. In reality, the latest BLM announcement is a cover-up for the fact that the thousands of wild horses in its pipelines are soon to be eligible for purchase at a dollar a head, in order to make way for the thousands more that have been unnecessarily and in violation of requirements to meet current science (conveniently, there isn't any) rounded up this summer. In turn, many of the victims of this latest "gather," to use the BLM's chirpy language, may also be headed for the slaughterhouse.

To head off such a scenario, the press release asks for private donations to go to Ford's new save-the-mustang program, which recently intervened to prevent the slaughter of 52 wild horses, among the first to bear the brunt of the new federal policy. I don't fault Ford here - in fact I commend them. As I've said elsewhere in coverage of the wild horse situation, a mustang isn't just a car - it's what this country rode in on.

But BLM's request for donations is disingenuous because there's not enough private sanctuary land to hold the confiscated horses. And there's no way private citizens can afford to buy the amount of rangeland that thousands of wild horses require. And why should we have to? The horses had a home before they were removed and that home, along with the horses, belongs to the public. Corporate involvement in saving wild horses should not let BLM off the hook. Nor should the phony claim that BLM is saving the taxpayer money by eliminating federal protections and then attempting to privatize the wild horse program - most Americans have no idea that there are any federally protected horses at all and the first thing they want to know when they find out is not how much does it cost to fund the wild horse program but where can they go see them. In a couple of years, maybe in zoos, if current policy continues.

Recently, there was a nationwide uproar over a Supreme Court ruling on eminent domain, aka "takings," or the theft of property from citizens whenever the federal government feels like it. You wanna talk "takings"? The unchecked removal of wild horses from public lands is the mother of them all. Are we going to let the First Cowgirl tell horse jokes while the First Cowboy rides 'em off the stage? Hopefully we can round up a posse and head him off at the pass.