BLM’s Bob Abbey talks Wild Horses and Burros: Fact or Fiction?

Horse News

By R.T. Fitch on June 4, 2010 • ( 184 Comments )

“In my Humble Opinion!” by R.T. Fitch – Author of “Straight from the Horse’s Heart”

June 3, 2010 Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director Bob Abbey announced that his agency plans to take the Wild Horse and Burro Program in a new direction, and in so doing he is requesting public comment on the document that implements Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar’s Wild Horse and Burro Initiative (Salazoo).

That’s pretty close to how the press release opens and reading those words makes me sit a little deeper into the saddle and latch onto the horn just a tad tighter because I feel something beginning to collect between my legs and the outcome is not going to be pretty.

It’s almost as if you are afraid to read any deeper into the announcement as truth and accuracy, to date, have not been forth coming from the BLM.  Although the words “seeking public input” has merit the mention of Salazar’s death zoo concept makes one’s blood boil.  (Let’s spend millions of dollars to round-up the last of our native wild horses, sterilize them and then spend untold millions more shipping them back east to leased or bought property with different forage to watch them wither away and die, gone forever.)  Can’t get me too revved up over a plan like that; neither scientifically or emotionally.

Although I hope that one day we can have productive and fruitful dialogue with an agency that looks over our wild horses, hopefully not the BLM, this current invitation appears to be flawed from the git-go.

The entire idea of well rounded discussion is immediately stifled when Abbey inserts caveats such as;

“certain topics and options will be off the table, including the euthanasia of healthy excess animals or their sale without limitation to protect the animals from slaughter

Sorry dude, that’s one of the FIRST things I want to discuss as your agency has not only been involved with but makes it easy for our national heritage to slip across our boarders to be butchered for wealthy foreigner’s dinner plates.  And it can and IS still happening today!  Excuse me while I clear my throat, “Errr, cough, hrmmm, excess horses my ass, brmmm, cough!”  There, that feels better.

Also, without producing accurate numbers or qualifying the need Abbey say’s that the unnecessary and deadly helicopter stampeded round-ups will continue;

“These gather operations are being carefully analyzed, engaging the public in the planning process.”

Says who?  Last December while your henchman Don Glenn was standing before a small group of equine welfare advocates extolling how transparent you all are a wild horse herd was being zeroed out in a covert, unannounced round-up and you expect us to believe you now?  Pardon me while I sneeze, “DOINK!”  thank you.

Carefully analyzed!?!?  For Pete’s sake you screwed up the math on the Calico Complex round-up and stopped stampeding horses well under the number you intended to gather because why?  You ran out of blinking horses to harass and capture, you had no idea how many were really out there.  You claim that you left 600 horses on the range and multiple flyovers and visits from independent sources indicate that if there are 100 still surviving, we are lucky.

“Based on the best information the BLM currently has, without these gathers the land will suffer, wildlife will suffer, and ultimately, the horses will suffer.”

And where did you acquire that “best information”?  Would it perchance come from your boss’s buddy’s from the cattle industry?  How about stampeding the forage destroying, privately owned cattle off from our public lands and let the non-destructive, native wild horses alone?  That would be a novel concept.  And how much would that cost, you know, just to leave the horses on the land that Congress put aside for them to live on?  Hmmm, let me get out my calculator, this is going to be complicated…cipher this to the 8^th power of that, shift the decimal point to the left and the grand total comes up to be ZERO!  Goodness gracious, why have we not thought of this sooner?

It just blows my mind how this mess goes from dumb to dumber; somehow I missed that “Government Employee Double Talk 101” class in college.  It must have been over in that “Bachelor of Incompetency” program.  I knew I messed up, just imagine the freedom a graduate from DOI U must have as they are not held accountable for anything while the rest of we dumb idiots are forced to live the truth and are required to produce deliverables throughout our careers.  Life could have been so easy but we just had to go and pick the path of accountability, bunch of dopes.

Abbey’s press release closes with a statement that indicates there are 38,000 horses left free with 35,000 held in concentration camps.  The former is probably way high and the later may tend to be a tad conservative.  Wonder how many of that alleged 35,000 are still alive and intact as the public has not been allowed to verify the well being of captives.  How many truckloads have been shipped across the boarder for slaughter as that is just what the BLM wanted to do two years ago and I don’t think a leopard changes spots that quickly.

But at least Abbey is being honest in bringing to light one thing; the fact that the BLM’s mission is near completion.  They have reached, at minimum, the point where there are more horses held in captivity then are free in the wild and that very, very soon…there will be no more wild horses, none, zero, nada, zippo.

That you can count on.

Categories: Horse News, Horse Slaughter, The Force of the Horse, Wild Horses/Mustangs

Tagged as: animal cruelty, BLM, Bob Abbey, Calico Complex, doi, Equine, Horse, Horse Slaughter, Ken Salazar, Mustang, R.T. Fitch, round up, wildhorse, wildmustang