American
Wild Horse Preservation
July 2014
[Ed. Note: The "livestock" industries want to rid our public lands of all animals they believe compete with "livestock" for food, land, water. GO VEGAN!]
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is planning to airlift 100 of our nation's wild burros to Guatemala, where they will spend the remainder of their days as "beasts of burden," working under stressful conditions in a country with few, if any, enforceable animal protection laws.
Wild, free burros...
The BLM is calling this a pilot program that could lead to additional efforts to exile thousands of wild horses and burros to foreign nations, where tracking the fate and ensuring the welfare of these protected national icons will be impossible. The agency also has in its possession a proposal to ship hundreds of mustang mares to Guyana. It's time to take a stand against our government's latest attempt to dump America's cherished wild horses and burros to fates unknown.
Sign an online petition here.
And then:
Find and contact your U.S. Senators
http://www.senate.gov/
Find and contact your U.S. Representative
http://www.house.gov/
Captive, enslaved burro...
Burros are amazing, hardy animals who manage to survive under the harshest conditions. Sadly, just like their wild horse cousins, they cling to a tenuous existence in a shrinking habitat on our public lands and struggle under a management program that rounds them up and removes them from their homes on the range in the American West.
Just like wild horses, wild free-roaming burros face many hardships,
including ever-shrinking habitat and a federal "management" program that
rounds them up in large numbers and removes them from the range to keep
burro populations artificially low.
Since 1971, when Congress unanimously passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses
and Burros Act, the number of burros in the West has declined dramatically.
Congress passed the Act stating that protection for these animals was needed
because "these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American
scene." So when the first federal census, conducted in 1974, found 14, 656
burros living on Forest Service (FS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
lands it was understood that was a low number. By 1978, after four years of
federal "management," fewer than 10,000 burros remained. Today just 6,825
burros remain on BLM land and under 1,000 on FS land. During this same time
period, their designated habitat area has been reduced by half.
Complicating the burros' struggle for survival even more is the fact that
the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act only applies only to mustangs
and burros living in designated areas on FS and BLM lands. On other federal
lands, such as those administered by the National Park Service, and on state
lands, these animals are considered to be "exotic" and "feral" and are
subject to eradication plans.
Working horses, donkeys and mules often suffer from exhaustion,
dehydration, malnutrition, and abuse as a result of excessive workloads and
limited animal health services in developing countries.
Now is the time to tell Congress and the BLM that this ill-conceived plan
must be immediately scrapped. The BLM should not be in the business of
shipping our cherished burros (or wild horses) to foreign countries where
the welfare and fate of these animals cannot be ensured.
Learn more about these steadfast survivors -
Burro Stories for Burro Awareness Month.
Thank you for everything you do for animals!
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