[Mb-civic] Last roundup for wild horses - Deanne Stillman - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Last roundup for wild horses

By Deanne Stillman  |  March 5, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

PEOPLE KEEP comparing George W. Bush to Richard Nixon. But that's wrong.

In 2005, President Bush signed legislation that will destroy our 
greatest icon -- the wild horse. In 1971, President Nixon signed 
legislation protecting it. This was the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and 
Burro Act, a hard-fought bill brought to lawmakers by ''Wild Horse 
Annie," a Nevada character who saw blood spilling from a truck hauling 
mustangs to the slaughterhouse, then dropped everything and spent the 
rest of her life trying to save them.

Now those trucks are revving their engines again. Starting on March 10, 
7,200 wild horses in government pipelines will begin to make their way 
to the three horse slaughterhouses in this country -- which are owned by 
France and Belgium.

In 1900, about 2 million wild horses roamed the West. By 1950, there 
were 50,000. Today, there are about 25,000 -- perhaps spelling doom for 
the mustang. What happened? World War I, the pet food industry, and 
cattle ranchers, who contend that the remaining wild horses steal food 
from 3 million cows on the range. In the old days, they hired 
contractors to gun down mustangs and bring them the ears. Today, Big 
Beef still hires guns -- politicians who set policy for the Bureau of 
Land Management, the agency that presided over a recent fixed grazing 
study yet is supposed to protect the wild horse. Now, the animal America 
rode in on is facing its meanest battle.

Last year, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana, a Republican who once 
referred to Bush as ''the man who wears the spurs," attached a rider to 
the 2005 appropriations bill, permitting the Bureau of Land Management 
to sell horses it has rounded up that are over 10 years old or haven't 
been adopted by the third try through its own program to be sold to the 
lowest bidder. But 10 is not old for a horse, and it's not unusual for a 
horse to remain unadopted on the third try -- there are barely enough 
adopters to take in the thousands of available horses (but those who do 
include the US Marine Corps Color Guard, which trains palominos from the 
Nevada range for parade duty -- naming some after famous battles, 
including Montezuma Willy and Peking).

Days after Bush signed the bill, 36 horses criminalized as 
''three-strikers" ended up at the killer plants. A nationwide outcry led 
to a new bill, temporarily halting such sales by cutting off funding for 
federal meat inspectors at the slaughterhouses. But Department of 
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns -- a friend to the meat lobby -- has 
done an end-run around the legislation, granting petitioners of the 
slaughterhouses permission to hire their own inspectors, beginning on 
March 10.

Last week, the second bell for the mustang tolled. With thousands of 
wild horses about to hit the market, the Bureau of Land Management 
announced a partnership with the Public Lands Council, urging public 
lands ranchers to buy wild horses for $10 each and put them back on the 
range. But the Public Lands Council consists of the National Cattlemen's 
Beef Association, the American Sheep Industry, and the Association of 
National Grasslands -- the very people who have been trying to expunge 
wild horses for years.

Wild horse advocates fear that some ranchers, businessmen after all, 
will turn around and sell the horses to the slaughterhouse. Making the 
plan even more suspicious is the fact that the wild horses are simply 
not returned to the land, which supposedly could not support them in the 
first place.

Conrad Burns is right -- the president is wearing the spurs. And he's 
driving our greatest partner off a cliff. So next time you see Montezuma 
Willy and Peking at a parade, take a picture and say goodbye. Or, join 
the posse and stop the horse thief at the pass.

''Wild horses and burros merit man's protection historically," Nixon 
said, ''for they are a living link with the days of the conquistadors, 
through the heroic times of the western Indians and pioneers, to our own 
day when the tonic of wilderness seems all too scarce. More than that, 
they merit it as a matter of ecological right -- as anyone knows who has 
ever stood awed at the indomitable spirit and sheer energy of a mustang 
running free."

Deanne Stillman, author of ''Twentynine Palms," is writing ''Horse 
Latitudes: Last Stand for the Wild Horse in the American West."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/05/last_roundup_for_wild_horses/
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