Public lands ranchers win, wild horses lose — again
A Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Tuesday'sHorse
February 2020

Once again, cattle ranchers illegally grazing cattle on public lands win a lawsuit to approve BLM's 'removal' of wild horses.

Wild Stallion by Randy Harris Photo

Public Lands Council (PLC) Executive Director and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) Executive Director of Natural Resources, Kaitlynn Glover, today released the following statement in response to a ruling in a case related to the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act.

This week, Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) decision to remove more than 1,700 wild horses from the Caliente Complex in Nevada complied with federal laws:

“Judge Howell’s ruling affirms the Bureau of Land Management’s responsibility and authority to manage these horse herds using science and the law. Across the West, horse populations far exceed their appropriate stocking rates, often by more than three times the ideal population sizes.

“This lawsuit sought to undermine the very tenets of the multiple use mandate. The BLM is required by law not only to manage resources for optimal land health, but also for a variety of uses for the American public. In areas where these herds reside, the BLM is required to ensure these horses do not continue to degrade water and land health simply because they are overstocked. I know I speak on behalf of ranchers when I commend Judge Howell for recognizing that this suit was nothing more than an attempt to prioritize horses at the expense of the health of our natural resources.”

Source: Press Release

WE SAY

Kaitlynn Glover

The above is based of course predictably (they never disappoint), on the the usual tissues of lies perpetrated against the American Mustang by the corrupt United States Department of Interior and its unscrupulously deadly puppets, the Bureau of Land Management.

In the meantime, someone explain how the Executive Director of the Public Lands Council is also the Executive Director of Natural Resources of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

In the meantime, the lowly welfare cattle rancher is often the target of blame, and they do play a part, but it would behoove us to look beyond them and continue to follow the big money, and therefore the power, all the way to the billionaire welfare ranchers.

Take a look at this who’s who:

• David and Charles Koch (Koch Industries)
• J.R. Simplot Corp.
• Bruce McCaw (McCaw Cellular)
• Barrick Gold
• Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA)
• W. Barron Hilton (Hilton Hotels)
• Mary Hewlett-Jaffe (Hewlett-Packard)
• James Barta (Sav-Rx.com)
• T. Wright Dickinson
• Stan Kroenke (Kroenke Group) & Ann Walton Kroenke (Walmart)
• Family of Robert Earl Holding (Sinclair Oil and Hotels)
• Ted Turner

See Rolex Ranchers and the Living Legends by Ellen Cathryn Nash, in 2005, and Wild horses, Federal Grazing and America’s Billionaire Welfare Ranchers by Vickery Eckhoff ten years later, in 2015.

Eckhoff sums it up with this statement:

“The .01 percenters are the nation’s biggest welfare ranchers, according to numerous environmental and policy groups; and it’s time they brought some attention to themselves and the federal grazing program they’re exploiting to the tune of an annual estimated one billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies while causing long-term damage to one of the public’s most treasured assets.”

One billionaire dollars in taxpayer subsidies. That, horse lovers, was in 2015. Imagine what it is now, five years on.

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