URGENT: Stop the Worst Ever Decimation Plan for Wild Horse Herd!
This alert is no longer active, but here for reference. Animals still need your help.
The Bureau of Land Management has hit a new low in its continued calamitous mismanagement of wild horses and burros. Its insidious plan for the North Lander Complex in Wyoming calls for the permanent removal of most horses with draconian sterilization measures undertaken for those horses captured and returned to the range. We must speak out against the planned brutal extermination of this herd and not allow a dangerous precedent to be set for the destruction of wild horse and burro herds in the U.S.
The proposed plan calls for stallions to be castrated which will completely alter their natural behaviors and their important functions in the herd. Mares will be subjected to harmful and experimental IUDs and GonaCon.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) must by law take public comment on the Environmental Assessment (EA) it has developed for the North Lander wild horse herds.
However, we must act quickly because the deadline is in just a few short days.
The EA contains three supposed action “options,” but we know from years of past experience that the only one the BLM will consider is the worst one that has ever been put into a wild horse management plan. Under this plan the BLM will:
- Castrate a high percentage (up to 95% or more) of captured stallions returning to the range.
- Use flexible Intrauterine Devices (IUDs) for wild mares returning to the range.
- Use GonaCon-Equine vaccine on all mares returning to the range, including mares receiving an IUD.
- Implement a 60:40 male:female sex ratio.
Anyone with a general understanding of science and wild horse behavior knows that five percent of intact wild stallions can breed with 100% of mares in the herd. This by itself would not reduce birth rates. Combined with the released mares being infertile due to their drastic experimental treatments, this is a recipe for the genetic destruction of the herd. The few remaining reproducing wild stallions and mares will result in most of their offspring being related, creating forced inbreeding. This will destroy the overall health and viability and could lead to the eventual destruction of the entire herd.
The fertility control for mares in the EA is also appalling because it is experimental and unproven. By admission in this EA, "IUDs in mares may cause physiological effects including discomfort or infection. Perforation of the uterus could result... Endometritis, uterine edema, and pyometra could result.." Also in the EA, "One of the major challenges to using IUDs to control fertility in mares on the range is preventing the IUD from being dislodged or otherwise ejected."
The EA references IUD studies done on domestic mares, which at least have the benefit of continual veterinary observation and care. Wild mares will not have that option and can suffer immensely from rupture, bleeding, pain, and worse.
The GonaCon proposal is alarmingly perilous because current studies have not determined the exact timing for the return to fertility in mares boosted more than once with GonaCon-Equine. Since it has not been quantified, some mares could become permanently sterile.
Fertility control with safe, humane, and reversible PZP remote darting is a much better option for wild herds, as potentially needed.
This alert is no longer active, but here for reference. Animals still need your help.