BLM Round Ups - Humane and Necessary? You Decide but Something has to Give

Let's move away from the subject of horse racing and talk about the Government and the Wild Mustang issue.

NBC News did a feature on the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) round ups on the wild mustangs.  The reality is horses are being moved off public lands to placate ranchers who raise cattle; competing for the same grazing land.  Watch the video at the end and you decide if the round up is humane or not.

I would suggest not from what you can see , plus one of he biggest problems with the BLM policy is the fact horses are easily gotten by dealers with a large number of them heading across the border with domesticated horses due to lax rules.  Clearly with more horses in captivity than out on the open range, the collection of horses is costing taxpayers a lot of money.

The truth is something needs to happen but it must be done humanely.  There are ways to give mares birth control to keep them from getting pregnant.  Instead of using helicopters, round ups can be done the old fashioned way. 
 

I would love to see the wild horses run free but there is a bigger threat than giving grazing lands to a large population of horses in the wild; the competition for water; not cattle versus horses but animal versus man.  The west has dwindling water supplies due to over development and  with increasing periods of drought (in fact some predict a new dust bowl is inevitable due to over development and population).  Then what happens?

 

In Australia, there are plans to cull 10,000 wild horses in their Northern Territory due to drought (only look at this link if you can handle upsetting photos) which have resulted in watering holes drying up, resulting in horses literally dying of thirst; to the point some pro-horse groups are calling for the cull as a humane way to handle an environmental disaster.  There, some blame the government for not doing anything to manage the herd size so it seems doing nothing is not an option.

 

Therefore, reducing the size of America's wild horse population is a necessity.  Those who oppose any control of their herd size is just as irresponsible as those seeking the land for cattle grazing.  Realistically, the government must step in; it is a question of doing it the right way; humane, not cruel,

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