Monday, October 20, 1997

Submitted by Elsa Wahl

This article appeared in the Savannah, Georgia, "Savannah Morning News" on the Opinion page 

Editorial page editor: Thomas S. Barton

email: letted@savannahnow.com

    A Federal program that might be  called "Adopting Government Horses for Fun and Profit" has met its well-deserved end:  To settle a lawsuit, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has agreed to tighten the reins on its $16-million-a-year wild horse adoption program.

    Earlier this year, the Associated Press discovered that some of the wild horses and burros that graze on government land in 10 Western states were winding up in slaughterhouses.

    The BLM rounds up several thousand horses each year and places them with adopters who pay about from $25 to $125 each depending on age and health.  The goal is to reduce the size of wild herds and find homes for horses too old to survive in the wild.

    The adopter must keep each animal for one year and comply with a health check before receiving title.  The adoption program costs the government $16 million a year because the BLM supposedly monitors each horse for a year.  More than 150,000 horses have been adopted since the program began in 1973.

    The AP investigations found that the BLM had lost track of 32,000 adopted animals and that 90 percent of the horses rounded up each year eventually ended up being slaughtered.

    And who were some of the profiteers in this scheme?  BLM employees who adopted horses, shuffled papers, "lost" the horses, and then sold them to slaughterhouses for up to $700 each.

    BLM policy encourages agency employees to adopt and train wild horses for their own use.  Yet some BLM employees could not account for any of the horses they had adopted.

    Thanks to lawsuits brought by the Fund for Animals and the Animal Protection Institute of America, the BLM has agreed to tighten up monitoring of its adopted horses.  It did not explain how it is going to do that, but hopefully it will not require hiring more overseers to monitor the monitors.

    What the BLM should do is determine whether the government should be in the horse management business at all.  It has a duty to protect wild horses from wanton slaughter.  But a costly, year-long "adoption" process easily abused by its own employees is a dubious solution.

Willis Lamm operates a horse facility in northern California, is a wild horse adopter, wild horse activist, mentor to wild horse adopters and webmaster of the KBR Wild Horse and Burro Page (the largest wild horse and burro website on the internet). He is not employed by or related in any way to the Bureau of Land Management.

KBR Wild Horse and Burro Website: http://www.ecis.com/~whl/pag/blmhorse.html

Guest Editorial Response: Re: "Tightening the Wild Horse Reins"

While many of us in the equestrian world appreciate the news media following issues involving wild horses and burros, much reporting has been built upon some very erroneous AP articles which contained what I could only describe as manufactured statistics, and quotes which the attributed makers have informed me thay did not give.

I think most of us agree that the Wild and Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act was written with a number of hardly enforceable provisions and correcting these weaknesses has been an important step forward.

However, the hysteria that thousands of adopted BLM horses are somehow being diverted to slaughter is just that... hysteria. There are numbers of wild horses going to slaughter, but this data does NOT include significant numbers of horses managed and protected by the BLM. The thousands of wild horses on private and non-BLM managed lands are unprotected targets.

It is important to maintain some clarity as to where the wild horse slaughter problem really originates. There are a number of special interests which are benefitting from this entire problem being laid at BLM's doorstep, which takes attention away from their own nefarious activities.

The BLM's Adopt-a-Wild Horse or Burro program isn't perfect, but it certainly isn't the inept disaster that the special interests want to portray it to be. Thousands of wild horses are being removed from overpopulated areas. Most of them are finding good adoptive homes. I would doubt that your local animal shelter scrutinizes dog and cat adopters to the extent that the BLM reviews potential horse adopters.

We need to protect the wild horses and we need to aggressively pursue those who aim to profit at their expense, however we need to be careful about who we accuse of being the villans here and not overlook the real culprits.

Willis Lamm

This letter was published in the Savannah Morning News subsequent to the original article.