Arkansas Blogging and Updates: ONWARD

Monday, March 14, 2011

Reposting this directly from Laura Leigh's blog 3/13/2011

What can I say? It was another Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board Meeting. I went. Not because I feel that the board has any meaning except to act as an illusion of public participation in process. The Board sleeps half the time and has no real legal authority… and NOTHING REAL every comes out of the meetings… from the Board. However I did attend as another voice and “warm body” to represent our herds.

Many other wonderful people were there. I am not going to start naming because I will miss someone and end up editing this entry for days. I do not have time to create a slideshow or edit video but I am posting a few pics to share.

Do not, for one second, believe there is no funding for summer. Do not, for one second, believe this is “time off.”

Funding will be pulled from another agency or program. The “balls to the wall” pace of the last year will continue. The agenda has not changed no matter what words are printed, spoken or drawn in the sand. The actions on the range, in holding, hidden in closed facilities remains unchanged.

There is no “New Direction” until the train is a hundred miles down track no one has even laid yet.

I’m back out… and the pace will pick up not slack off. This IS NOT “time off.” It is time to reload…

WE need a Congressional investigation into this program… no NAS study with parameters given to them by BLM, no internal investigation into contractor actions, no “observers” provided by a 501 that may very well be illegally operated and a conflict of interest for an Advisory Board Member… no more.

We need something tangible from Abbey now.

For starters let’s try transparency of actions… OPEN closed facilities to the public, approve sanctuaries that give something back to the tax payer, start making lease holders actually pay for the cost of their leases and stop running an entitlement program on public land… AND adhere to the most basic premise of the act and start treating these animals in a humane fashion according to today’s standards and NOT some 1800′s cowboy mentality.

Am I really asking too much in a supposedly civilized nation?