Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Cattle Tripping the Light Fantastic! (not)

Never mentioned in the EA's, the damage cattle do to the rangelands must be acknowledged. Here is the Sierra club's view.

Restore our Western Wildlife Heritage!
Help Remove the Adverse Impacts of Livestock Production on Our Public Lands

Grazing in the Sonoran Desert, Arizona. America's arid western public lands are at risk from taxpayer-subsidized livestock production.

Livestock grazing occurs on more federal public lands than any other commercial use, affecting more than 260 million acres – an area the size of Texas and California combined! Additional impacts related to livestock grazing – including water diversions, wildlife killings, and mile after mile of fencing - further threaten the wildlife and wild character of these public lands, including habitats important to many of our most imperiled species of plants and animals.

In the United States, livestock grazing has contributed to the listing of 22 percent of federal threatened and endangered species—almost equal to logging (12 percent) and mining (11 percent) combined. No other human activity in the West is as responsible for the decline or loss of species as is livestock production. The Sierra Club has placed a high priority on protecting and restoring native wildlife and habitat to our public lands by seeking management changes that will correct livestock impacts. In some locations, this may require an end to commercial livestock production.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Kiss Them Goodbye

This day's entry is courtesy of grassrootshorse and Arla Ruggles' beautiful photographs.

Save Nevada's Wild Horses!

Front cover

Artist: Arla M. Ruggles

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Every wild horse in this collection lives in an area targeted for roundups, beginning July 1, 2011, shown in the order in which the roundups will likely take place (starting with July). Wild Herd Areas include Triple B’s, Maverick-Medicine, and Cherry Springs.

When ordering, we suggest setting the beginning month as July 2011.

Updates on the members of each band shown will be published throughout the coming year on GrassrootsHorse

100% of profit from this work is donated to GrassRootsHorse.com; a 501©3 charitable organization dedicated to the preservation of America’s wild horses. Tax-deductible donations will be used to defray expenses incurred by advocates attending the BLM roundups in Maverick-Medicine, Triple B’s and Cherry Springs wild herd areas in eastern Nevada, during the summer of 2011.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Nevada Wild Horses in 1906 - Montreal Gazette

Proving the History of Wild Horses and Burro’s in Nevada:

This is an excerpt from a 1906 article in the Montreal Gazette proving that the ranchers are full of self righteous BS and their claim that wild horses are not WILD, is nothing but a cowardly lie in order to attain their cruel agendas. It reads:

“The traveler often wonders at the large herds of horses found along the lake, seen in the desert along Walker lake below the Walker Indian Reservation. These horses are wild, not range animals gone wild, but wild horses. They are as unrestrained as the horses that once covered the planes with the buffalo and antelope, and no doubt can trace an ancestry free from the hackamore for half a dozen generations back. “

This article was written in 1906 when population in Nevada was almost nonexistent except for the few mining towns like Hawthorne which at that time consisted of 6 house. Long before the cattle ranchers settled there. The writer states that for at least 6 generations these horses have been wild and free, effectively proving their wildness for over 220 years at a very minimum and also proving that thousands of them roamed the planes with the buffalo before white men even settled the continent.

America once was great planes where the buffalo and the horses roamed in peace. There used to be over a million, now we are down to the last 20,000 if even that many; an independent unbiased count has never been done.

These are the last survivors of the BLM policies, the survivors of the poisoning and shooting by the Mustangers, the survivors of hundreds of tough winters and summer droughts. They have evolved into the toughest horse in the world with the most beautiful and amazing natural herd dynamics. They can survive a lot, but they cannot survive longer than 4 days without water.