PETITION TO HAVE AMERICA’S WILD HORSES AND BURROS DECLARED ENDANGERED SPECIES UNDER THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT

Today there are more wild horses and burros languishing in government holding pens and pastures than there are out on their legal habitats on BLM-USDI and US Forest Service-USDA lands! And their numbers are rapidly being reduced by hellish helicopter roundups to genetically non-viable population levels and their herds are being meanly thwarted in their natural tendency to harmoniously adapt to each unique ecosystem, as the law intended. Those who remain have their most intimate parts altered so as not to reproduce or only in a very minimal way. Basically, these animals are being victimized and converted into domesticated animals. Indeed, those in charge of our nation’s wild horse and burro programs openly deride the very concept of wild, naturally living horses and burros and ignore their status as deeply rooted native species in North America as well as the many substantial benefits they contribute to ecosystems as returned “keystone” species. It is now high time that this outrageous situation be remedied! The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act (WFHBA) was unanimously passed by Congress  in 1971 but has been deviously subverted by the very enemies of the wild horses and burros that it meant to defend these valuable animals against!

America’s greatly reduced wild horses and burros are now under extreme attack was designed to defend these national heritage species remaining throughout the West on BLM-USDI and US Forest Service-USDA lands. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act  mandated that they NOT be eliminated by their human enemies. But both BLM and USFS  have willfully ignored this law’s true intent and purpose so that certain exploitive interests, mining, oil, gas and public lands grazing could continue to monopolize the forage, water, and other habitat components to such an extent that the very survival necessities of the wild horses and burros would be taken away – even within their legal areas where these animals have legal rights to the principal resources in order to restore and maintain truly long-term thriving herds and ecosystems.

These nefarious policies have led to official assignments of genetically non-viable population levels – the so-called Appropriate Management levels (AMLs). And to make matters worse, our federal officials are making the wild horses and burros largely infertile through various drugs and vaccines that sap their natural vitality and disrupt their social infrastructures, similarly to what happens to many domesticated animals, whose truer nature is thwarted. Basically, this is a prescription for decline and demise in a relatively few short generations.

Currently (October 2024), our federal agencies have reduced the original legal habitats from at least 54-million acres (researchers show that this figure should have been 88-million acres or more [see the book: The Wild Horse Conspiracy]) to slightly less than 27-million acres – that basically chopped this in half on BLM lands, and even more on USFS lands! Our public officials, and supposed servants, have ignored the millions of General Public citizens in order to favor for-profit corporations who covet the natural resources that are required for the wild equids to survive on only a minor portion of the public lands – around 12%.

The nationwide Appropriate Management Level on 177 Herd Management Areas (reduced from an original of ca. 350) on BLM lands is 26,900 wild horses and burros. The population limitation these officials are imposing on these horse and burro herds totaling only ca. 27,000 wild equids would be the equivalent of ca. 1,000 acres per individual wild equid (and please remember that a wild burro eats only about one half as much as a wild horse and eats more bushes and forbs compared with the more grass-eating horses). And since there are 640 acres in a square mile, the so-called Appropriate Management Level yields a population density of 1.56 square miles per individual wild equid. This represents a nearly empty wild horse and burro habitat in America and a tragic mockery of the unanimously passed WFHBA, representing the General Public’s will concerning what is precious to the average American and his/her experienced Quality of Life. This outrageous sabotage would favor narrow-minded and selfish exploiters of the natural resources, including the forage, water, and other survival requirements that these people are loathe to share with a modest number of wild horses and burros. For, in spite of their receiving enormous taxpayer subsidies to keep their operations afloat and in spite of the fact that these public lands ranchers are only allowed to graze their livestock by cancellable permits, whereas the wild equids possess legal rights to the principal resources within their legal habitats on BLM and USFS lands, yet this extremely unjust, cruel, un-ecological, mean-spirited and immoral situation persists today in America!

Both horses and burros possess deeply rooted, native North American ancestry, as an exhaustive fossil record and DNA analysis abundantly proves and Native American oral and written history also substantiates. Indigenous Lakota science, which has always dispelled the claim that horses died out before being re-introduced by the Spanish, alongside ground-breaking DNA research.  Today, new discoveries in Western science have come together with Lakota scientists to create a more complete understanding of the Horse, its evolution and place in Lakota and other American Indian tribes history as shown in the ground breaking film Native Horse currently airing on PBS.  Taku Skan Skan Wasakliyapi: Global Institute for Traditional Sciences spearheaded by PhD Yvette Running Horse Collin and  Wendell Yellow Bull presents substantial science, documentation and Lakota oral history of the Horse surviving the Pleistocene extinction event.

The Yukon Beringia Museum in Canada and it’s team of scientists has unearthed in the melting permafrost vast findings that are re-writing history! Tyler Murchie from McMaster University in Canada has been studying frozen earth cores from the Yukon and has discovered DNA from both Woolly Mammoths and Ice Age Horses, genus Equus, that are about 6,000 years old, which blows up the whole paradigm of these animals going extinct in the Holocene Epoch roughly 12,000 years ago. The new data implies that horses may have persisted in North America well after the classical Late Pleistocene extinction event.

Both species wild horses and burros  improve the ecosystems they inhabit as “keystone” species that benefit a myriad of flora and fauna. As members of the ancient and long-standing Perissodactyl Order of the Mammalia, they are natural gardeners who enrich soils and disperse intact seeds of a great variety when compared with the cloven-hoofed ruminant herbivores – which they greatly complement and balance out in North America, as well as in many other places throughout the world. So now, let’s take a look at some more of the plain facts:

The BLM has a high-end AML for wild burros nationwide of an outrageously low 2,919 burros, which is a sure prescription for their genetic decline and demise. And, though considerably higher, the high-end AML for wild horses nationwide is a very substandard 23,866 horses. When divided among the 177 Herd Management Areas (HMAs) that remain out of the 349 original Herd Areas (HAs – 172 of which have been “zeroed out” or had all their wild horses and burros removed), we can calculate that at high AML an average HMA has only 135 wild equids.  Yet, 135 is a genetically non-viable population even according to the contracted geneticists that BLM pays to advise them and certainly far lower than the 2,500 reproductively intact individuals that the much more objective IUCN SSC Equid Specialist Group recommends for a viable population living in nature! Incredibly, the situation on the US Forest Service lands is even much worse! This agency seems dedicated to total elimination and doesn’t even like to acknowledge that they have a responsibility to protect wild horses and burros! (Again, see: The Wild Horse Conspiracy as well as the references for the published statistics in the paragraph at: https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2024-03/2024_HMA-HA_PopStats-2-29-2024_COMBINED_Clean_FINAL_web.pdf; Duncan, P. 1992. Zebras, Asses, and Horses: An Action Plan for the Conservation of Wild Equids. IUCN Species Survival Commission, Equid Specialist Group. Many additional references are including in the book.   A recent study of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests wild horses in northern Arizona at: https://thewildhorseconspiracy.org/heber-asnf-mustang-report-11-2022/ . Also read this strong defense of America’s precious wild horses and burros at: https://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2021/08/22/outrageous-treatment-americas-wild-horses-and-their-legal-habitat/ .

FINAL STATEMENT:

The current, so-called “path forward” adopted by BLM-USDI and US Forest Service – USDA should actually be called “the wipeout plan,” because its aim is to eliminate nearly all of America’s wild horses and burros and to leave only highly fragmented, scattered, and pitifully reduced and dysfunctional “token” herds. Then America’s remaining wild horses and burros would no longer be truly wild and free, but rather terribly thwarted, altered, and domesticated, including by extensive fencing within their legal habitats to accommodate livestock ranchers, oil, gas and mining operations in wild horse & burro legally designated areas.. This would disrupt their natural movements and seasonal migrations and grazing rest rotation and make a mockery of the “Free-Roaming” part of the WFHBA! This favoring of a heavily subsidized industry’s that depends heavily on taxpayer support is very contrary to the true spirit and intent of the WFHBA and other related laws such as the Endangered Species Act.

For this reason and in order to strengthen the WFHBA, those of us who still care should see to it that legislation is passed to have America’s greatly reduced wild horse and burro herds additionally protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) as unique herds or deeply rooted North American species and lineages. This act covers threatened and endangered populations as well as entire subspecies and species; and each one of the legal herds in their own special and unique habitats on BLM and USFS lands constitutes a unique lineage that has adapted to its unique ecosystem. Each one of these should be protected and restored at a population level that guarantees long-term genetic viability under the ESA. Though most of America’s wild horse and burro herds have already been eliminated due to the sabotage of the WFHBA, it is till not too late to protect those that remain! And, so, in closing we greatly urge you to please sign this statement that now takes the form of a petition so that legislation can be immediately introduced, passed, and signed into law by the new President of the United States, for whom we pray to be guided by Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka,  the sacred or the divine. This can be translated  as the "Great Spirit" and occasionally as "Great Mystery". Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka can be interpreted as the power or the sacredness that resides in everything.. This term describes every creature and object as wakȟáŋ or having aspects of the sacred or the divine. Tanka or Tȟáŋka corresponds to "Great" or "large".

Contact your Congressmen, Senators, Governors, and the President of the United States of America along with anyone else you can think of, including members of the media.

For a future without these great wonders (Wild Horses & Burros) and native healers of ecosystems including myriad plants and animals as well as people themselves truly do deserve their Place here on the North American continent!  These extraordinary horses and burros have done so much for our evolution!  They most surely deserve their place, their fitting natural homes, &  habitats, as the noble and truly progressive Wild Free Roaming Horse & Burro Act unanimously passed by Congress  intended and still intends!

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