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Eight Bells for Eight Belles
A petition urging Churchill Downs to honor Fox Hill Farms' deceased filly
Eight Belles by ringing eight bells:
Blog on Eight Belles, speak your mind..
Wild Mustang Coalition Organization
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New Nevada Agriculture Director
Takes
Aim at Wild Horses
Part Twenty Eight |
News From the Front - May 13, 2008
Stupidity and the latest round of state budget woes.
Gaming is down which means the state budget is short another $15+ million, Nevada Appeal, May 10, 2008.
Dumb and Dumber.
Dumb is fabricating a crisis in order to extract more money from a from a state budget that is bleeding from every
orifice... money for expanding holding corrals, bringing in large numbers of horses, hiring a new employee, conducting a new
range study, having to feed hundreds of horses that are brought in, fighting lawsuits, etc... all over a "problem" that doesn't
really exist.
Dumber involves the Governor of a state that is vitally dependent upon tourism revenue alienating those tourists
by allowing an egregious attack on "Nevada's own herd," the Virginia Range horses. (So far this year gaming tax collections
are down about $65 million dollars.)
In every major poll between two-thirds and 70 percent of the respondents were in favor of protecting the wild horses. If
the recent Nevada-Appeal poll is any indicator, this ratio has actually climbed to over 80%.
Governor Gibbons, those are your tourists speaking!
Gibbons is leaving both Democrats and Republicans scratching their heads as to why the he insists on being the engineer
and allowing Lesperance to shovel in more coal for a train wreck that can only produce more financial hardship for Nevada
and for our citizens whose livelihoods depend on tourist dollars.
What has to be done:
- Dump Tony Lesperance
The man appears to be either a compulsive liar or incompetent, or perhaps both. He has shown himself to be a crusader who
is not only wasteful of precious taxpayer dollars but is running the risk of triggering a tourism boycott that could make
the current revenue shortfall look like a warm-up act. Some very well financed people from out of state are just waiting for
the opportunity to vilify Nevada and encourage tourists to "Go somewhere else," presumably to their own entertainment
and recreational venues.
So Step 1 has to be to get the liars and incompetents out of the picture, save our tax dollars wherever possible, and stop
alienating our tourists. Lesperance & Co. need to get off at the next stop.
- Don't waste more taxpayer money
The last thing we need during a budget crisis is to hire a new management person when someone already experienced and capable
is running the Virginia Range horse program. There has been no need demonstrated yet to hire yet another taxpayer-funded boss.
We don't need to spend money on more round-ups, more corrals and expensive feed for rounded up horses unless the incompetents
at the Department of Agriculture so alienate the cooperating horse groups that they stop taking "excess" horses from the state
to hold for adoption and they stop raising funds for emergency winter feed for the herd. (The horse groups currently hold
horses for adoption at their own expense and they provide emergency winter feeding if needed.)
We don't need to spend money on a new study until people at the Department of Agriculture can demonstrate that they understand
the study that they already have. The existing NRCS study already provides a pretty solid baseline for horse management, assuming
that the persons interpreting the study can do simple arithmetic.
- Let the current Horse Program Manager run his program
Virginia Range Estray Program Manager Mike Holmes is arguably the most knowledgeable person in the department about the
Virginia Range and the horses. As someone who has never lied to the groups, he is the person whose observations and conclusions
hold some credibility with the field active volunteers.
One of the primary reasons the Virginia Range issue has become a crisis is that the Department has excluded the one person
on their staff who actually knows what's going on from the discussions it has had with the wild horse groups. (I suppose if
you're trying to advance a big lie, it doesn't work to bring a straight talker to the table.)
For reasons that defy explanation, Director Lesperance is shifting a huge, unfunded and open ended financial and labor
burden from the wild horse groups onto the backs of the taxpayers and he is quite likely damaging Nevada's tourism economy
in the process.
How can Governor Gibbons stand by and let this stuff happen? He's throwing good money after bad and this whole fiasco stands
to further harm Nevada's tourism industry and the vital revenues that the state derives from tourists. If just ten percent
of potential Nevada tourists say "Screw Nevada," we'll see a whole new round of painful cuts.
Is this fiscal responsibility? Absolutely not!
A new sniglet
Those of you who remember Rich Hall and "Not Necessarily the News" should remember sniglets. A sniglet is a neologism defined
by Wikipedia as "any word that doesn't appear in the dictionary, but should". The current "horse crisis" has produced a new
sniglet.
Agrimanufactation (n) The creation of a fact or facts on the fly by the Department of Agriculture in order to support and
unfounded claim or theory, or to cover a previously made false statement.
Southwest Blend
The folks from Southwest Blend Magazine were up for a look around the Comstock and the Virginia Range. The magazine has
jumped to something like 1.8 million readers since it went from paper to on-line publication.
These folks literally travel all the world's outdoor places, including spending years studying the animals and landscape
of Africa. Ergo they certainly aren't amateurs. They seemed quite satisfied with the condition of the range and its animals
and could find no evidence of the range being "totally destroyed" as the Department of Agriculture claims.
In tomorrow's edition - More contemporary views of the range
The spirit of Thomas Paine lives
Virginia Range herd management needs to be viable and economical
By Willis Lamm
Here's what's really going on -- and it doesn't really matter if you are pro-horse or anti-horse. The fundamental
issues involve truthfulness of governmental officials and manipulation of our tax dollars.
The current wild horse issue is focused on the Virginia Range horses that are managed by the state. Folks are going to
disagree on the appropriate numbers of horses on the Virginia Range, and we probably need qualified and objective range biologists
to look at the entire range and make such recommendations. But the horse population really isn't the issue.
What this business is about is a manufactured "crisis" intended to scare the state's Interim Finance Committee into giving
more money to a mismanaged state program while the state is experiencing a severe budget crisis. The whole thing is nonsense
and here's why:
Originally the nonprofit wild horse groups, primarily the VRWPA, managed the Virginia Range herd and covered all the herd
management costs. Former Nevada Agriculture Department director Paul Iverson took that responsibility away from the counties and wildlife groups and in a
court action, asserted the department's authority over the herd. That action also obligated the state to pay for a lot of
things associated with managing the herd.
Nonetheless, the wild horse groups, through cooperative agreements with the state, accepted and placed excess horses with
adopters, took in and rehabilitated injured horses and orphan foals, provided significant winter emergency hay caches, and
covered the costs of these and other related activities. For years these groups also kept track of hundreds of horses, helped
mitigate conflicts between horses and poorly designed developments, and helped facilitate relocation of "trouble" bands to
more appropriate locations by negotiating permission from landowners.
The University of Nevada, Reno included the Virginia Range herd in a GnRH birth-control study, and the volunteers have been observing the horses, looking for any undesirable side effects.
The Virginia Range herd certainly still needs to be managed. Those horses not birth-controlled show a robust birth rate,
which speaks to the overall health of the herd. There are a number of low-cost or no-cost management options that can provide
for a healthy range and keep the horses in balance. However, the current agriculture director Tony Lesperance doesn't care
to hear about that from either the groups actually working with the horses or his own staff.
Things are so bad under director Lesperance that a number of "old school" veterans in the department (those who take pride
in serving the public) are looking at early retirement or moving to other agencies "if things don't change." This loss of experience and dedication would be tragic. Also the alienation
of the wild horse groups is leading to a loss of their funds, shifting even more burden to the taxpayers.
So we are at this fork in the road. The director can waste a lot of time and taxpayer money, and the wild horse groups
can redirect their resources into defending the Virginia Range herd, or Gov. Jim Gibbons can appoint an interim director who can actually work with his/her staff and the "boots on the ground" groups who provide
the funds and services that can make management of the Virginia Range herd viable yet economical.
Nevada is still a relatively sensible state, and most Nevadans can see which option makes the most practical sense.
Willis Lamm is president of Least Resistance Training Concepts, which cooperates with the state and BLM to provide services
for these agencies' range and wild horse programs. He's also vice chair of the Lyon County Animal Control Board and a member
of the Lyon County Advisory Board for Wildlife.
Click here to launch
Warning: Contains graphic images
Some of these are most likely wild horses also..
Bob Richter: 'Horse slaughter on the border' tells a difficult story
Web Posted: 09/28/2007 06:02 PM CDT
The front page of Sunday's Express-News is dominated by a disturbing report and a horrendous photograph of something that
I'd guess most of us never have seen, nor want to see.
Lisa Sandberg's story, “Horse slaughter on the border,” illustrated by Jerry Lara's graphic photos of horses
being hacked to death in a Mexican "killing box" and then strung up to bleed to death, dramatizes the usually untold story
of what happens to Black Beauty when she gets old or can't run.
It's a vile situation that was set up when a federal court ordered the closures this year of the last three U.S. slaughterhouses
for horses: two in Texas, one in Illinois. While hailed by animal rights groups, the ruling didn't end the butchering; it
just moved the process across the border, to Mexico and Canada.
After you've read the piece and seen the photographs, you might be wondering what purpose is served by writing about a
process that occurs, albeit under the radar, daily in U.S. meatpacking houses where barnyard animals are butchered and processed
to become main courses on U.S. dinner tables.
There's a distinction, Express-News Managing Editor Brett Thacker contends:
"Yes, we slaughter cows, pigs and chickens by the millions every year in this country, but the practice of butchering and
eating horses induces a certain cringe factor. Thanks to their special place in American lore, horses have earned a status
similar to dogs and cats as companion animals, not beasts to be killed for consumption.
"The fact that it's socially unacceptable is a big reason the government shut down the slaughterhouses in Texas and Illinois.
Now, some entrepreneurial sorts have found a way around the ban and are making a few dollars by trucking the horses across
our borders. By shedding a light on the practice with this story, maybe Congress will follow through and close this export
loophole."
That justification notwithstanding, Lara's photos taken inside a Ciudad Juarez slaughterhouse were particularly lurid.
Several were published with Sandberg's story, making it easier for her to describe the process. About 30 more photos, shot
the same day, are here on MySA.com.
Lara, whose long body of work here at the Express-News includes scores of sensitive, artistic photographs, said officials
were "very accommodating" to his wants and "took pride in the facility," but he was troubled by the Juarez shoot.
"As kids growing up in the U.S., we are bombarded with images in movies, paintings and photographs of the majestic horse.
Seeing it reduced to a step in the food chain was trying. Seeing the animal stabbed, at times repeatedly, was tough."
Pam DelaBar is a bona fide local animal lover – a trained animal abuse investigator, horsewoman and president of
the World Cat Congress. She disagreed with the closure of the Texas slaughterhouses where, she says, horses were killed humanely
and the meat was shipped to places where it is legal and desirable to eat, including zoos.
"This is the fallout, this is the other side of that legislation," DelaBar said, "that horses won't be humanely slaughtered,
or they'll be starved to death."
Animal welfare advocates who lobbied to outlaw horse slaughter in this country now are lobbying Congress to outlaw the
shipment of horses across the border for slaughter. As Sandberg wrote: “No one disputes that slaughter-bound horses
have it far worse today than they did before .....”
While editors here expect an outcry, “Horse slaughter on the border” is an important story, and the newspaper
is justified in publishing it. However, my gut tells me that even if Congress bans shipment of U.S. horses across international
boundaries, the law won't work any better than current U.S. law does in stopping immigrants from illegally crossing our borders.
What do you think?
Bob Richter is the Express-News public editor. His opinions are his own. Contact him at (210) 250-3264 or brichter@express-news.net.
Read his blog at MySA.com, keyword: publiceditor. |
H.R.249
Title: To restore the prohibition on the commercial sale and slaughter of wild free-roaming horses and
burros.
Sponsor: Rep Rahall, Nick J., II [WV-3] (introduced 1/5/2007) Cosponsors (17)
Related Bills: H.RES.331
Latest Major Action: 4/26/2007 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Received in the Senate and Read twice and
referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
House Reports: 110-93
Please go to the BLM Mustang page to see how you can help.
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