Wild-Horse Slaughter -- Cattle-Ranching Industry Has Appropriated Public Lands
Your article "Adopted horses are sent to slaughter" (Associated Press, Jan. 12) was heartbreaking as it outlined the tragic abuse of the Wild Horse and Burro Program of the Bureau of Land Management, which was designed to give these gentle animals a chance at a quality existence rather than sending them to European and Asian tables, fattening the wallets of speculators in animal misery, including many BLM employees.
You failed, however, to mention the reason why there are so many "excess" horses and burros that require the protection that the program has clearly failed to provide. The range lands where wild horses have romped and grazed for millennia, including vast tracts of public - I repeat, public - lands, have been appropriated as a private fiefdom by the cattle-ranching industry, and long-term residents of these lands are no longer welcome since they may reduce in some small measure the profitability of the cattle industry. Thus public tax dollars are used to remove horses and burros from the land, as well as fund the annual $30 million Animal Damage Control program of the Department of Agriculture under which tens of thousands of prairie dogs, coyotes, cougars and other range animals are trapped, shot, poisoned and gassed to further assist profits for cattlemen. To continue to abuse these public lands, the cattlemen pay a fee that is well below market value - another gift from the taxpayers.
These grand giveaways are sustained by a well-entrenched cadre of Western senators and representatives whose campaign war chests are liberally supported by ranchers and their soul mates in logging and petroleum development. In exchange for all this, the American public receives overgrazed lands and waterways fouled by manure runoff in order to "enjoy" a food source rich in saturated fat to promote cardiovascular disease and enhance the risks of colon cancer, E. coli contamination and "mad cow' disease.
The solution to all of these problems is to return large tracts of public land to non-grazing use for wildlife habitat, recreation, and preservation of water quality, raise grazing fees on public lands to fair market levels, and stop public subsidy of the cattle industry. Robert Stagman Mercer Island