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Why should we waste 80 million on them . There are plenty of domesticated ones . It's not like they're going extinct . We're only 20 trillion in debt , what's another 80 million down a rat hole ?
Because we all love them to pieces.
No one threatens Sparkle Pony and gets away with it in the USA.
And until that attitude changes, everyone connected to the mustangs have their hands tied.
Don't get me wrong; I come from a family of horse breeders, and have ridden several mustangs, although I never owned one. They are every bit as good as a registered purebred in most situations, are hardier than most others, and are probably the best mounts for trail riding and hunting of them all.
And though feral, they are often quite beautiful, too.
But until folks quit loving them so much as an idea, a part of our great national myth, and are nothing but fantasies little girls dream of owning someday, then the real living horses will continue to be an expensive problem that live hard and die even harder.
They deserve better. The least we can do is offer them a quick and merciful death when they over-populate their shrinking range and allow their carcasses to be put to honest use to defray some of the costs of keeping them alive. We do the same with the rest of our domesticated animals, after all. But no one has a fantasy of riding a hog into the sunset.
I hope Trump brings home some of our Nobel Peace Prize winners drones in Syria that are helping create a vacuum for terrorists and starts targeting those wild horses with hellfire missiles from the drones.
Because we all love them to pieces.
No one threatens Sparkle Pony and gets away with it in the USA.
And until that attitude changes, everyone connected to the mustangs have their hands tied.
Unfortunately I don't see that attitude changing any time soon. Rather the opposite: to my eyes, the number of "animal lovers" who are actually just terrified of death and can't bear the thought of any critter ever dying is rising. And ultimately that bodes ill for feral horses as well as the native species they share their range with, because in the absence of significant predation Nature resorts to less pleasant ways of reducing their population: starvation, severe weather (which more readily kills off the underweight and the weak), and disease.
No species of animal voluntarily controls its own numbers. And since we're responsible for those horses being on the range in the first place, the least we can do for them (as you said) is to keep their numbers low enough to allow them to be well-fed and in good condition instead of existing on the ragged edge of starvation. To do otherwise is just cruelty. Letting Nature do the final act of killing because we're too squeamish to do what is right doesn't keep the blood off of our hands!
99.99999999 don't even know anything about wild horses, sound like the liberal op trying to drum up some I hate republican business, this is a local issue
I hope Trump brings home some of our Nobel Peace Prize winners drones in Syria that are helping create a vacuum for terrorists and starts targeting those wild horses with hellfire missiles from the drones.
Geez. Overkill much?
No need for drones. A bi-annual roundup and cull is a lot cheaper and just as effective.
The mustangs don't over-populate all their range at once, nor at the same time. One roundup may only catch a few or may catch many, as nature decrees most of their survival.
Roundups where the population is too large for sustainability may not require all that much, depending on the circumstances of the time.
But I'm guessing you knew all that already, and just used the topic to take a cheap shot at our departing President.
So the Republican Congress brought back the Holman Rule, which gives them the power to reduce federal employee salaries at will in order to essentially defund anything. Interestingly the initial goal was to defund care for wild horses on public lands.
Rep. H. Morgan Griffith (R-VA), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, told the Washington Post that he brought the Holman Rule back out of disapproval for an $80 million federal program devoted to caring for wild horses on federal land in the western United States. He said he wants to see the rule applied strategically to slash funding for that type of program, which he deems wasteful, but also acknowledged that lawmakers now have the “power” to cut large swaths of the federal workforce if they so choose.
Fed Employees Wary Of New Rule Allowing Congress To Cut Their Salaries At Will
It's probably one of those things that while they claim it's being used to manage wild horses, it's probably going to some of the politicians that have huge scenic ranches and use the American tax payer to keep it going.
Although, many of these posters I do like, I strongly disagree with their attitude. This is what I was thinking,(in the bold) yet, some will blame the horse. They never consider there are people out there trying to keep the horses from inbreeding and trying to culling the diseases.
The one problem I do have with the animal activist, they can be just as bad as those who think the wild horses are their problem to manage. This can only work if the two sides come together without thinking money in their pocket.
For people to think all wild horse rescue people or activist are hard headed, just shows who hasn't taken the time to learn or listen, not all, animal activist see the wild horses as "Flicka" We certainly understand the diseases and hardship both sides face.
I like wild horses but they are not native to the US so kill them all.
No need to kill them all. After all, wild horses are an important symbol of the Old West to many. We just need to keep their numbers low enough so they don't out-compete the native grazers, and so that the ones left out on the range are healthy and fat instead of walking skeletons.
Let's not forget that the mustangs aren't the only feral critters that are problematic.
Feral hogs and feral burros also abound, and both are even worse than the horses in some respects. The burros eat vegetation a horse won't touch, and climb up rocks and into places a horse won't go.
The hogs are omnivorous and and will eat anything and everything. They also root up the ground, destroying future vegetation and eating the young of all kinds in their dens.
Folks are almost as reluctant to do anything about the burros as the horses. Hogs are hogs, and we don't hold any affection for them, so they're now considered wild game. But since they reproduce at a higher rate than either horses or burros, they are the greatest problem of all.
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We certainly understand the diseases and hardship both sides face.
