PlEASE help SAVE Cloud and the Pryor Mountain Mustangs

They've rounded them up before to sell young-stock at auction. These horses are being gelded to control their populations; many wild horses are instead sent for slaughter or adopted out, to inexperienced and ultimately abusive owners, in an effort to control their population. Personally I would far rather see the boys gelded and then returned to the wild. Could you explain what you are specifically upset about?

If you'd like to see how they round up the horses I know there is a video on You Tube.

I agree with you Nes. I have a small equine rescue and rehabilitation and currently have 11 equines, 5 cats, and 5 dogs that own me.

I have 3 mustangs. 2 were taken off the Carson, NV range and my mare was pregnant when she was captured. She was malnourished and I was worried her foal would not be healthy. Luckily she was healthy and she is now going on 9 years old bringing my mustang population up to 3. My gelding is crippled. He was born with a defect and if he had been left out in the wild, ungelded, he would have been killed by another stallion by now.

Over 90,000 horses a year were being sent to slaughter in this country every year. It is illegal to slaughter horses in the US now, but they can and are still shipped out to be slaughtered elsewhere.

However, The Equine Cruelty Prevention Act - H.R.503 will make it illegal to buy, sell or ship American horses to slaughter for human consumption. Please contact your congressman and ask them to support this bill.

Over population due to indiscriminent breeders is a HUGE part of this problem. Illegal poaching of our wild mustangs has been another.

Many domestic and wild horses are now literally dying of starvation due to over population and the economic down turn and simply neglectful people.

I am all for equine population control for feral AND domestic horses. It's better than seeing these magnificent animals slowly starve to death...which is why I rescued 2 last summer.

I don't have a stallion and the one I bought (my mini) was gelded within a month of my paying to rescue him.

Oh my I can't imagine what is going to happen to the many neglected horses across the US if that bill passes . There will be SO many untrained, unmanagable and unhealthy horses looking for homes. I'm not really pro-slaughter, but I am pro-solutions and I hope your congress also decides to support the REAL rescues across the country with money to help them out!

Good for you for taking in those horses! I wish we had our own place, but then again I'm already a sucker for sad cases and horses cost a whole lot more to feed then cats! .

In Oregon there are two herds of nearly pure decendants of Spanish Barbs, true Spanish Mustangs.
The Kiger Mountain Mustangs.
BLM has managed these two herds since 1971 and keeps the numbers below 100 per herd.
And they will move stock between herds for genetic viability and integrity when needed.
So I don't see how they will be sentencing any herd to extinction by contueing a process they'd developed over 30 some odd years.
These roundups are not new, nor are they unique to any herd.
They are a neccessary evil to prevent over population, starvation, and disease.

The same thing that is happening now...people are letting them starve because they can't afford to take them out of the country and send them to slaughter. Only the horsetheives are doing that and they don't take thin horses...they want the healthy or fat horses so they can get more money per pound. The healthy horses are owned by people who actually care and take care of them...

Hopefully this will curtail a lot of these thefts!

You don't need to take them out of the country to send a horse to slaughter, any local auction will have kill buyers.

From everything I've read it seems all mustangs stem from the original Spanish horses that were brought over when Cortez raided the America's. Other breeds of escaped or turned loose horses blended later (my 9 yr old looks like an old fashioned Morgan) as more settlers arrived from other countrys. Kigers are beautiful and I don't think they look like true Spanish horses (their heads are just too refined and pretty!) JMPO on that though. I'll see if I can find a photo of my gelding, now he looks like a Spanish horse!!! Roman nose, thick neck, long mane...

http://www.kigermustangs.org/reg/mod...howpage&pid=12

But they can't ship them to slaughter here and I'm thinking the bill will help curtail how many horses can be transported out of the country, more restrictions on proof of ownership, destination, etc.

Personally I think the way they are slaughtered (any animal) is cruel and inhumane. They won't put murderers to death with lethal injection but they'll slam a steel bolt through an innocent animals brain after they've been terrorized and traumitized by seeing, hearing, and smelling death and blood all around them?

No that new bill will stop people from shipping them out of country to slaughter, right now they are shipped to Mexico & Canada to slaughter plants, facing hours/days in cramped and hot livestock transports.

I don't want to start a slaughter debate, just don't listen to too much of the PETA style propaganda.

This issue is that the BLM is not managing the herds, they are extincting them. Cloud 's herd is under 200 horses. They are barely viable now and the BLM wants to remove 70 from the herd. The remaining mares will receive birth control which will guarantee the herd won't survive. Also, they won't guarantee that Cloud won't be removed. And why? Because Skyline Uranium wants to mine in the Pryors. The herds in Nevada are at 600 and they want to take them down to 60.

Speak up now or the Mustangs will be gone. The last piece of American heritage will be gone.

The total Mustangs remaining on public land are under 20,000. While the Mustgangs are being systematically removed, the privately owned cattle on BLM land have grown to 7.5 MILLION.

Visit www.thecloudfoundation.org or my site http://www.vickitobin.com/id22.html for more information.

Sorry guys, I'm still of the position that I'd rather see these guys rounded up and sold to good homes (although I'm not convinced the BLM does a good job of re-homing mustangs) then being shot because they are "nuisances". Mustangs are feral, not wild, they will never have the same rights as the native animals - any maybe that is the way it should be. I don't want packs of dogs roaming down my streets either.

(FYI I'm a HUGE horse lover & an owner)

Good luck with your petition.

Nes, actually the horses are NOT feral. The herds in the Pryor Mountains have been genetically proven to date back centuries and are the descendents of the Lewis and Clark expedition horses. If you are interested in reading the facts on the genetics of our wild horses, this is an excellent paper - http://www.vickitobin.com/sitebuilde...irkpatrick.pdf

There was absolutely no reason to remove any horses from the Pryor herds. The land is lush and the horses were all in excellent condition. The same thing is happening in Nevada. The horses keep disappearing and the cattle keep increasing. They are up to 7.5 million so please, don’t say the land cannot sustain the less than 20,000 horses that remain free on public land. If you haven’t already read the BLM FOIA, I suggest you read that and the team meeting minutes. It is very clear that the BLM plan is to extinct the wild horses. There is a copy of the FOIA and minutes on this page, toward the bottom next to the blue blinking bullet- http://www.vickitobin.com/id37.html. I would also encourage you to read the articles on the page to find out what is really happening. Aren’t you curious why the BLM would conduct such a controversial round-up when congress wasn’t in session and over a holiday weekend? Great time to do something the public doesn’t want and when we can’t get a hold of anyone in congress to stop it.

Cloud was released with PZP’d mares. That means they cannot reproduce. So next year, the BLM will say the herd is not viable and zero them out. The BLM is out of control and are ignoring everyone, including congressmen and senators. We need to do something now before they are all gone.

The ROAM act already passed in the house so please call your senators and ask they pass the ROAM Act (S 1579) before it’s too late.

Still not changing my position.

Feral means previously domestic now released into the wild and non-native to the area.

I'm also not upset about Australia culling their feral camels because they are destroying the natural ecosystem and endangering native species. I'd much rather see the horses rounded up & fixed then shot out of plane.

You're not going to convince ME otherwise.

I have been keeping my beak shut but, Vicki, I beg to differ about the horses not being feral. Feral is once domestic or DESCENDED from once domestic which makes every wild equid on the Western Hemisphere FERAL. The Pryor Range is fragile as is every high desert area and cannot sustain livestock of any kind over winter, browsers such as deer, yes, grazers, no. While it may LOOK lush, it most likely isn't grass but forbes and small shrubs, certainly not horse feed at more than bare subsistance level. FWIW, not that it probably matters to you, a horse requires roughly 2% of it's body weight in dry good quality forage to maintain and that increases dramatically with the wanderings of the feral herds and even more dramatically when winter hits. Assuming a weight of 800 pounds (typical for mustangs, btw), a horse doing nothing save wandering around aimlessly would require 16 pounds of dry feed (14% moisture), and double that for cold, foul weather. The problem with high desert is grass isn't exactly common and what is there is pretty poor feed, and horses cannot live on sagebrush, nothing can. Sage is toxic in large quantities and even if it wasn't, grazers cannot even subsist on woody shrubbery. I live live in almost semi-desert and toxic shrubs abound. My horses avoid them but on the other hand, they are well fed.

I looked at your pictures of 'lush range'. I see buckbrush (toxic), sagebrush and greasewood but nothing that resembles grass. Obviously, your idea of lush is greenery, regardless the source, and isn't truly based in any knowlege of range plant life or range management. Here, which is MUCH more lush (grass), recommended stocking rate for year round grazing, no supplemental feeding is 1 unit (cow, horse, 2 goats or sheep) per 15 ACRES. The farther south you go, the higher the acreage per unit. Go over to high desert and I am guessing you are looking at a minimum of 100 acres per unit with supplemental, seasonal feeding. I know MY horses cannot survive on this yard even just summer grazing if I fenced it in and that would be 3 acres per horse. I know that two milk cows needed a lot of extra feed, even in summer to survive and the sheer tonnage of feed hauled in every fall would stagger you. Even now, with just TWO horses, I have at least FIFTEEN tons of hay brought in - fortunately, it is from my own hay flat which I have sharecropped out. Fifteen tons, thirty THOUSAND pounds of hay for one year for two horses, so start figuring what amount of feed would be needed for 200+ head. This is why these horses are being rounded up - there isnt enough FEED to sustain the growing number of animals on the range.

Vicki, I would like to know what qualifications you have to make the assessments you have been making. If you are sitting in some flat in NYC or any other city far removed from the Pryors or any other similar rangeland, regarldess which side of the border, you really do not know.

At least someone agrees with me.

I understand it's hard to accept, and when I was younger I was totally on the anti-slaughter band-waggon, standing on my soapbox on the street corner. Then I looking into the whole issue a little more deeply and past all the PETA-style propaganda. Sometimes the unsavoury thing really is the best, both for the individual and the community.

However, if you believe in this strongly and feel you are fully informed on the issue - more power to you!

The pictures on my site were not from the grazing areas. They were from the ground where the observations were taking place. Ginger Kathrens from the Cloud Foundation has the pictures of the areas where the horses were living and if you watch her new documentary on PBS on October 25, you can see it for yourself.

Would you care to explain how the horses are removed because the land is not sustainable and then replaced with thousands of head of cattle? You can bury your head in the sand with what the plan is for our wild horses and burros but it won’t change the facts.

The information I have is from respected wildlife ecologists and people I work with that have studied the wild Mustangs for years. Where I sit does not dispute their information.

You may want to tune in to the George Knapp investigative report that will air on October 10 @ 9p on KLAS-TV channel 8 and you’ll learn what is really behind the round-ups. If you are not in the NV viewing area, you can check the site for a link after it airs. I will also have it posted on my website. I have two past reports posted on my site on this page - http://www.vickitobin.com/id22.html. His investigations have yet to be disputed.

The BLM is out of control and in the pockets of ranchers and special interest groups. Millions of acres have been taken away from the wild horses and it is time that the land is returned to the horses. Call your senators and ask that ROAM S. 1579 be passed swiftly.