Monday, November 24, 2008

Looking for a Million Acres Madeleine Pickens told Charlie Gibson of ABC News during a Person of the Week interview that she is in negotiations to buy a million acres as a sanctuary to house those 30,000 mustangs she is adopting. The only thing she wouldn't say is where it would be. She dropped a clue by saying that she hopes to be able to lease BLM land adjacent to her ranch. "If all these cattlemen have access to all this BLM land, what if I bought a ranch and I can get access to the BLM land and then we shared it. They can have their land and we'll have ours for our horses." This appears to be an end run around the BLM's claims that if they did not remove the mustangs, "the result would be an ecological disaster for Western public rangelands," according to a recent fact sheet Paying for supplemental grazing does seem more logical than paying out the $21.9 million to keep the horses eating hay in pens all year like the BLM. It is often drinking water that is the limiting factor for animals on the range....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

30,000 horses that weigh a 1000 pounds will consume at least 15 pounds of forage daily and drink about ten gallons of water daily. A million acres of BLM ground won't do it. Remember that most of the water in the West is owned by the ranchers. The BLM has very few good water holes and to drill would be an environmental disaster. I have heard that T.Boner has ED and his wife has the same malfunction of the brain