Activists aim to halt horse castration plan

A coalition of conservationists and wild-horse activists is suing the government to block its implementation of a precedent-setting plan to castrate hundreds of wild stallions in eastern Nevada. The lawsuit, filed by the Western Watersheds Project, the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign and the Cloud Foundation, follows the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's decision in July to back off a similar plan to castrate hundreds of wild stallions in Wyoming. The complaint contends the BLM's "scientifically unsound, controversial, untested and radical approaches'' to managing wild horses in the 855,000-acre complex violate federal law while the agency continues to authorize thousands of sheep and cattle to graze on public lands in the area. "The BLM has violated the law by failing to analyze impacts of domestic livestock and wild horses," said Jon Marvel, executive director of the Idaho-based Western Watershed Project. "I hope this case ends once and for all BLM's illegal bias in favor of cattle and sheep over wild horses and all other native wildlife."...more