Trump’s Cowboy Allies Say All the Pretty Horses Must Die

Christopher Ketcham

...This was a herd with room to move and enough grass to eat and water to drink. That it was being treated with a degree of respect was due in no small part to the work of Gus Warr, a wild horse specialist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, a branch of the Department of the Interior, which oversees horses that range on the public lands. Warr had implemented an experimental fertility control program in the Onaqui herd, because otherwise the animals, without predators to control their numbers, would overpopulate and wreck the ecosystems of the Utah desert. The program involved darting the animals with a contraceptive called PZP. At Onaqui, I watched Warr’s employees dart mares using air-powered blow guns. The mares jumped as if stung by a bee, the dart fell out, the shooter went to retrieve it.   That was the extent of the program. It cost about $24 a dose, and the typical mare, otherwise going about her business—PZP is non-hormonal, an immunocontraceptive, and does not affect behavior—wouldn’t be able to conceive for a year. Since the program began in 2015, the Onaqui population had stabilized. n Nevada, Warr’s colleagues at BLM had dismissed fertility control as a political and practical impossibility and taken a brutish approach to wild horses. The animals, once they had expanded to an unacceptable number in their selected “herd management areas,” were periodically rounded-up, forced into tractor trailers, and trucked across the desert to holding facilities from which they would likely never leave...more

 A long long piece, chock full of such goodies as:

Bernard Shanks, author of This Land Is Your Land, wrote about “BLM cowboys” who donned “rodeo belt buckles, western shirts complete with a can of Copenhagen in the pocket, well-worn cowboy boots,” and who deferred always to what Shanks called “the regional landed aristocracy.” The aristocrats, fattening their cattle on the public domain for private gain, did not cotton to the idea of sharing grass with horses, as Johnston’s law dictated. And they did not like that Johnston had outlawed mustanging: No more money from grinding the range rats into pet food. Johnston had committed the unforgiveable offense of taking away a piece of the ranchers’ livelihood, the horse as harvestable commodity on the range. Death threats followed her the rest of her life. 

and,

In April 2017, Leigh got a call from the office of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who was curious about wild horse management in Nevada. "What are the issues facing horses there?" a staffer asked. The first thing to understand about the situation in Nevada, Leigh replied, is the extent of the capture of the BLM by the livestock industry. “The BLM has been corrupted by cowboys,” she told the staffer. And the Nevada BLM was the most cowboy-corrupted of all.