00:00:10
Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Cow’s Week in Review with Ryan col Klan. Here’s Cal. Hey, there’re Col’s week in Review Cal in the wild Listeners, we got another fantastic interview for you this week with Jenny Luciett, and Jenny is going to fill us in on a topic that we’ve covered off and on in the past. In fact, we did a whole video on it down in New Mexico. We were rounding up feral cattle and we talked about some other critters out there on the landscape, like wild horses and burrows as well. So right now we’re in this really interesting time where all of these agencies, Department of Interior, BLM, US Forest Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, everything’s getting shooken up. And one interesting thing that’s kind of come out of this is there’s a writer in an upcoming bill that would enable agencies to implement management, some would say higher management, some would say management of some level on our wild horse and burrow populations that are roaming around a lot of our public lands here in the West, not just the West, but those are the kind of the ones that we’re talking about right now, not out there on the shore of Maryland, but it will apply to that in a way as well. So from my home state, broadcasting from my home state of Montana, we have a big mosaic drought and certain parts of the state are hit really hard. And when those parts of the state are hit really hard with drought, oftentimes will see emergency measures that allow grazers our ranchers. And I’m not going to hold this against you, but I’m assuming a lot of people who listen to this show have probably seen that farcical portrayal of my wonderful home called Yellowstone. So like the real versions of those fancy Hollywood people who run cattle and try to make a living off of short prairie grass, well, those folks don’t have the ability to graze cattle in a sustainable way on their their private ground or their Bureau of Land Management or sometimes US Forest Service leases. And then we’ll see these emergency measures where our state wildlife management areas become available for grazing in order to help spread some of the burden out during these trying times. And that’s not like an atypical thing. It happens, but that’s a real kind of narrow little snapshot of kind of what we’re talking about today. So you have grazers on the landscape if you’re raising those, anything else that grazes on the landscape is kind of a form of competition. We talk about like bison being reintroduced to the prairie. Well, bison eat grass, elkiat grass. Antelope and deer eat grass, as do the beef. So one thing that boy the history. We just hopefully Jenny, you’ll get into into the history here. She’s she’s our expert. Is we have wild free ranging herds of like I pointed out earlier, sometimes they’re cattle, but we’re talking about horses and burrows today that are out there on the landscape competing for grass. That, especially in trying times of drought and a little to no surface water, you have an unmanaged or lightly managed, highly political situations such as the wild horse burrow, and their actions can have real implications on both our wildlife huntable and non huntable, as well as our domestic livestock production. So extremely long intro. Jenny, thank you for sitting through that. What do you do?
00:05:28
Speaker 2: What do you do? Well?
00:05:30
Speaker 3: You know you mentioned this, you know the complexities of this user of the range lands. I mean, one of the things you didn’t point out is the fact that, Okay, there’s grazers utilizing that land. And I’m not sure competition is the greatest word, because a big thing in when we’re talking about wild horses is you’ve got a lot of groups that are staying. Will you take the cattle off and livestock then and you know the horses will be fine. Well, first off, this is the only grazing animal that is overpopulated and not in balance. And the opening words in the Wild Horse and Burrow Act is that it sustains an ecological balance on the range. So every other grazing animal out there is mandated and are balanced at what we call appropriate management levels. Again, the horses aren’t. And I want to say right now, I am not a horse hater. As a matter of fact, I have one branded Mustang sitting in my backyard with two quarter horses. So this isn’t about decimating them. But the facts are on the grazing side. When you talked about ranching and those types of things within the one hundred and seventy five herd management areas that just the bee lamb manages not the rest of the Forest Service ones. I believe there’s thirty seven territories. They all fall under that act. But since that Act was passed, livestock grazing within those herd management areas have gone down by approximately thirty seven to forty percent in the allocated plans. Okay, and I want to be clear, and you kind of stated this in the intro, which I love, but for folks that don’t understand, this is you’ve got a plan in place, an allocation in place that says, basically, on the best year possible, no drought, no fires, none of those things we can’t control, are at the best you know levels. So that’s your highest allocation you’re going to get. The opposite is what the use is. And we’ve got herd management areas here in my home state of Nevada that they still have the grazing allotment, but they haven’t grazed those livestock in their ranches since the nineteen eighties. So so talking about cattle and horses or cattle in and wildlife is not talking about apple staples. So I just wanted to get that out of the way, and we can answer any questions forward, but let’s talk about wildlife versus horses that are on the ranges three hundred and sixty five days a year. They’re not managed, they’re not rotated, none of those stipulations come into play. And so when you’re looking at you know, wildlife alone here in Nevada alone, I’ve got a graph that shows all of the angulence, all of the wildlife ungulents compared to wild horses and burrows. And when you look at that chart and you see the difference from the nineteen eighties to today, it’s it’s almost criminal. So that’s what we’re talking about. There is a call to action out there. What we and when I say we, over one hundred and twenty conservation wildlife groups, scientists, professors and coalitions have all joined together and basically called on Congress to finally uphold the law and protect our range lands. And you stated this earlier. Basically what has occurred, and you know this goes forth to Congress. Congress has a law that’s pretty well written and has been amended, and I can go into the details of that if you want. But every year during the Appropriations Act, which for the federal government is October first, they have put forth writers like you stated onto that Appropriations Act. So they’re not amending the law, they’re not rewriting the law law, they’re not doing anything else. They’re just saying follow law is written, but you can’t follow this one section that was an amendment to the Act in two thousand and five six, and that is you know, the law’s eight pages long.
00:10:16
Speaker 2: It’s not a heavy reader.
00:10:17
Speaker 3: So I recommend people looking at that law, reading it and dissecting it and really understanding what it’s stating.
00:10:26
Speaker 2: So Congress has been.
00:10:30
Speaker 3: I guess, you know, convinced by large packs and large animal activist groups that they can’t follow a section in that thirteen thirty three, and that’s basically stating any animal over the age ten or has been offered for adoption can be sold immediately. So as sold immediately, what that means is in this nineteen seventy one Act or the government holds the title of that adopted animal for a year to check on it, make sure it’s being humanly taken care of, and then at the end of that year, that person that owns that horse in their backyard can apply for a title. So it’s just like a car or anything else. Unfortunately, horses over the age of ten. Aren’t typically animals that are wild. They’re not domestic animals. They’re wild, are going to be something somebody’s going to come forth and adopt. And so over the years, over the history for fifty four years, we’ve gone up and down. And in two thousand and seven, the horse population, the wild horse population BLM and Force Service was one thousand horses away in the ten western states at being out appropriate management levels. The next administration came in and decided we’re not going to gather animals anymore. People are telling us they’ll manage their own selves.
00:12:07
Speaker 2: Well.
00:12:08
Speaker 3: So from two thousand and seven at about twenty nine thousand horses on the range in the areas they were found, by twenty twenty they went up to ninety five thousand on the range. So since then we have been doing everything in our power, whether it’s you know, the public because we own the lands, really saying all we got to do is follow the Act. Forget these things that keep bringing forward, trying to rewrite the Act, et cetera. We just want to follow the Act as it’s written period. So we’re asking Congress to do the simplest thing, just drop that rider for fifty four years. We’ve tried it the activist way, and we’re asking for five years to show you that by following the law as it’s been written and mended, we can get those populations to that level.
00:13:06
Speaker 1: So and Jenny, we’ve been talking about the Wild Horse and Burrow Act.
00:13:12
Speaker 3: It’s called nineteen seventy one Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burroughs Act.
00:13:20
Speaker 1: So that’s been for those of us, sorry who because we started pretty hot out of the gate here. Okay, we left out of the chute, so to speak. Folks may be wondering who the heck you are and why do we need Jenny Luciatt’s experience and perspective here. What is your background?
00:13:44
Speaker 3: Jenny, So, I actually retired over a year ago from the federal government from the Bureau of Land Management. The majority of that time with the Bureau of Land Management. This was twenty years in the federal government. My main focus was the Wildhorse and Borough program. I began my government career at the age of forty. So. I also come from the private sector and went to d C from Nevada after nine to eleven, and in my head it was I’m going to go to d C I’m going to learn what I can and I’m going to come back to Nevada and get a job with the state.
00:14:25
Speaker 2: Things are changing.
00:14:27
Speaker 1: Well.
00:14:28
Speaker 3: My entire life I’ve spent, you know, in the equestrian world. Also, you know very much about rangeland management. So when I got to d C and folks started hearing this, I spent a couple of years in contract positions and then came forth with the State Department and a small quasi government called the Millennium Challenge Corporation. From there, how I got in government was I was a schedule see political appoint appointee under the Bush administration. Spent about two years in that position, and at that time I was transferred from the Millennium Challenge Corporation to the Bureau of Land Management, and basically they saw my resume that I had ran ranches. That was the year that the Act was amended with section thirteen thirty three. I spoke of and immediately BLM brought me in to help with the communications and marketing and legislation that was going to change with that Act. So I spent many years in Washington, d C. Came back to Nevada in what we call a detailed position during the RA years the American Recovery Reinvestment Act. I supposed to be there for three years and then got a call saying we need you in Wyoming. So I was transferred to Wyoming as the Wyoming Wildhorse and State Program Manager with oversight on the entire state of Wyoming, all those districts, all those herd management areas. Before I came back to Nevada, spent a couple of years in mineral management, so really dealt into the environmental assessments, those sorts of things to really better understand how we balance on the range. The Bureau of Land Management, for a service, is what they call a multiple use organization, So that kind of goes back to people need to understand we’re not the Park Service and just doing a park. Every single acre out on that land is managed and utilized by something. So when you bring in new things or threatening endangered species, those allocations need to be balanced together so that we can bring forth the effects of everything else. So it’s really complex, and I don’t want to get too deep into it.
00:17:06
Speaker 1: Well that that you can touch on one of my pet peeves when I hear, well, you know, the private land has managed so much better. Yeah, and my response at this point is, well, I’m sure as hell hope. So Yeah, comparatively, it’s pretty simple. Yeah, and any person can make a decision.
00:17:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can determine what you’re going to have on your private land. You know, you’ve got everything from you know, butterflies and plants to wildfowl migration paths, you know, everything from elk, moose, antelope, you know, all of those species that are out there.
00:17:46
Speaker 1: You know that that and you can have a mining claim in the middle of it, exactly. Yeah, and it’s all got to be weighed out.
00:17:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:17:54
Speaker 3: So it’s definitely a moving complex subject and that’s the that’s how the BLM came into this, you know. So it is the mandate. It does change. But what’s been funny over the years, you know, and I say over eighteen years directly involved with the horse program, where I’m writing legislation, write and testimony to Congress, policies, readjusting where we see fit, you know, new drugs coming in, doing research, all of that stuff. That’s part of this adoptions, marketing, all of it. So you know, I’m thankful. I’m probably one of the only people out there that basically is done about every position. You know, My first position there was the communications, but it was also running the national budget for the wildhorse.
00:18:46
Speaker 2: And Burro program.
00:18:47
Speaker 3: And I want to point something out. When I came in to the BLM in two thousand and five, our budget was about thirty seven million dollars for the program. Today the appropriations is one hundred and forty two million dollars. That’s ludicrous. And the worst part of it is eighty percent of that last year was spent on feeding horses that, in my opinion, nobody wanted. You know, adoption is never kept up with what we’ve got in holding, and so of that eighty percent we’re talking one hundred and forty two million dollar budget, one hundred and one million dollars was spent on feeding animals that nobody’s adopted.
00:19:37
Speaker 1: Well, I got to push back on you there, Jenny. Any time I see any sort of media surrounding wild horses, they’re all beautiful, good looking ponies out there. So you’re telling me people don’t want beautiful, good looking ponies.
00:19:56
Speaker 3: Well, you know, yes they do. But you know, let’s focus on marketing here. So when we have gathers, the public is allowed to come see the gather We own the government, right, we have that ability to come see the gathers. So these large groups send out folks to take pictures of the gathers. And I’ve sat there on well over one hundred gathers for fifteen hours a day during the gather session, and all I hear every hour because trust me, it takes about an hour to get the animals slowly moved toward the trap site. At the pace that the animals move, those helicopters are not on top of the animals.
00:20:47
Speaker 2: Picture is worth a thousand words.
00:20:49
Speaker 3: But if you’ve got the right camera shot, boy, you can manipulate it. So those people are literally I’m hearing, with the camera are taking up to five thousand pictures a day, and then they’re uploading them and then those big packs are going through the picture to find that one beautiful shot. And that’s what we call their money shot. So what you see on social media is a marketing scam to a certain effect. Yes, on the adoption side, you want to show the pretty horses. More people buy colorful horses. They don’t want the browns, blacks and bays, you know, which is the majority of horses out there. They want that splash effect. So a lot of really great horses.
00:21:35
Speaker 2: I mean, I prefer.
00:21:37
Speaker 3: Those bays over anything else. You know, they’ve got better confirmation in my opinion, those sort of things.
00:21:44
Speaker 2: But that’s talking at a different level.
00:21:47
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, there’s a lot of animals that are left behind that could do very well. And also it’s the market. There’s a lot of stipulations to adopting. I adopted five horses to a gentleman in Austria and immediately folks from the other side always a deflection, We’re screaming, I ah, he’s going to eat the horses. Well, let me tell you what. By the time he was able to get those horses to Austria back in I’m going to say twenty ten, it cost almost thirty thousand dollars a piece to get those animals from when he adopted them to his ranch in Austria, and quite frankly, thirty thousand dollars a piece, that’s some pretty expensive sausage. So let’s stop this about slaughtering of wild horses. I had to due a report to Congress those horses that at the time when we had commercial processing plants and an oversight here in the United States, there was less than one percent of horses that were going to those commercial processing plants that had a brand on their neck. And there was zero horses that were untitled that ever went through a commercial processing plant. So all of this kill buyer stuff, everything else is a business ploy.
00:23:11
Speaker 2: So let’s stop there.
00:23:13
Speaker 3: When I talked about those one hundred and twenty conservation groups, folks like you, boots on the ground doing things rangeland resource protection, restoration, those sort of things. Unfortunately, today, your best rangeland restoration project in the ten Western States would be getting these animals, these horses and burrows to an appropriate management level that’s been established across. If you do that, then you’re going to start seeing areas. We can’t control fire, we can’t control drought. We can control the number of animals on the range. And it’s through the hunting, restoration, trapping, those sort of things. The only animal not being managed, and even livestock raising, all of that’s being managed at those levels.
00:24:12
Speaker 2: The only thing.
00:24:13
Speaker 3: That’s not being managed is the horses today. And let me trust let me, you know, trust me when I say we are doing this for all the animals out there. Nobody’s trying to decimate the ranges or decimate the horse populations. We just want, just like the law says, at an ecological balance on the range.
00:24:37
Speaker 1: What is the range of the well? First of all, i’d love like, do you call them wild horses or are they faral horses?
00:24:47
Speaker 3: Okay, it’s funny because in the act they call them wild horses. Okay, so that’s the title in the act. Here in my state of Nevada, we’ve got the eight horses, they call them astray horses because at one time they were all zeroed out. You can never catch every single horse, and now they’re ten times over in that section they call them astray horses. And then you’ve also got feral horses. At the end of the day, they’re all the same thing. In the one hundred and seventy five herd management areas for the BLM across the United States, there are only five herd management areas and ones in your state of Montana that have any Spanish type blood in what we’ve done in genetic testing, and when I’m talking Spanish type blood, I’m talking one two three percent. So they are you know, feral, astray, wild whatever you want to call them. But let’s forget about the deflections that keep going forth. These are animals on the range. The unfortunate part is that these range lands have a lot of landlords. And when I say that that’s Congress, it’s not only the American public, but the landlords that are tasked and taking care of them are a congressmen and senators. And when you’ve got a congressman in Pennsylvania or Florida, or Texas, even to a certain extent Arizona, even where there are a lot of burrows, it’s hard for them to understand, especially the East coast, the situations we have in our high desert lands on the west. These aren’t the flowing pastures where they’re getting, you know, significant amount of rain. In Nevada, the average rainfall is seven to ten inches a year, so high desert. So that’s where this is getting too. Is we are beyond you know, oh we’ve got to manage this, and oh we’ve got some time. We are at beyond a crisis level, and we are already seeing in the West, you know, range lands that will never be recovered. I mean, think about this, the California Trail, everybody loves it. You can still see the ruts from the wagons coming across the California Trail. Why because that land’s been so decimated that it will never grow back. And when you overgraze any amount of land to a point where that plant source can’t be rejuvenated, it’s gone, and it’s it’s gone for decades. So so that’s when I say we are beyond a crisis level.
00:27:49
Speaker 1: And so is there a defined range for wild horses? Like has the US government said this is where these animals belong? And we just got a story last week that somebody was letting horses go on Idaho.
00:28:11
Speaker 3: Yep, rewilding and Idaho. I know a little bit about that, and there’s somebody else that has tried that.
00:28:21
Speaker 1: Okay, so we’ll start there.
00:28:24
Speaker 3: There is, and it’s stated in the act itself that back in nineteen seventy one.
00:28:32
Speaker 2: They flew out.
00:28:33
Speaker 3: They people flew out, flew across the ten Western states and basically did a map with big old circles saying, okay, we saw horses here, here, here, and here.
00:28:45
Speaker 2: They came back. Excuse me, they came.
00:28:48
Speaker 3: Back and basically Wyoming, I think Montana is the same, Nevada. Most we’re open range. In other words, ranchers would put their horses out in the wintertime to graze, bring them back in in the spring and summer months, call what they needed, taken what they wanted, those sort of things. So you know, they never were able to catch every single wildhorse. So what they did in nineteen seventy one is they gave them a sixty day claiming period so all ranchers could come back and claim their private property and remove them from the range. After that they went back out. So the big circles were what they called herd areas. And so those big circles is where they saw them. Once the ranchers came back took their private property, they flew it again and those became in nineteen seventy one herd management areas. Those are the designated areas. And when I talk about that currently today, just for the BLM, there’s one hundred and seventy five herd management areas. That means you can’t just pick them up and relocate them. It’s does it states where they were found in nineteen seventy one period. So this rewilding Idaho. You know, I see that as a great title, But if anybody wants to go out there, and they want to buy private property, private branches, those sort of things, and they want to put wild horses on that private property.
00:30:28
Speaker 2: Do it.
00:30:28
Speaker 3: That’ll help. That’s stepping up and doing something. But then you’ve got something like rewilding, Idaho within that private property that they’ve purchased. It’s checkerboarded, there are and it’s and this is more the Forest Service. So this is just me doing my own research because maybe I’m a freak about it, but I don’t want to see things get out of control.
00:30:54
Speaker 1: If there’s been some US Forest Service grazing allotments in there, that.
00:30:58
Speaker 3: Looks like there’s four of them, and so in time people will ask to convert a cattle grazing allotment to a horse grazing allotment or sheep or any type of other livestock, because let’s face it, horses are livestock. So at this point, if those conversions are going to be made, then truly cattle grazing, what they consume need to consume in comparison to horses is a different level. Horses consume more forage, or is needed to consume more forage and water than cattle, so that conversion needs to be taken place at the very beginning, how many horses can you graze in those areas? And by the way, cattle allotment grazing is typically limited to and there’s lots of limitations. And in this case, what I found out from what I found out, now I could be right or wrong to a certain extent, but it looks like those grazing allotments are from July until September. Okay, So in this case, just like cattle or anything else, in this case, those allotments cannot be utilized per the nineteen fifty six or fifty seven Tailor Grazing Act and those limitations and stipulations within them. So in other words, they’d have to fence off that area and remove horses from utilizing that area. And at this point I know for a fact they haven’t done that to the extent. And also there’s requirements when it comes to taking on untouched wild horses and burrows. You’re fencing has to be significant. You’ve got to prove how much hay and stuff you’re feeding them, if that the water resources are there, et cetera. So you’ve got to prove humane treatment. So sticking up a couple of barbed wire fences is not a humane treatment for these wild horses, so that fencing is looked at as you apply for adopting horses or even purchasing animals. So you know, what I’m seeing is there’s a lot of work to be done before this is actually logical. And from what I had been told by very reliable sources, there was Originally these folks, who by the way, come from New York, came in and requested because even though there’s limitations in the law about how many horses you can adopt or purchase without you know, with the title, the secretaries of both the Interior and the Forest Service do have the ability to look out what they’re asking for and say, you know, yes, you know, you’ve proven to us that you can handle many more horses than this.
00:34:05
Speaker 2: Et cetera.
00:34:06
Speaker 3: So there is it, and it’s the secretary’s order, not the bureau lay of Management.
00:34:11
Speaker 2: It rises to the secretaries.
00:34:14
Speaker 3: So that this group came in and requested fifty studs, which by the way, BLM does not adopt out studs. They do what we call guilding of every stallion that’s brought in. So so right there, it’s like fifty you can have, you know, They asked for fifty males and fifty females.
00:34:35
Speaker 1: And intact in males and females a breeding population, right.
00:34:40
Speaker 3: And they were advised that’s not going to happen, but still they wanted fifty and fifty. They went out there, they saw, you know, their plans, everything stood the ground, and said, you don’t have the correct fencing. We’ve got to talk about threeronments under the allotment. You know, there’s a lot of stipulations that come in and I went through this and I don’t need to name the person. Folks that know it understand who it was. Came in and did that here in Nevada, in kind of the Wells area of the northern part of the state. And I mean, I’m saying it’s gone on over a decade because originally she came in in two thousand and six. I want to say to the BLM saying I’m going to take every horse that’s in holding. And then it was like, well, wait a second. You know, I’m only going to I’m going to do that, but I need to be paid for the feed, and I’ll wait a second.
00:35:40
Speaker 2: You know.
00:35:41
Speaker 3: So a lot of that went on. She bought a ranch in the Wells area and the requirement was to do an environmental assessment because it butted up onto the government lands public lands. There were allotments throughout this checkerboard area. And to this date that environmental assessment has never been completed or accepted or signed. So there’s still back and forth with that one person that started this in two thousand and six. So again it’s misinformation going out there. You know, there’s a dream in there. And again, if they can do this and they have the private property and they follow the laws as they are written, whether it’s the Grazing the Tailor Grazing Act, or the Wild Horse and Burro Act, or the Environmental Protection Act or Range Land Improvement Act, there’s a lot of levels to this that have to be followed before it’s like, oh, I’ll take the source and just let them out. By the way, you adopt a horse and you let them back out on the range, it’s a federal offense for every single animal you do that for there’s up to two thousand dollars in fines animal and up to five years in prison. So people think and they can adopt a horse and just throw it out on the range, it’s not wise thinking that so.
00:37:12
Speaker 1: And you know, managing horses on private ground in a sustainable fashion is labor intensive, right like, And they don’t typically just get a free range their whole life away on private property.
00:37:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean because it turns to dirt right right.
00:37:34
Speaker 3: If you think you’re going to grow a couple acres of grass in your backyard and you’re gonna be able to maintain a horse that typically needs twenty pounds of forge a day, and I’m talking about nutritional forage a day and at least a minimum of five to fifteen gallons of water a day. Those couple acres give it a week, you know, it’s not going to sustain them. And you know, I own horses. They’re in my backyard. I’m very fortunate to have been able to find a place. But they’re not grazing anything. I have to purchase that hay and that hey from. You know, I’m going to say twenty years ago, I could buy for seven dollars a bale. That one bale might feed a horse for five days. Currently, I’m paying anywhere from twenty eight dollars a bail on up to thirty five dollars a bail, and that’s not counting maintaining their feet in a humane fashion, maintaining vaccinations that are required in each state vet bills. Because I put more stitches in my domestic horses than I’ve seen injuries and wild horses.
00:38:52
Speaker 2: It’s not a.
00:38:54
Speaker 3: Cheap hobby to have, and it depends on where you live and those sort of things, so it’s not for everybody. But you know, look, these large advocacy groups are now posting all over social media that the biline wants to kill sixty three thousand horses.
00:39:14
Speaker 2: That’s not the case.
00:39:15
Speaker 1: Number one, Well, let’s talk what are the management options, because you know, as a as a hunter and the way we manage wildlife populations. You know, I’m not a callous person, but even if we put it in terms of wild, free ranging yellow labradors, which I happen to be very fond of, there’s there’s a portion of that population when looked at at large scale that that can only be put down right, right, and so I know that there’s been a long running program of uh sterilization.
00:40:05
Speaker 3: Right, we can and I’m not going to stop you, but I do want to say this, we can talk about those other tools when we get to appropriate management levels. Because if we’re talking fertility control drugs, sterilization was going to be research and of course these packs and advocates, you know, once they start doing something, they’re always going to fight. It’s always going to be a lawsuit, litigation, litigation, litigation, which by the way, costs us as taxpayers a lot of money. So when they’re doing research projects and they come they come in and try to litigate it, know when they are likely to lose the litigation, we aren’t going to spend that kind of taxpayer dollars on litigation and appeals going back and forth when we’ve got you know, programs to manage that comes out of those program dollars. So, yes, sterilization was started to be re surge that came in. By the way, the Department of Interior do not have lawyers. They have to go and hire the Department of Justice to work all their cases within the Department of Interior, which BLM is just a small agency within that. So let’s talk about you know, efficiencies. So when we’re talking fertility control drugs, we’ve been using fertility control drugs since the nineteen nineties, been promised a longer lasting agent. Ever since then, they’ve gotten as far as typically they last eighteen months, and there’s many different forms of it.
00:41:44
Speaker 2: There’s one group and.
00:41:45
Speaker 3: Again I’m not going to name that group people that are aware of this, where the rumors is that they actually own the patent on a particular fertility control that me personally am not in favor of. Because this drug bug all it does is it uses pigovaries. It’s shot into them. There’s two forms of it. One lasts about a year, that’s the darting stuff. The other one can last up to eighteen months, but the effectiveness goes down once once they’re inoculated. And by the way, just to get the inoculation done is a process. So long story short. That drug PZP. What it does is it coats the egg. So in other words, that mayre is constantly in heat. This is wildlife. This is animals. They aren’t humans, okay.
00:42:42
Speaker 1: So biting and kicking and fighting each other constantly exactly.
00:42:48
Speaker 2: So if I.
00:42:49
Speaker 1: Don’t want to be a chauvinist here, because now she’s sending mixed signals right.
00:42:55
Speaker 3: Right, And what do they do? They grays, They have babies. That’s it. That’s what they do. They’re living their out there. So to me personally, again and a female, I don’t want to be in heat all the time, you know, and they’re going to be in heat until they’re pregnant, so that particularly is not my preference. There’s another agent out there that’s been approved called GonaCon that does start to go into the ocytes, into the actual egg and kind of what we’ve seen in you know, different scientific papers is that it does kind of stop that fertility, you know, that period or that segment. So that to me is much more humane. If you’re going to use the fertility control drug. Again, if they’re not at appropriate management levels, fertility controlled drug is doing nothing what a fertility control drug does.
00:43:57
Speaker 1: Plus like what would be the a bill to doctor that many animals right like the human power.
00:44:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, you’re in Nevada.
00:44:09
Speaker 3: If you think you’re going to go out there, and we’re talking to hunters right now, a lot of them. If you think you’re going to go out there with a shiny rifle on the millions of acres in Nevada, find this horse, shoot them in the butt with a dart.
00:44:26
Speaker 2: Go pick up that dart.
00:44:27
Speaker 3: Hope you hope you hit it and it went in and then go and find that horse a year later in the exact same place, or eleven months later in truth, because horses having eleven month just station cycle good luck number one. Number two, These fertility controlled drugs, if the mayor is already pregnant, does not affect that pregnancy. So now on eleven month just station cycle, you shoot a mayor that may have a fole on her side, she’s likely pregnant already with the next fole, and so therefore your effectiveness of that. If it’s a one year drug, it’s gone okay. If it’s an eighteen month drug, that effectiveness is now much lower by the time that they go back into heat and you’re searching for that animal again. So it’s not there are areas where that can be effective. It’s done in acet you know, on the East coast ast Gorilla.
00:45:26
Speaker 2: They do a very good job.
00:45:27
Speaker 3: But those herds are i think one hundred and fifty and one hundred and seventy five we’re talking currently.
00:45:34
Speaker 1: And around people right right, and.
00:45:37
Speaker 3: They’re fenced in and they don’t have other animals coming in.
00:45:42
Speaker 2: Look.
00:45:42
Speaker 1: So one of our management options to get us down to the level that we’re supposed.
00:45:52
Speaker 3: To be at So currently, the only thing that Congress is allowing because of that rider is that gathering animals. You know, first off, they’ve got to give us an appropriations that can cover everything planning, gathering, maintaining, processing them for adoptions, holding them, and holding. I mean, there’s many factors. So first off, it’s the appropriations that they give us. By the way, if they allowed everything in the Act, we could save them in one year forty million dollars them being US taxpayer dollars. Forty million dollars could go a long way in areas. Long story short, So gathering horses, I’m removing them from the range, you know, utilizing fertility control where it’s feasible and it is being utilized. You know there’s that argument, oh, you’re not you’re not getting all the marrors. Well, first off, you’re not going to get all the mirrors. But second off, there’s also stipulations to that. Why are you going to put a wild animal through the process of giving it fertility control when clearly it’s pregnant or has a brand new fole on its side that you’re not going to kick back out that mare with a brand new fole because that mayor is going to take off and leave that fole. So those animals are taken into holding, right, and we’ve got pregnant mayors taken into holding. So the other option that we’re allowed to use is adoptions and since two thousand and five, sale without limitation any horse over the age of ten currently in holding in our private pastors across the United States. We’ve got and I’m looking at a document because I just updated this, we have thirty eight preparation maintenance type facilities, which are the corrals. Okay, those horses need to be vaccinated, they need feet done, they need all of that stuff fed hay because they’re in corrals. There’s thirty three pastures and they’re located in basically the midwest Kansas, South Dakota, but they’re separated by sex. They’re in a confined area which is quarantined. So it’s a lot cheaper to have them in pastures. But currently right now, just in those thirty three pastures, there’s over thirty nine thousand horses. There’s those burrows out there. Borrows are pretty easy to adopt or in a smaller portion, So this is all horses of those thirty nine thousand horses and By the way, these are privately owned contracted facilities. There’s only four facilities that the public can actually go see and possibly adopt from it. So nobody will ever see these horses again. They’ll never see the wild again. There are horses in there up to the age of thirty two, so now we prolong their lives. And of those thirty nine thousand, there’s thirty six thousand that are over the age of ten.
00:49:15
Speaker 2: And our solution the one hundred.
00:49:18
Speaker 3: And twenty groups plus everybody that are now signing petitions, our first initial solutions is to get these animals to appropriate management on the range because quite frankly, the range comes first. If that range is dead, that nothing’s going to survive. You’ll have no wildlife, no wild horses, no livestock, no birds and foul no rabbits, no anything on that range. They have to have that range to survive. So we need to get them to appropriate management levels, and we need to allow when you asked about what things we have, we need to allow that third section thirteen thirty three of the Act is allowed horses over the age of ten to be sold without limitation. And I’ve talked to people in Congress, people in the interior. And our suggestion is, let’s go back to nineteen seventy one. Let’s do a sixty day claiming type period. Let’s offer every single horse over the age of ten to every single five oh one C three sanctuary, animal rights group animal, you know, any of those groups first so that nothing needs to be put down. That’s thirty six thousand horses. They testified to Congress they could take every animal unwanted animal and stop the commercial processing. Plants in the United States claim to have millions of followers. Thirty six thousand is a pretty low level, so I’m sure you’ll find either adopters to take these animals over the age of ten or open up a sanctuary, buy some private land, put those animals on. But by the way, they’re going to be alive from until they’re twenty or thirty years old, so they’re going to fill up two.
00:51:25
Speaker 2: At some point. But no animal needs.
00:51:29
Speaker 3: To be euthanized if we did that to begin with. On the other side of this, once we got these animals to appropriate management levels on the range, we’re not going to have to gather twenty thousand horses a year. We’re going to only have to gather by utilizing at that point fertility controlled drugs where it’s feasible thirty five hundred to five thousand a year. And by the way, in the last ten years, BLM has been able to up those adoptions to last year, we sold I think something like twelve hundred, and I say we I don’t work for them anymore.
00:52:10
Speaker 2: Let me make that clear.
00:52:11
Speaker 3: The BLIM sold like twelve hundred animals gave instant title. The rest of those were adopted, and I think it was eighty six hundred. I’d have to check that number were adopted. So, by the way, if we adopted eighty six hundred in a year and we’ve only got to gather a maximum five thousand for once in the fifty four years of doing this, that’s going to balance it out.
00:52:39
Speaker 1: And now your demand’s going to outweigh your supply finally, right, right, Why are these animals sitting in these facilities for so long? Because what’s happening in that instant Okay, I have way too many questions and we just don’t have enough time. I don’t know why it’s ten years old or older. I got a buddy who I work with who just paid out the nose for a three year.
00:53:12
Speaker 3: Old ten years old a wild animal figure, you’ve got to get a halter on them, you’ve got to touch them. They’re dangerous animals. So in my opinion, most people that are definitely horse type people are looking at younger animals three to five years old. After five, but we’ve got groups that are working with BLM that are training horses that are five to eight and in some cases have the ability. But that’s a very distinguished trainer in hands. So bottom line, anything over the age of ten basically becomes yard art is better off in a large pasture that they can maintain their own feet. Those are what those pastors are in the Midwest. There’s an environmental assessment that looks into them. So and we’ve only got thirty eight corrals across the United States, which again is ludicrous, So there’s only so much room. I mean, look, these aren’t goldfish. You don’t stick them in a tank and put them on a counter. They’re large animals, eight hundred pounds to twelve hundred pounds, and everybody thinks, you know, it’s the Walt Disney unicorns and rainbows. These are large animals, they’re aggressive animals and So once you get to that point, and once we got to a point of gathering animals on the range, when we were at ninety five thousand, we were taking everything we could get. It didn’t matter what came in efficiencies, everything else. Back in the day when I started Bielum, they did what they call gate cut gathers. They would bring animals in, they’d gather them, they’d separate them, and they would literally take the older animals and put them back out on the range, let them live their lives on the range. Why put the stress of an animal that’s been out there into corrals and do all this. So I would love for us to be out appropriate management levels, go back to doing those types of gate cut gathers. And also, by the way, in those one hundred and seventy five him as, if you gather like as states in the law, to the minimal feasible level, you don’t even have to go back into that herd management area for four years because horses start going up about twenty percent on an average per year.
00:55:38
Speaker 1: So less management, less cost to the taxpayer.
00:55:43
Speaker 3: Less stress on the animals, you know, and all the animals out there. So we need to get back to how we realistically did this before all these activists and packs that are making millions of dollars off the horses backs that have no solutions and do no rangeland restoration came in and started litigating and litigating and litigating and litigating frivolous lawsuits. So let’s get back to managing these animals in a humane factor, in a humane way where we’re not going in there and disrupting through gathers. You know, look, you guys got hunting seasons. I’m you know, I go out, I do a lot of scouting with good friends of mine. I’d prefer while meat over store bought meat. So I’m definitely not you know, I’m one hundred percent for the conservation of hunting. But there’s hunting seasons, and there’s stipulations to that, and there’s only a number of tags that go out, so you know, they’re managed. Horses are not managed when you’ve got them overpopulated at these rates, and it’s going to be an updown seesaw if we can get them back to appropriate management levels. Congress stands their ground on management styles. As technology comes up, we do better and better and continue to update that. Then everybody’s going to be happy, but there’s got to be a compromise. And us folks that are now feeling the effects, whether you’re a hunter, a recreationist, a farmer or ranch or anything else, are now truly feeling the effects of this overpopulation and balancing out who’s talking to Congress And by the way, we’re we’re out numbering it. When you look at an economic side, are going in saying time out. Why am I spending ten thousand dollars to go on a hunt in Nevada When I get out to what used to be the best tunting area and all I’m seeing is horses? You know? And why are conservation groups that all are part of your podcast watch this, Why are they spending two million dollars to recede after a wildfire goes through when your populations are three and four times over of wild horses that seed’s never going to take into the ground.
00:58:18
Speaker 2: You know, that’s that’s ridiculous.
00:58:20
Speaker 3: It’s kind of like a tenant, you know, that is infested with rats. You know, think of the pythons, Think of the wild pigs, think of rats in the cities. Nobody has an issue with managing those to death. You know, exactly that. But this is the one animal. And I get why seeing them out on the range in a normal group of horses, which is a band is seven to ten, is great. But when you see hundreds and hundreds of horses together in the same area, basically on a dirt lot, that’s criminal. Those horses were in my backyard the way that their body conditions are, I’d have a federal offense against me, So let’s talk.
00:59:10
Speaker 1: That’s what It’s so hard when you know there’s so many animal rescues out there that are constantly dealing with private animals that have never been wild, that have just been stuck out and basically abandoned on private property, and the ability for the most well meaning people to try to adopt those animals and get them back into horses are weird, you know, Like once they go on that down slope, it’s so hard to bring them back into there are functional weight and and health. We had a great uh Peruvian Pacifino, Sheila. She was awesome, ye, but she was a fancy show horse and during the eight crash, she you know, she was like super fancy indoor lady won a bunch of saddles with her and stuff and and then just ignored her once she couldn’t pay the rest of her bills, and and we ended up with her, and and we could get her just fat enough to put a little little tack on, but any amount of work she would just turn into skin and bones, you know, and wonderful, wonderful horse. And I feel like a lot of rescue animals really understood her second second shot at life.
01:01:02
Speaker 3: You know, well, they’re they’re not humans, and you’re hitting a good point here.
01:01:08
Speaker 2: They’re I can tell you a million stories. We don’t have time for that.
01:01:13
Speaker 3: But but what is the most humane thing to do to an animal that doesn’t understand They’re not going to walk up to you and go, oh God, my stomach kurts. You know, well, let’s do you know, let’s let’s do an MRI and see how your lover’s doing. Those organs are already deficient when they’re getting in those body class conditions, what we call one to three’s organs are already stopping, stopping to function. To ever get them in that healthy state is likely not going to happen. So what you’re gonna try to do what you can, because look, we all have big hearts. Everybody wants to be able to save every animal out there, and and it is emotional, right, but the truth is, what is the most humane thing to do to an animal and that condition, And in some cases it is to euthanize them. I mean, when I’m talking about horses and pastors that are thirty two years old, their Congress basically said you can’t euthanize a horse that’s still walking around. Even though the law says old, sick and lame, there’s no true definition of what’s old, sick and lane. That’s every person’s thing. There needs to be policy on that clearly defining that because when those horses are typically at the age of over twenty five to thirty, they start losing their teeth, the inability to eat.
01:02:35
Speaker 2: It takes almost a.
01:02:36
Speaker 3: Year for a horse to starve to death and drop to the ground. They typically drop near water source, will drink that water until they literally die, and that could take weeks too. So if you’re talking about humane treatment to animals, that is not humane. And look, that’s that’s a whole nother big subject after this. That again, Congress with that rider is not allowing the Bureau of Land Management or has made it afraid because when we do gathers, these activists are out there. They’re very transparent about what’s going on together. And when a horse dies during a gather, they’re either it had to do with the gather. Horse hits a fence, breaks it neck, its neck, it steps in a gopher hole, breaks a leg, whatever the case might be. Things are going to happen with wild animals. Let me tell you that’s less than two percent horses die during the operations, okay, which if you know wildlife, I mean, that’s a pretty astronomical, really good percentage. At the same cases, there are horses that we do put down BLM or a service with a vet puts down as an act of mercy to that animal. I’ve seen horses come in after fires that ninety five percent of their bodies were burned. You want to rehab that, you want to continue to allow that animal to go through that kind I’ve seen horses where there’s foals trying to milk off of a mare and you can count every single rib, their hip bones, their wither bones, everything. That horse should have been put down months before the suffering that allows horses coming in with three legs. I’ve seen coyotes eat in the back end of a horse as I’m driving up and the horse raises its head. Mother nature is not kind, and it’s about time that this particular thing is stopped being driven by emotion, because the only animal that’s suffering suffering is the horses themselves. And then the other animals such as elk and antelope and everything else that try to get to water holes and aren’t allowed if there’s horses around, are too suffering. That mule deer population in Nevada we had over one hundred and sixty thousand ten years ago. We’re down to less than sixty thousand. So that is a domino effect. And at the end of the day, the United States, you know, has determined that the majority of people in the United States don’t eat horse meat. That’s fine, We’ve got that ability to take that option. But guess what, in India, they don’t eat cows. We sure like them. So there are many many countries that would give anything to have that source of protein to feed their starving people. And so there is you know, options of humanitarian effect up in the future to discuss should we want to go down that path. And there are folks here in the United States that would utilize that meat. Karakastan, they literally survive off of horse meat. It’s higher in protein, lower in fats. I mean those sort of things in their mind. They’re not the typical United States person. I’m not advocating to eat horse meat, but they’re the only animal out there that truthfully doesn’t have a resource value. We are importing horse meat to feed zoo animals and sanctuaries. We’re importing them pay.
01:06:39
Speaker 1: We need to get those people at the Place to See park to make us some saber toothcats so they can go back to wandering and predating on their Place to See horses.
01:06:55
Speaker 2: It’s an emotional effect.
01:06:57
Speaker 3: We’ve given them fifty four years to run, you know, a law based on emotion, and basically the one hundred and twenty to twenty people that sign this letter that is in the hands of Congress, amongst everybody else.
01:07:13
Speaker 2: We’re saying groups. So think about how many.
01:07:16
Speaker 3: Members those conservation wildlife groups have and now we’re talking about millions and millions of people across the United States. I’d say close to a billion, not the one hundred million or whatever the activists claim that are saying it’s time for us to follow the Act as it’s written. It’s the easiest thing for a legislator to do. You don’t have to do anything well.
01:07:40
Speaker 1: As you pointed out, the best thing for everything is the ecology of the range, and we’ve got a lot of work to do all over the place to get that stuff back to healthy. It’s got a lot of threats outside of absolutely grazing, right like noxious weeds, invasive plant species. And if that goes away, then we won’t be talking about this anymore because there’s not gonna be any place for.
01:08:11
Speaker 3: Him to go so and it’s not going to happen overnight. And I think that’s the human nature. We want to see results immediately, and that’s why they put up the pretty pictures of horses.
01:08:22
Speaker 1: But to talk about immediate things that we can do. Though, it sounds like there’s an appropriation to ask as well as an ask to remove this writer from the bill. Correct.
01:08:40
Speaker 3: I’m going to tell you right now, because there is back and forth in conversations. The Department of Interior already requested in their budget request, that’s the way policy works, to remove that act.
01:08:55
Speaker 2: Okay.
01:08:55
Speaker 3: Then it went to the President, Office of Management and Budget. Presidents of US he put forth his request, we’re just talking one program to Congress. Congress now had these groups coming at them, God knows how much money they’ve spent lobbying, etc. Those sort of things, and so that Congressional House Congressional Committee and the House Congression or the Senate Congressional Committee put back in there that they want at least the same amount of money as this year. Because the President also came back with the lower appropriations, which if we followed the Act, we still got plenty of money. Okay, because we see that in this first year. If that appropriations were to be voted in on October first, which hasn’t happened since the Bush administration, and so likely we’ll be under what we call continuing resolution, which means last year’s budget basically goes forward, which which means writers are still in there. There’s not much we can do about that, though that’s actually being researched right now, and likely there is a way to for Congress to say, Okay, we’re on a continuing resolution, but we’re going to drop the writer. So that would be the biggest hope of it. But I’m going to be truthful with you. If the Act was followed as written, say, all those activists or advocacy groups came in five oh one c threes came in, took those thirty six thousand horses over the age of ten, and found homes for them, whether it being in a sanctuary or adopters. You know, they transferred them to those sort of things. Then at that point, we would say the taxpayers anywhere from thirty five to forty million dollars in that one year, which by the way, takes away from the budget. And you’re also not feeding those thirty six thousand horses at two dollars and seventy five cents a day, okay.
01:11:12
Speaker 1: And twenty pounds of forage and five to fifteen gallons of water.
01:11:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, so doing that simple math is very easy. The president actually, you know, his money people behind that were very generous with his request to Congress, and that group of what is it, five to seven, seven to twelve committee members you know, put right back in the act. Well, that made it easy for these activist groups to come in there and say, hey, you know, fertility control, these are people on the East coast, you know.
01:11:48
Speaker 1: Well, I think the new new thing is you say, hey, these animals are consuming five to fifteen gallons of water per day. Don’t we need that for artificial intelligences?
01:12:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and that’s what we really are talking about. You know, when we’re going in and talking to legislators, it’s very different than than what we’re talking about on the podcast. We’re why are we talking about one animal? What comes first? The ecosystem? That is our call to action. We want to protect our ecosystem. We want to say that ecosystem because if you know, all the forage is gone and all the springs are stomped to mud holes, which, by the way, they’re doing an emergency gather right now in Wells, Nevada, And I’ve got pictures of horses stuck in those mud holes trying to get a drink of water.
01:12:44
Speaker 2: Right.
01:12:44
Speaker 3: Well, that was also for wildlife and even bees and honeys and birds and everything else. It’s destroyed, it’s gone, it’s not coming back. It has to be rehabilitated to come back. Well, why are you going to do that if you’ve got you know, horses on that and understand waterflow? Some of those springs could produce five to seven gallons an hour, others, you know, twenty to thirty gallons. So there’s a lot of scientific information that goes into that. And when you look across the deserts and you go, oh, that looks like great, there’s green everywhere. Well, half of that’s halijeaten, half of that’s poisonous, noxious weeds that horses can eat. The burrows can eat some of it down in the lower deserts. Their livers are built differently. I mean, there’s so much scientific information that it’s not that simple. So all of this social media misinformation being spreaded out there to people that are sitting in cities, they just need to learn how to educate themselves.
01:13:54
Speaker 1: Well, where where would you point them?
01:13:56
Speaker 3: Jenny Gosh, we are now put together the just in Nevada. There’s the Coalition of Healthy Nevada Lands. That website has many many scientific papers, white papers, those sort of things on it. If you just google scientific research, Comma, wildhorses and burroughs, you’re gonna get everything from fertility control to range land management, you know those sort of things. The BLM BLM dot gov website, if you type in BLM COMMA research, it’s going to bring you to their research page and it will have hundreds of scientific professor directed information.
01:14:51
Speaker 2: That is going to.
01:14:52
Speaker 3: Very easily if you’re if you’re getting your information from an advocacy group that the first thing you on the site is pushed donate. Now you’re not getting real information and you’re not getting educated.
01:15:07
Speaker 2: That is all about the money.
01:15:08
Speaker 3: And by the way, none of that goes back to the rangelands or the horses themselves. What it goes back to is paying people to take pictures. And for instance, ASPCA, their CEO makes over million dollars, almost one point two million dollars a year. Go look at those taxpayers, they’re public, Go see what they’re spending their money on. It’s frivolous lawsuits. There’s not a single lawsuit that they’ve won a big case on, you know, minimal pieces here and there. Ol BLM’s got to go back and redo their environmental assessments. So you are paying people sitting in Los Angeles with one case, their CEO ten years ago was making one hundred and eighty.
01:15:53
Speaker 2: Thousand dollars a year. That money is not going back to those horses.
01:15:58
Speaker 3: Start putting those money in to true conservation groups, not just because they have conservation in their title. True conservation groups that are going out there building guzzlers for wildlife and wild horses in those sorts. You know, conservation groups, you know, whether it’s Rocky Mountain Olk Foundation or the North Antelope Pronghorn Association or you know backcountry horse.
01:16:23
Speaker 1: Uh hunters, anglers, anglers.
01:16:27
Speaker 3: I mean, you guys, the amount of money that you’ve put back out on that ecosystem, out on the range lands and water sources.
01:16:37
Speaker 2: I don’t even know if you can.
01:16:38
Speaker 3: Tell me off the top of your head how many millions of dollars you’ve spent on that. You know, those are conservation groups, honting people. These hunting groups aren’t about trophy hunting like everybody claims they are. They’re about conservation of the lands. There’s there’s huge resource value in taking your family out to the Western range Lands and spending time, you know, and then great if you get the extra and you can go home and and have meet in your freezer for a year. That’s conservation. So so go to those sites.
01:17:17
Speaker 2: You know.
01:17:17
Speaker 3: I’m sure you guys have a lot of current information on it, but BLM does have those research sites. Go to you know, University of Wyoming, those range Lands, University of Montana, those sites.
01:17:32
Speaker 1: And we’ll we’ll dig up some some resources and put them on the page as well. Thank you so much for talking to us, Jenny h and I got to run and U catch a playing so.
01:17:46
Speaker 3: I well, hopefully you’re coming out west. No, I appreciate it, and and sorry for taking up so much time. I think we could go on for much longer.
01:17:56
Speaker 2: Oh.
01:17:56
Speaker 1: I still have a ton of questions, but what I typically say is we’ll send in your questions as k c A. L askcal at the meeater dot com, and we’ll either get Jenny back on here to answer them, or we’ll reach out to her and answer them here on the next show. So thank you so much, thank.
01:18:18
Speaker 3: You, and thank you for having me on this. You know, it’s great to talk to new audiences.
01:18:23
Speaker 1: Absolutely
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