My post will be long and emotion filled. It will also be filled with what seemes to be contradiction. I am sure that there are other members here at YT that have other experiences to share about their involvement with mustangs. This is just one person's story, so I ask that you read this and understand I am speaking first hand. So readers please beware. I have first hand information about Wild Mustangs, and the Burea of Land Management. Not only did I adopt a total of three wild mustangs, I became a volunteer for the BLM for several years. Don't get me started on my "America's Living History" soapbox - if I did, admin would need a new server to handle the volumes I would type
In the mid 90's I fulfilled a lifelong dream and adopted two mustangs from the BLM. It was the most incredible expreience. The adoptions are an exciting EVENT - well they were back then. You went the day before in and camped at the site - and strolled through the pens of horses and listed the horses that you would like to adopt. The adotpion was held by lottery. You were assigned a number, the numbers were dropped in a hat and a BLM staffer pulled the names and made an announcement from the office steps.
I cannot begin to explain or make you understand the thrill of walking through the horse pens in the pre-dawn listening to the soft rustling of the horses walking around, listening to them munching down on alfalfa, the smell of sweaty horses mixed with urine and dung. For a horse lover, it is a once in a lifetime experience. My heart is racing now just remembering.
The horses that were safely adopted to loving homes are the few lucky ones.... the ones that aren't so lucky are adopted by people who fulfill their adoption requirements and then sell them to rodeos, rendering plants, or are abandoned to starve and die.
The mustangs don't have many wild predators to help keep their numbers in check. If this were so, then nature would naturally week out the sick, weak, old, and unsound specimines and only the strongest and most healthy would survive. Because there isn't that check and balance these horses are reproducing unchecked. The population is increasing, and there is no place for them to go. Our Federal Government allows big farmers to use OUR FEDERALLY owned land to graze cattle and sheep for next to nothing. THIS LAND BELONGS TO YOU AND TO ME AND TO THE MUSTANGS!!! The large cattle people have a lot of pull politically, the wild horses don't have much.
What is hidden from the public are roundups where helicopters are used to herd the mustangs into areas where they are run off of cliffs or are penned up and shot. It makes me sick to type those words, but it is happening more than you would like to know. The BLM turns it's head because their agency has little funding and few heros to help.
So the problem is what to do with the Mustangs that have been forced from the land that was promised them? The BLM tried using contraceptives - it would put drugs in the watering holes that would prevent the mares from coming into season. For obvious reasons that didn't work. They capture and adopt out as many as they can, but with the economy the way it is, taking care of a horse is very expensive.
So what do you do with a wild and free spirit that has no where to go? I am bawling like a baby as I type this because I have loved three wild ones. I would much rather see these magnificient horses humanely euthanized rather than penned up for the rest of their life or allowed to continue reproducing unchecked and face starvation.
If anyone wants to talk Mustangs, just pm me. I can tell about the little weanling that we adoped (the third mustang) that would lay down in the pasture and my children would use as a pillow.