January 28, 2005, Friday
He's the star of this mountain ballet: Mustang No. 04217347, a yearling pinto with one blue eye, one brown.
Graceful, young, charged, oblivious to the frigid temperatures, he gallops in a 5-acre pen with about 20 other wild horses who form a racing collage of rich browns and auburns against a snow-white background.
He was brought to the Litchfield Bureau of Land Management compound outside Susanville, Calif., as part of a regular roundup, designed to keep down the wild horse population on public grazing lands.
In California, the agency brings in "excess" mustangs and sells them at auctions either at Litchfield, Ridgecrest, outside Bakersfield, or through independent "satellite" adoptions, such as annual ones in Brentwood and Livermore.
"How would you like to see that on your dinner plate?" asked a grim Willis Lamm, who trains horses on a ranch outside Oakley.Far fetched? Not really.
A provision slipped into a federal appropriations bill silently killed a 1971 law that kept feral horses from being sold to slaughterhouses.
Without that protection, horses less attractive than Mustang No. 04217347 could join the lucrative U.S. horse meat export market.
The legislative language, crafted by Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Montana, with the help of Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., targets mustangs more than 10 years old -- past the age of likely adoption -- and any young horse that has been to three sales and not adopted.
Burns says his goal was to keep the mustangs from overpopulating then starving to death. But backers, primarily cattle ranchers who hold leases on public lands, say the horses interfere in their operations.
Rachel Buzzetti, executive director of the Nevada Cattlemen's Association, defended the industry's support of the repeal.
"Water, springs, forage -- they pretty much stomp the springs out," she said. "A lot of ranchers are showing 65 percent (less) forage. If you were to turn 50 goats onto somebody's back lawn, you can imagine what would happen."
But activists wanting to protect wild horses from slaughter are having none of it. After a recent strategizing session, they say a million-horse march on Washington, D.C., is not out of the question.
The crux of the whole problem is competition over the last blade of grass on the 200 public herd areas the BLM provides in 10 states, said Karen Sussman, president of the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros.
"Public land ranching is a welfare program. For every dollar a rancher spends on leasing the land, he gets $3 back in subsidies," she said.
Leases to BLM grazing land are renewed automatically every 10 years and are hard to get, as many leaseholders hold onto them for many year. While private ranch lands go for up to $50 an acre, public lands cost $1.49.
In sparsely populated Montana, oil and gas, livestock, mining and forest products interests carry major influence, combining to donate $400,000 to Burns' campaign in 2002, public records show.
Leases on many public grazing lands are held by corporations, including banking interests and oil companies.
Opponents of Burns' rider complain the action was taken without any public discussion.
Not even Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, which oversees the wild horse program, knew Burns had inserted the language into the appropriations bill.
But it came as no surprise to the cattle industry. In fact, the language is nearly identical to a National Cattlemen's Beef Association policy statement dated November 2003.
It calls for legislation to command the BLM to sell unadopted horses and burros and keep the profits.
"This ends 33 years of protection," said Renee Been, a Richmond, Calif.-area equine sports massage therapist who has owned two mustangs, one of whom she adopted from a BLM facility in Kingman, Ariz.
Contra Costa County is home to about 100 adopted mustangs _ one of the largest concentrations in the state.
"California did pass an anti-slaughter law but that doesn't really help, since the mustangs can be bought here and transported to other states," said Suzi Kicker, a Pittsburg woman who has adopted BLM horses.
Burns' office reacted angrily to the criticism.
"Right now we run the risk of these horses starving to death, or being rounded up and kept in feedlots" due to over-population, said Burn's communications chief, J.P. Pendleton.
"The BLM was not taking the adoption process seriously. Do any of these people who claim to love the wild horse want to see them starve to death?"
BLM spokeswoman Celia Boddington said the agency actively encourages adoption.
"We have 10 sanctuaries, and the horses receive a high level of care in them," she said. "We're doubling our efforts to find them good homes."
Government round-ups have reduced the wild horse population to less than 37,000, most in California, Nevada, Oregon and Wyoming. Boddington said there are another 14,000 in agency facilities.
The Bureau of Land Management is aiming to get the number down to 26,000 by 2006.
Mustangs are technically feral _ there are no native wild horses in the United States _ but some strains have been wild since they escaped Spanish conquistadors in the 16th and 17th centuries and are nearly pure Spanish stock.
For many, the horses are an important vestige of America's past.
In repealing the Wild and Free Ranging Horse and Burro Protection Act of 1971, the provision orders the BLM to sell its captured horses _ and, an irresistible lure to an agency whose costs have been rising at a rate of 45 percent _ to keep the profits.
But critics say the order ensures the slaughter of the equines.
Since hoof and mouth disease surfaced in 2001, demand for U.S. horse meat overseas has risen dramatically, and individual small ranchers with hopes of adopted a horse say they can't compete with slaughterhouses in price.
There are three horse slaughterhouses in America: two in Texas, one in DeKalb, Ill. All are European-owned.
Ray Field, director of the Wild Horse Foundation of Franklin, Texas, is a neighbor. Field's WHF contracts with the BLM to adopt horses. His organization found homes for 880 horses and burros last year alone.
He accused the BLM, which is drowning under its soaring costs, of pushing for the change.
"Their adoption program is a mish-mash and their marketing sucks," he said. "But instead of saying, 'Your marketing sucks. You're fired.' They said, 'Let's kill us some horses.'"
A high-ranking BLM manager agreed that the agency would save hundreds of thousands of dollars on boarding costs by selling the animals to what he called "kill buyers" in lots.
The U.S. Humane Society Web site says 55,776 horses were slaughtered last year in the United States and thousands more transported to Canada and Mexico for slaughter there. The meat is exported to Belgium, France, Italy, Japan and Switzerland, where it is considered a delicacy.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Belgium imported nearly $20 million of horse meat in 2001, much of it for distribution to other European nations.
Meanwhile, no one has told the BLM how it is expected to change its practices, said Videll Retterath, who manages the Litchfield ranch.
As snowflakes fell on the green steel dash of her Kawasaki tractor cab, she said, "We're always the last to know."
Inches away, mustangs chomped at "cob" -- a treat that mixes corn, oats and barley together with molasses.
"We don't have any guidance whatsoever."
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