There have been several stories on the news lately about wild mustangs in Nevada and the attempts to deal with them.  The Gov has about 30,000 in captivity and can’t handle any more.  They are not having much luck in getting private citizens to adopt the animals.

Ranchers who lease Gov land want the remaining animals eliminated saying that they are pests & are destroying the diversity of the land.  PETA type groups want the animals preserved and allowed to continue to roam free.  Also, there is discussion about giving horses to people “without restrictions”… which would allow the animals to be used for making “food”.  

Thoughts?

2 Words:

Horse Jerky

Quoted: 2 Words: Horse Jerky

+1

Horses do too well here in the wild to roam freely. They're an invasive and alien species. They outcompete natives like deer and elk and are also aggressive towards livestock like cattle and sheep.

IMO, they should be dealt with more decisively than capture and adoption, and I'm leaning more towards shooting them for sport.

steaks.....

I don't know what the perfect round is for wild horse, but I know I have several that will just the job just fine.

Quoted: They are not having much luck in getting private citizens to adopt the animals.

Are those horses free, or did they stick a bunch of stupid fees onto it?

Although I can see a problem with expecting people to adopt untamed horses either way...

Well, if PETA can come up with money to support the horses why not? Otherwise......you have to do a plan B.

Many moons ago, a friend adopted one of these pintos, a recently gelded stallion.  Fuck.  Frozen dynamite is more stable.  I would recommend they all be shot and turned into French Food.  They like that shit.

Wild horses are a fucking pest.

Here is a news story from the NY Times on the subject
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/us/20mustangs.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

The New York Times

July 20, 2008
On Mustang Range, a Battle on Thinning the Herd
By FELICITY BARRINGER

GERLACH, Nev. — Five mustangs pounded across the high desert recently, their dark manes and tails giving shape to the wind. Pursued by a helicopter, they ran into a corral — and into the center of the emotional debate over whether euthanasia should be used to thin a captive herd that already numbers 30,000.

The champions of wild mustangs have long portrayed them as the victims of ranchers who preferred cattle on the range, middlemen who wanted to make a buck selling them for horsemeat and misfits who shot them for sport. But the wild horse today is no longer automatically considered deserving of extensive protections.

Some environmentalists and scientists have come to see the mustangs, which run wild from Montana to California, as top-of-the-food-chain bullies, invaders whose hooves and teeth disturb the habitats of endangered tortoises and desert birds.

Even the language has shifted. In a 2006 article in Audubon magazine, wild horses lost their poetry and were reduced to “feral equids.”

“There’s not just horses out there, there’s other critters, from the desert turtle in the south to the bighorn sheep in the north,” said Paula Morin, the author of the book “Honest Horses.”

“We’ve come a long way in our awareness of the web of life and maintaining the whole ecology,” Ms. Morin said, adding, “We do the horses a disservice when we set them apart.”

Environmentalists’ attitudes toward the horses have evolved so far that some are willing to say what was heresy a few years ago: that euthanasia is acceptable if the alternatives are boarding the mustangs for life at taxpayers’ expense or leaving them to overpopulate, damage the range and die of hunger or thirst.

The federal Bureau of Land Management, the legal custodian of the wild horses and burros, recently proposed euthanization. For years, the bureau has been running the Adopt-A-Horse program, selling mustangs from the range to those who would care for them. But 30,000 once-wild horses were never adopted and are being boarded by the agency at facilities in Kansas and Oklahoma (another 33,000 run wild). As feed and gas grow more expensive, the rate of adoptions plummets.

Boarding costs ran to $21 million last year and are expected to reach $26 million this year, out of a $37 million budget for the bureau’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, which is intended to protect the animals. And drought lingers here in northern Nevada, where the mustangs were rounded up on a recent weekend morning to prevent them from starving.

The bureau “can’t do a good job of taking care of horses on the range if they have to take care of all the horses off the range,” said Nathaniel Messer, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Missouri and a former member of the federal Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Committee.

Steven L. Davis, an emeritus professor of animal science at Oregon State University, said: “Many of the wild horse supporters claim that the horses have a right to be there. I reject that argument.” He added: “They damage the water holes. They damage the grasses, the shrubs, the bushes, causing negative consequences for all the other plants and critters that live out there.”

For groups formed to protect the horses, the specter of euthanasia as a solution remains anathema. “It’s not acceptable to the American public,” said Virginie L. Parant, a lawyer who is the director of the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign.

The mustang, Ms. Parant said, “is part of the American myth. People want to know that they can come to the American West and know that they can see herds of wild horses roaming. It’s part of the imagery.”

As mustangs increasingly competed with cattle in the 1940s and 50s, many were rounded up and slaughtered. They found a champion in Velma Johnston, better known as Wild Horse Annie, who pushed Congress to act. In 1971, Congress gave the federal bureau the job of caring for them.

Shelley Sawhook, the president of the American Horse Defense Fund, argues, along with other horse defenders, that the federal government “mismanaged the program from the very beginning.” She added that “their proposal to euthanize is a stopgap measure” to cover what she believes is an overly aggressive policy of removing horses from the range for the benefit of cattle interests.

Accusations of mismanagement have dogged the bureau across Democratic and Republican administrations; a decade ago The Associated Press found that a few agency employees were adopting mustangs themselves and selling them to slaughterhouses. In the wake of lawsuits by the Fund for Animals and other groups, the bureau required anyone adopting a mustang to sign a binding pledge not to send it to a slaughterhouse. In 2001, the Earth Liberation Front took credit for the firebombing of an agency hay barn on the Nevada-California border.

Today, the fundamental rift between the bureau and its critics involves two judgment calls: how many horses can a range of 29 million acres support, and how should that level be maintained?

Arlan Hiner, an assistant field manager for the bureau in Nevada, said, “We’re supposed to be managing for ecological balance.” Over all, the bureau wants to cut the wild herd by about 6,000 horses. Ted Williams, the author of the Audubon article, argued that without euthanasia such a balance would be impossible.

Mr. Williams’s article infuriated the mustang advocates even more than the agency’s proposal to resume euthanasia. Ms. Parant laughs at the idea of attributing the range destruction to horses when cattle greatly outnumber them.

Jay F. Kirkpatrick, a scientist who is the director of the Science and Conservation Center in Billings, Mont., wrote in a rebuttal to the Audubon article that Mr. Williams had not given sufficient weight to birth control options, which could make “serious inroads” on horse populations.

“The issue is not that the technology doesn’t exist, but that the B.L.M. is not investing in it,” Professor Kirkpatrick wrote.

Herd sizes, the bureau says, double every four years. And the agency is working with a contraceptive that is largely effective for two years in mares. Alan Shepherd, the official who helps run the contraceptive program, said that it showed promise but had limitations.

“The ultimate thing is you can’t catch them all,” Mr. Shepherd said.

The horses that came rushing into the corral ahead of the helicopter were taken to a holding facility and will eventually find their way into the Adopt-A-Horse program.

The bureau said it would be premature to discuss the criteria for culling horses or the means of euthanasia. Longtime observers believe that older, unadoptable horses would be the focus of such a program. And in past mustang-thinning operations at holding facilities, marksmen shot the horses, said Dr. Messer of Missouri.

After Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, raised questions this month about the euthanasia proposal, the bureau agreed to make no decision until after completion of a Congressional audit of the program, which is due in September.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

There is a prison in KS that gets some of these mustangs (I'm not sure if they're these exact ones), and lets inmates break them.  They then sell them to the public for a very small fee.  I guess if you had hay to burn or pasture to keep down it would be a viable option, but cows do the same thing and they taste good.

IMO, if they are that big a nuisance they should be treated just like feral pigs.  Keeping 30k of these in captivity is insane.  

They need to do like they did in that movie with Matt Damon and mow em' down with Gatling guns.  

Would anyone here buy a license to hunt/shoot one?  

Quoted: Would anyone here buy a license to hunt/shoot one?

The problem would be disposal.  You'd either need a chainsaw or a backhoe.
That's a lot of dead meat.

But yes, I would

I agree that the BLM has mismanaged the program. They would in the beginning take all of the best horses and turn the less desirable ones loose. They would the sell the good horses. Well then all of the less desirable horses would mate producing more less than desirable horses coupled with lot'o inbreeding. Now no one want these horses, and have saturated the market.

What they should have done is what has worked in the past from the ranchers who used to do this for free or paid the government to do. Which is round them up, take some of the best to sell also on occasion introduce new stock then take some of the worst to the slaughter house for food products.

Sell what ya can and keep the population low.

I think wild horses are an important part of American culture.

However, that doesn't keep ya from making logical and rational choice to limit population.

PETA are morons. Those people and their policies would do more harm than good to animals.  For instance, they want the breeding of dog outlawed so that the only dogs that will be bred are those from irresponsible owners who will do nothing to screen for genetic defects producing inferior dogs with poor health and social temperments.

Treat them just like feral hogs... let people shoot them with no restrictions.

 No limit, no weapons restrictions, no season, etc..

Quoted: . . then take some of the worst to the slaughter house for food products.

I believe there is some US law that forbids using the wild mustangs as food.

we had a Red Roan when I was younger.. she was a  foal when obtained from the BLM.  Awesome horse.

hell, I hear theres a glut of good, tame horses.  Someone told me that their freind took 3 to a sale and found 2 had been stuffed into his trailer. Somewhere else, there is a herd of them that just grouped together in the wilds of KY because they were too expensive to care for.  

You can thank women (seem to make up most of the owners of) for getting that law into effect: can't ship them out of the US to be 'processed.'  That means an overabundance of aging and sick horses w/ no solution.

Quoted: Horses do too well here in the wild to roam freely. They're an invasive and alien species. They outcompete natives like deer and elk and are also aggressive towards livestock like cattle and sheep. IMO, they should be dealt with more decisively than capture and adoption, and I'm leaning more towards shooting them for sport.

I dont think I could have said it better!

I see them almost every time I drive I-80 just east of Reno.

Most people who adopt them don't know how to break them.

The BLM rounds up wild horses because they breed to the point that the land can't support them.