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Re: OT ...Re: [RC] If you are concerned about America's wild horses an... - Sharon Soule

Actually, the BLM has studied methods of birth control.  During the mid
80's, I was a subcontractor at the NSC feedlot in Lovelock NV where they
were housing about 3000 captured mustangs.  At the time, researchers from
the University of Wisconsin (I think) were conducting two studies of methods
of birth control.  The first one involved implants similar to the Norplant
that came out around the same time for women.  The other involved
vasectomizing the dominant stallion in a herd on the theory that he is the
one who produces most of the foals.

The vasectomy study was basically a joke.  It would have been faster and
cheaper simply to capture and geld every male horse on the range than to
vasectomize one stallion--and the theory of the dominant stallion doing the
breeding was not only unproven, but silly as far as those of us who had
actually observed wild horse behavior were concerned.

The implant study went as far as a field study during the late 80's and
early 90's.  I remember reading that they had all sorts of problems with the
radio transmitters on the horses they were trying to track and several
deaths.  I don't know if it was that problem that ended the study or just
the fact that the implants proved to be too expensive a proposition (they
would have to be re-implanted at intervals of 5 years to make them
effective).  Anyway, you can be certain that if it had proven to be safe and
effective and less expensive than rounding up horses, it would be in use
now.

I think that the upshot is that with little to no competition for forage
(remember that grazing cattle and sheep are severely controlled by the
government as to the amount of time they spend on the range) and little to
no predation, wild horses have a phenomenal reproduction rate.  I'm not sure
I have an opinion one way or the other about the Burns Amendment, but I do
remember the overpopulation problems in the 70's when the drought hit the
west so bad.  Those horses died horrible deaths from thirst and exposure.
It would have been far more humane to simply shoot half the horses on the
range at that time than to allow what happened to happen.  And, it happened
in the name of "humanity" because the horses were protected at the time but
there was no population control process in place yet.  In fact, it is what
inspired the round-up and adoption program we have today.

Sharon



   1.. hunting is not a viable option to control horses
 BLM has yet to try other methods of herd control such as =
sterilization....even when studies show this might be a far more cost =
effective way to control herds than the labor and cost intensive =
adoption program. Might be a viable option as well as adoption to =
QUALIFIED indivuduals.




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