As Americans celebrate Earth Day, one of our most beloved wildlife species is
yet again under attack. A herd of 1200 wild horses in Nevada are scheduled to be
rounded up and sold at the livestock auction where they will almost certainly go
to buyers for the slaughter industry. Ironically, the horses under siege in
Nevada are descendants of the herds that inspired Wild Horse Annie to fight to
protect wild horses, resulting in the 1971 Wild Free Roaming Horse and Burro
Act. That act has been dismantled and gutted through the years, leaving the very
horses that inspired its inception once again threatened. Further, a well
intentioned but misguided piece of Federal legislation threatens thousands of
wild horses across the country. For more details, please read this urgent alert
from the America Wild Horse Preservation Campaign (AWHPC) and take action today:
H.R. 767: A new threat to Sheldon’s wild horses The REPAIR Act (H.R. 767) has
been making its way quietly through the U.S. Congress. The stated goal of the
bill is to eradicate “harmful nonnative species” from federal wildlife refuges.
This could have dramatic consequences for wild horses on wildlife refuges:
although they are a reintroduced native wildlife species, horses are treated by
the government as nonnative; the REPAIR Act could allow refuges such as Sheldon
to appropriate federal dollars (our tax dollars!) specifically to eradicate wild
horses (click here for a report on Sheldon’s last round-up: http://www.wildhorsepreservation.com/sheldon.html
CAUTION: graphic material). The bill passed in the House and is now awaiting a
Senate vote. As Chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator
Barbara Boxer (CA) controls if and when the bill is brought to a vote. Please
alert Senator Boxer to the unintended consequences H.R. 767 could have for
thousands of wild horses. Urge her NOT to move the bill until it is amended to
exclude wild horses from its scope: Contact Senator Boxer today by email: http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm#form
Or by phone: (202) 224-3553
"It is not
the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to
the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and
blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because
there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive
to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends
himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high
achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring
greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who
neither know victory nor defeat."
-- Theodore Roosevelt,
Citizenship in a Republic, Address at the Sorbonne, April 23,
1910.
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