Stop Plan to Kill America's Wild Horses

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior that administers America's public lands, including the animals who call this land home.

As part of its wild horse management program, the BLM has spent the past several years rounding up wild horses and keeping them in private, long-term holding facilities—which is expensive. Now, the agency wants to euthanize thousands of healthy horses, claiming it is too costly to feed and care for them.

The ASPCA encourages the BLM to explore other solutions, including but not limited to reopening additional land for the horses and increasing certain contraception programs that have already proven safe and effective.

What You Can Do

Please visit the ASPCA Advocacy Center to email a letter to your legislators in the U.S. Congress urging them to oppose the BLM’s plan to kill thousands of healthy wild horses.Thank you for taking action for America's animals.

WILDALERT: Stop ORV Damage to Utah's Wild Lands

Located in central Utah, the Richfield BLM Resource Area encompasses spectacular redrock canyons, rugged and unique badlands, peaks over 10,000 feet, and portions of western Utah's Basin and Range region. Much of the region's public lands are wilderness quality - among many others, areas such as Rocky Ford, Kingston Ridge, Limestone Cliffs, Wild Horse Mesa, Flat Tops, and Bull Mountain should all be afforded the highest level of protection to ensure their enduring beauty.

While oil and gas development presents an increasing threat to these wild landscapes, off-road vehicle (ORV) use remains the biggest concern. Encouragingly, the BLM took a big step toward reducing this problem in 2006 when it implemented emergency motorized travel restrictions on the delicate Mancos shale badlands surrounding Utah's famous Factory Butte. However, BLM is now considering a management plan that would afford minimum protections to the majority of this fragile landscape.

The BLM is now taking comments from the public on its proposed management plan. Please tell the BLM it must revise its proposed plans in order to reduce the destructive and redundant web of ORV routes and the resulting noise, fumes, and scars to the land. There's a limited time to act. Click here to take quick, effective action.

Please take action today and tell the BLM to include wilderness preservation in the Richfield resource management plan.

Sincerely,
Kathy Kilmer
The Wilderness Society

BLM broke environmental law, appeals court rules

Decision too late to save 400-year-old trees

Jeff Barnard Associated Press
December 5, 2006

SpokesmanReview.com

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management violated environmental law when it sold old-growth timber in southwestern Oregon without considering the cumulative harm that so much logging was having on northern spotted owls and salmon.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reversed the ruling of U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan in Eugene, despite the fact that the trees in the Mr. Wilson timber sale had already been felled.

The panel sent the case back to Hogan with orders to have BLM revise the environmental assessment to take a "hard look" at past and future logging in nearby areas.

George Sexton, conservation director for Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, a plaintiff in the case, said it was too late to save the 400-year-old trees, but he hoped the ruling would make BLM stop cutting so much old-growth when much of the U.S. Forest Service is focusing on logging in less controversial second-growth stands.

"I think BLM has decided who butters their bread, and they are connected at the hip with the timber industry," Sexton said. "I don't see BLM ever reaching the point where they decide to hear the public's desire to see old-growth forest protected and move into a less controversial second-growth thinning program until they log all the old growth or the law is changed."
BLM did not immediately return telephone calls for comment.

In the majority opinion, Judge Alfred T. Goodwin wrote that BLM had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to consider seven other past and future timber sales in the West Fork of Cow Creek watershed and what that would do to habitat for the threatened northern spotted owl and salmon.

The ruling noted that BLM's environmental analysis was based on broader looks at the impacts of logging that did not specifically address the harm caused by past, present and future logging.
It added that the BLM decided to log despite the fact that the environmental analysis found that four timber sales in the area would remove up 1,000 acres of old-growth habitat, and that future logging would remove some of the last old-growth in some sections.

The timber sale was an area designated for logging by the Northwest Forest Plan, which reduced logging on federal lands in western Oregon, Washington and Northern California. In a dissenting opinion, Judge A. Wallace Tashima agreed with Hogan that because the trees had already been cut, the case was moot.

But Goodwin wrote that if that were the case, BLM could just rush through logging projects before conservationists could get to court.

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/local/story.asp?ID=162867