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Uncle Sam needs a really big truckBy Trent Loos I will start with the items we can agree on: Uncle Sam has more horses than he can properly tend to, those horses are costing taxpayers too much money, and we need a solution other than the current system of long-term holding facilities. However, everything else Madeleine Pickens is trying to talk the Bureau of Land Management into is dead wrong. On the very same day she held a discussion breakfast in New York City unveiling her plan to "Save America's Mustangs," she was on my "Rural Route" radio program to share her vision with me. This is the second time Pickens has joined me on the air to discuss the horse issue, and I must admit that I don't think she intentionally does wrong; she simply doesn't understand the life cycle of a horse or, for that matter, what it actually takes to keep a horse alive and in good condition. Pickens has assembled a full cast of National Football League stars to address the problem. Once again, I emphasize that she has not surrounded herself with people who understand the issues regarding livestock care and herdsmanship, but rather people who became wealthy throwing around an inflatable hide. For example, she was recently quoted as saying, "Instead of going to Washington (D.C.) as a little blonde animal lover, now I've got America's testosterone behind us. People listen to football. Football matters in this country." Therein lies the problem. We need people who understand livestock and horses--not football--to discuss the issue. Nobody, including the federal land ranchers of the West, wants to eliminate the wild horse, but we must begin to implement a little animal husbandry in this herd that, quite honestly, is closer to 100,000 in number than anybody will admit. On Jan. 15, as horses were being gathered at the Calico Complex north of Gerlach, Nev., Pickens flew into the middle of the roundup with helicopters carrying the television crew for ABC's "Good Morning America" and her team, including her consultant Lee Otteni, a former BLM employee. I don't know exactly what happened, but it appears that tempers flared and plans may not have been executed as designed, since BLM had hoped to remove 2,700 horses from the region. Otteni is charged with the responsibility of finding a ranch that can be turned into a wild horse sanctuary to take the horses that have been going into long-term facilities. During our radio interview, Pickens was extremely negative toward individual ranches in Oklahoma, Kansas, and South Dakota that collect $2.20 per day to provide horse care. Not two minutes later, though, she indicated that she had presented a plan for BLM to give her horses for the sanctuary and then, in turn, pay her a "stipend" for each horse. Upon questioning her about why it is bad for someone else to get paid to care for the horses but good if she gets paid, her response was that her organization is a nonprofit foundation, so that would make it better. First of all, you cannot buy a ranch in the West and simply run thousands of horses on federal lands. Every region has designated species animal-unit limits. It requires a public hearing and serious bureaucracy to change existing limits on federal lands. If BLM does, in fact, cave to pressure from Pickens' purse strings, we can add that to an already long list of serious government problems in this country. Furthermore, the Pickens plan includes purchasing a western ranch with accompanying water rights. Then, this ranch would be developed to improve hay meadows with irrigation and cross fencing. As a person who has spent a lifetime being there and doing that, I can tell you that they will soon figure out that the folks warehousing horses for $2.20 per day are sure doing it cheaply--unless, of course, the taxpayers are going to be expected to provide all of these improvements to Pickens' "nonprofit" ranch. There is one more flawed component of her plan that she is using to gain national traction. BLM just rebuilt a short-term holding facility in Fallon, Nev., that Pickens actually toured on her January trip to see wild horses. She made a compelling and passionate argument that horses on the range have an average of 1,100 acres per horse, while this "feedlot" has 17 horses per acre. Obviously, there is another little bit of information missing from her plea, because it takes all of 1,100 acres just to provide enough feedstuffs for these horses to survive. In a feedlot, the feed and water are provided, so the horses don't need to roam to find them. If you start haying a group of 1,000 horses out in the middle of the Nevada desert, before long you will have 1,000 horses per acre because the horse only travels as far as it has to in order to get adequate food. We do not need to do what Interior Secretary Ken Salazar suggests and spend nearly $100 million annually to feed the horse habitat. This has become yet another government welfare program. As long as you keep supplying horses with everything they need, they will quit going out to forage for themselves and will just keep on reproducing without concern for how their offspring will survive should the handouts finally end. A population of wild horses owned by the government certainly is a romantic notion for many folks, but Uncle Sam and BLM simply need to do what every other horse producer must do from time to time--sell some horses and manage the ones they have with the resources available. Should they decide to do this, they better hire a really big truck. Editor's note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.FacesOfAg.com, or e-mail Trent at trent@loostales.com.
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