Now that there are fewer than 40,000 wild horses ranging-free in America and with Sec. Zinke looking at killing the balance of all the remaining wild horses at the BLM corrals (about 40-60,000), we seem to be facing a very serious time-sensitive issue where the BLM (Sec. Zinke) is considering slaughtering (soon) the only known cost-effective solution to a potential problem with a national scope; this emerging prion problem.

So what happens if Secretary Zinke allows slaughter of the only animals (wild horses) which can effectively abate the prion vectors in the wilderness and forest lands of the BLM and USFS? Who knows? But on its face, I think it has disaster written all-over it. It reminds me of a forester who told me that ‘BLM’ stands for Bureau of Large Mistakes.

Killing the only potential natural and readily available solution to a couple of very serious emerging problems seems like the ‘bad idea’ of all time to me!

Let’s examine the benefits of harnessing the natural abilities of wild horses to once again serve mankind by letting them thrive in the wild & help out the environment instead of killing them:  

By leaving the Wild Horses out in their natural habitat in the Wild...

1. BLM saves about $50million/annually in costs related to keeping the 40,000-60,000 horses corralled; and,

2. Mitigated wildfire fuels saves insurance industry hundreds of millions annually in losses as a small fraction of their current multi-billion dollar losses; and,

3. Less fire means less fire suppression costs to the USFS (USFS spends 1/2 of its budget on fires), and savings to USFS and BLM-DOI translates to taxpayer savings; and,

4. Grass and brush abatement by wild horses (immune to prions) may alter prion disease vectors (grasses and brush) and introduction into game animals (deer, elk, moose) that are now succumbing to the prion-caused chronic wasting disease (CWD), which is good for hunting lobbies ($10b annually). Having the immune wild horses abate excess grasses and brush may also provide some fire-walling against transmission of emerging prion diseases into domestic livestock herds from deer and elk (mad-cow – livestock lobby) and potentially infecting humans (medical community). Releasing wild horses back into the wilderness and creating a pilot program to study their affect on CWD may lead to some insights and methodologies for protecting livestock; and,

5. Last but not least, Wild Horses and Burros provide highly beneficial symbiotic mutualisms to all of their historical ecosystems and add to the aesthetics and tradition of the American wilderness. This final statement is consistent with the Congressional preamble to the 1971 Wild Burro and Horse Protection Act.