ShareThisIt is now possible for the federal government to abandon a wide variety of cruel acts purposely inflicted on animals, much of it by government agents themselves. The Environmental Protection Agency announced last week the official registration of the first contraceptive vaccine for horses in the United States, called ZonaStat-H (more commonly referred to as porcine zona pellucida or PZP).
The Humane Society of the United States has been fighting for the vaccine's registration, even sponsoring it. Registration means the vaccine can now be used to control herd sizes in the American West. Once herd sizes are controlled, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will have no reason to keep torturing and killing wild horses because they supposedly overpopulate western land.
Supporters of humane treatment of America's wild horses and burros have been fighting the BLM for years. They are trying to stop annual roundups that include the use of helicopters swooping as low as a few feet above the fear-stricken animals. CNN's Jane Velez Mitchell's online video report on one of these roundups shows how 77 of the regal mustangs died during one roundup as a result of helicopter pilots' techniques.
The CNN video also shows handlers using excessively cruel techniques when they herd the horses. One picks out a tiny foal, scares it away from the herd, then lassos it roughly around the neck as it's running and harshly trips it to the ground. What is with these sadists?
The Humane Society calls the federal management program for wild horses "something of a financial and animal welfare disaster for quite some time." The BLM has rounded up 45,000 formerly wild horses and burros in recent years. It has also killed many in the roundup process.
Despite the best efforts of animal-rescue groups to find adoptive homes for these creatures, way more are rounded up than could ever be adopted. So the government consigns them to live in small, dirty pens, where handlers treat them roughly. Many of them spend their captive lives injured and in misery.
For whom is this exercise in senseless misery performed? For the cattle industry, that's who. Even though much of the land on which the horses and burros live was specifically set aside for them, as living symbols of America's western history, greedy cattle ranchers want that land for grazing. And they want it cheap, which is how they get it, subsidized by you and me, the taxpayers. Yes, these titans of beef are nothing but welfare queens, masquerading as cowboys.
I wish we could count on the Obama administration to help out the wild horses, but we can't. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has appointed two new pro-slaughter members of the BLM's Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board since June, according to the Animal Law Coalition.
Barack Obama supported animal-rights laws when he was in the U.S. Senate, but he has abandoned the movement since entering the White House. Late last year, he signed an appropriations bill that can be used by horse-slaughterhouse owners to re-open U.S. operations. Horse slaughter was banned in the U.S. in 2007.
All that said, if the BLM starts using the new PZP vaccine to prevent what it calls overpopulation of wild horses and burros, presumably it could humanely eliminate enough creatures so the roundups would end. That would be a welcome gift to these animals and to the people who love them.
(Bonnie Erbe is a TV host and writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service. Email bonnie.scrippshoward(at)gmail.com.)
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