Photo: Terry Fitch
The facts are in: There are 10.6 times as many livestock as wild horses grazing public range lands in Utah’s Iron and Beaver Counties.
For anyone following the news about ranchers looking to round up 697 wild horses there on the taxpayers’ nickel, this is an auspicious (and overdue) piece of BLM (Bureau of Land Management) data. For everyone else, pay attention: that 10:6 to 1 ratio is significant to you as a U.S. taxpayer and citizen—and my latest article on AlterNet (“Ranchers Want Our Public Lands for Their Livestock, and Want the Govt. to Stick It to Wild Horses and Taxpayers”) explains why.
What’s auspicious about the figure of 10.6 to 1? Everything.
The story behind the story
The wild horse issue is a numbers story shaped by two taxpayer-supported federal programs: the BLM’s Wild Horses and Burros Program and the Federal Grazing program. Together, these two programs…
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Exposing the Big Game 
Ranchers have been displacing wildlife and wilderness for thousands of years, since the dawn and march of civilization. They do not see themselves as such, but ranchers, farmers, hunters have led a war on wildlife since then. Ranchers often see themselves as stewards of the land and conservationists because they allow some animals on their land, even if the the land is public leased land. But they are not tolerant of predators. Hunters often see themselves as conservationists because they work to expand and protect the game herds for their blood sport traditions, but they create a huge distortion in wilderness ecology by marginalizing predators and farming ungulates and game birds. Both groups are hugely into entitlement thinking. Ranchers, particularly in the West, seeing all public land as “their land” and they are against wild horses, bison, predators. Hunters and fishermen see their sports targets as theirs and resent sharing with raptors, storks, apex predators. They are wrong about it all, not seeing the benefits of balanced ecology and the healthy roles of predators. But their thinking errors get in the way of any change: Entitlement, power and control, victimstance, use of their delusional righteous anger to control others, dehumanization of opponents to their views, self centered thinking. Major obstacles to change are society’s own ignorance, and indifference to the unsustainable animal farming and game farming effects, most enjoying the inevitable extinction of land and see wildlife andmaybe our own existence (too abstract a concept for them).
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