(This giant banyan tree must be at least a couple of hundred years old. The tree is a lifeline to many arboreal animals such as civet cats, flying squirrels, squirrels, etc., that come to feed on its fruit. Because of its immense size and the lives it supports, it in itself is an ecosystem of its own. This particular tree grows on a steep hill, and its remoteness and inaccessibility have preserved the tree from extinction/File – Jim Wungramyao)
Ukhrul, April 4: The Wung Tangkhul Region (WTR) of NSCN-IM on Friday issued a directive banning the hunting and trapping of animals during the breeding season, which begins in the month of March and continues through August, within the jurisdiction of the Wung Region.
The directive stated that “hunting and trapping of animals and birds during their breeding season, which usually takes place from March to August, is strictly prohibited in the Wung Region.”
It further added that “strict action will be initiated against individuals who defy the directive. All the villages under the jurisdiction of the Wung Region are also directed to implement the directive and initiate action and policy at the village level. The village authorities are also directed to report to the office of the WTR if there are any individuals who do not follow the directive.”
The “Closed Seasons,” or the periods during which hunting or trapping is prohibited, are designed to protect animals during their breeding season or when they are most vulnerable. Hunting animals and birds for food and other purposes has led to the reduction and extinction of several animal species found in the Wung Region.
CAO of WTR, Samson Jajo, has appealed to the public to extend maximum support for conservation measures aimed at protecting wildlife populations by allowing animals and birds to reproduce and raise their young without any threat.
Two barred owls are perched on a tree limb in Washington. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated the eastern North American species as invasive. Their presence in old-growth forests has contributed to the rapid decline of the northern spotted owl. (Photo courtesy of Paul Bannick)
By Wayne PacelleGuest Writer
Last month in Virginia, a barred owl managed to shimmy down a chimney and perched on the family’s Christmas tree, displacing the star placed at its apex. The good folks at the Animal Welfare League of Arlington deployed, and with the yuletide blessing of the homeowners, they set the bird free.
That same month, from Iowa to Massachusetts, kind-hearted people took in barred owls struck by cars and delivered them to wildlife veterinarians who did their best to put them back together.
Indeed, there are more than a few acts of human kindness to barred owls. But the collective efforts of wildlife rehabilitators and other Good Samaritans all around the nation will collectively pale in comparison to intentional, lethal harm that our federal government plans to deliver to the birds.
In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) hatched a plan to massacre 450,000 barred owls over a 30-year time frame (CDN, Nov. 23, 2024). It would be, by a long shot, the largest raptor kill plan any government has ever undertaken. Cost estimates are as high as a staggering $1.35 billion.
If it’s not stopped, we’ll see government-financed shooters taking aim at owls within Olympic and Mount Rainier national parks in Washington to Crater Lake in Oregon to Yosemite and Redwoods national parks in California.
The scheme aims to reduce competition for nesting sites between barred owls and their threatened cousins, spotted owls. But it’s doomed to fail for several reasons, beginning with the lack of a ready labor pool for a kill plan of this scope and scale.
Add to that the immense “control area” spanning 24 million acres from Marin County to the Canadian border; it’s an area encompassing 14 National Park Service units and 17 National Forests, many of which have millions of roadless areas that make them inaccessible for all but the hardiest, most determined owl slayers.
And then there is the nagging tendency for surviving barred owls to colonize nesting areas previously depopulated — a sort of killing treadmill that produces forward motion but no progress.
Wildlife will not ‘stay put’ for anyone
Barred owls are a range-expanding North American native species protected for a century by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and ranging from Maine to the Dakotas at least since the Pleistocene.
Former Fish and Wildlife biologist Kent Livezey wrote in one peer-reviewed paper that 111 North American bird species have experienced recent range expansion, with 12 species moving even more widely than barred owls. Indeed, range expansion is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon, a core behavioral characteristic of birds and mammals.
Within the last hundred years, they’ve made it to the Pacific Northwest, with movements perhaps triggered by climate change and human-induced changes to forests and grasslands.
To demand that species “stay put” where they were mapped at an arbitrary moment in time ignores the dynamism of ecological principles, weather patterns, and human impacts on the environment. Colonizing new habitats is what species do. Let’s not forget that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers crossed the Bering land bridge and over time came to occupy nearly the entirety of the New World.
By the government’s own estimates, shooters will slay barred owls on 28% of the land area inhabited by spotted owls. But what’s to stop barred owls on the other 72% of land areas from simply taking wing and reoccupying sites that were recently purged? The barred owl kill plan has an especially high degree of difficulty in Washington, given the unmolested population of barred owls in British Columbia who can easily fly south and fill the vacuum.
Eric Forsman, the premier forest owl biologist in the nation, told The Seattle Times that “once you start” killing barred owls, “you can never stop.” His recommendation: “Let the two species work it out.”
Who’s next on Fish and Wildlife Service ‘Wanted list?’
Indeed, wild animals compete against one another. They breed with one another. They angle for prey and space. It happens within families, within species, between species. That competition animates ecological systems. Is it realistic to think the federal government can micromanage these countless interactions among hundreds or thousands of species?
Our wildlife agency previously documented that the great horned owl may occasionally prey on spotted owls. Will that owl species be next on the hit list?
The whole plan is myopic, looking too narrowly at a single-species response and sidestepping the arduous and more complex task of confronting the decades-long acts of human commerce and settlement that have collectively put spotted owls in peril.
This is a case of the federal wildlife agency not seeing the forest for the trees.
Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, is a two-time New York Times best-selling author.
Bureau of Land Management moves to boot wild horses from public land to keep them from straying into private property
ROCK SPRINGS, Wyoming—The Bureau of Land Management [BLM] on March 31, 2025 opened a 30-day public comment period on a plan to permanently remove wild horses from “newly converted herd areas of the former Great Divide Basin, Salt Wells Creek, and a portion of the Adobe Town herd management areas,” amounting to about 3.3% of the state.
The horses are to be removed, the Bureau of Land Management announcement said, “to protect land health and resolve area management disputes” in a region of southwestern Wyoming stretching north from Colorado.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Boot waiting to fall since 2023
The proposed horse removal follows a May 8, 2023 Bureau of Land Management decision, tied up in court for most of the time since, “to cease management of public lands for wild horses within the checkerboard land pattern of ownership area,” meaning a region where about 1,124 square miles of land belonging to members of the Rock Springs Grazing Association are interspersed with 2,105 square miles managed by the Bureau of Land Management offices in Rock Springs and Rawlins.
“Proposed gathers are planned to begin in July 2025,” the Bureau of Land Management announcement projected.
“Complete removal of nonnative equines from the Great Divide Basin, Salt Wells Creek and the northwest portion of the Adobe Town herd management areas still faces a public review process and legal appeal,” explained Mike Koshmrl for WyoFile.
Wyoming wild horses. (Beth Clifton photo/collage)
Three-step removal process
The Bureau of Land Management strategy for the wild horse removal is detailed in a 47-page environmental assessment posted by the BLM on March 31, 2025.
“First to go,” wrote Koshmerl, “would be the estimated 1,125 free-roaming horses in the Salt Wells Creek herd and 736 animals in the northwestern portion of Adobe Town, according to BLM Rock Springs field office manager Kimberlee Foster. Then, in 2026, horse removal crews would move on to eliminating an estimated 894 horses in the Great Divide Basin herd.”
Reviewing preliminary information about the Bureau of Land Management wild horse removal scheme, Koshmerl on August 16, 2024 explained that, “The White Mountain Herd’s horses, roaming the northern end of the region involved, “are well known enough that they are being allowed to persist. The BLM even advertises a scenic drive that winds through the heart of the herd management area. The plan is to maintain in the neighborhood of 205 to 300 horses in this region, which reaches from Rock Springs northwest to Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge.
(Beth Clifton collage)
15 years of lobbying & litigation
“The Adobe Town Herd, in the Red Desert, is also being allowed to persist: BLM plans call for 225-450 horses there,” about 20% of the present number.
“The expectation is that 3,371 wild horses would be removed,” Koshmerl explained, “but the ultimate number could range from 2,500 up to 5,000, according to the BLM.”
Summarized Koshmerl, “The push to rid southwest Wyoming’s checkerboard region of free-roaming horses traces back 15 years. The Wild Free-Roaming Horses & Burros Act of 1971 directs the Bureau of Land Management to “remove stray wild horses from private lands as soon as practicable upon receipt of a written request.”
The Rock Springs Grazing Association submitted such a request on behalf of members in the “checkerboard” area in 2010.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Ranchers won; appeal pending
“Lawsuits from both the Rock Springs Grazing Association and wild horse advocacy groups,” Koshmerl recalled, alternately sought to expedite and delayed the requested wild horse removal, with the Bureau of Land Management taking the side of the ranchers.
In August 2024, U.S. District Court of Wyoming Judge Kelly Rankin, “a Biden appointee,” Koshmerl noted, “ruled in the federal government’s favor.”
But the American Wild Horse Campaign, the Animal Welfare Institute, the Western Watersheds Project, and private citizens Carol Walker, Kimerlee Curyl, and Chad Hanson in March 2025 appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Expecting to get the go-ahead from the appellate court, the Bureau of Land Management is preparing to do the Adobe Town and Salt Wells Creek herd roundups, the largest on the BLM 2025 schedule, from July 15 through September 15.
“In regions of the Adobe Town herd area where horses are being allowed to persist, there are plans to remove 2,179 horses — numbers that far exceed the [BLM-set] ‘appropriate management level,’” Koshmerl reported.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Possible precedent for wild horse removals throughout the west
But those plans could be stopped by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“We have prevailed in the 10th Circuit previously on this issue,” American Wild Horse Campaign executive director Suzanne Roy told Koshmerl.
“This would be the first time in the 54-year history of the Wild Horse & Burros Act,” Roy said, “that the BLM eliminated a herd management area and eradicated entire wild horse herds — two of them — when the agency itself concedes that the area has sufficient habitat for the horses.
“It has implications for wild horse protection across the West,” Roy explained, “because if private landowners who have land adjacent to or within herd management areas are allowed to dictate the presence of wild horses on the public land, that’s a very dangerous precedent.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Wild horses vs. wildfires?
The southwestern Wyoming “eheckerboard region” slated for permanent removal of wild horse herds happens to be among the few parts of the state not ravaged by wildfires in 2024, the second worst wildfire season in state history.
Altogether, 810,000 acres of Wyoming burned, markedly more than in the previous bad fire years of 2012 and 2020.
That may attract comment from William E. Simpson II and Michelle Gough, the wild horse researchers and directors of Wild Horse Fire Brigade, a small nonprofit organization in the Siskiyou mountains of northern California, just south of the Oregon border.
Simpson has been advocating deploying wild horses to graze down flammable grass and brush since 2018, “after experiencing the beneficial results of wild horse grazing during the 38,000 acre, wind-driven Klamathon Fire,” he wrote to ANIMALS 24-7 in July 2023.
William Simpson ll & friend from the Wild Horse Fire Brigade.
“Studied the behavior of wildfire in areas of different fuel loads”
“I was on the Camp Creek fire line for nine days as the local knowledge advisor to the California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection,” Simpson said, “and studied the behavior of the wildfire in areas of different fuel loads.
“My wife of 47 years, Laura Simpson, was killed by toxins in the smoke from the Klamathon Fire.
“Our local herd of wild horses, the pilot Wild Horse Fire Brigade,” Simpson argued, “made the suppression efforts on the Klamathon Fire more effective via the large grazed-in fire breaks and safe zones in areas unsuited for livestock grazing. The Cascade Siskiyou National Monument and the homes and towns beyond were spared incineration as a result.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Judge rules against BLM adoption subsidy scheme
Meanwhile, the American Wild Horse Campaign, Skydog Sanctuary, and Denver wild horse advocate Carol Walker on March 3, 2025 won a verdict from Judge William Martinez of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado in Denver which may significantly complicate all Bureau of Land Management wild horse removals by obliging the BLM to suspend a five-year-old scheme that pays adopters of untrained wild horses or burros $1,000 a head.
Program participants are allowed to adopt up to four untrained wild horses or burros per year, and must keep the horses or burros for at least one year.
The idea, officially, is that the $1,000 subsidies encourage adopters to prepare wild horses or burros for use or resale to users.
But an American Wild Horse Campaign investigation, followed by a New York Times investigation, reported in 2021 that many participants were simply taking the Bureau of Land Management subsidies and trucking the horses to Mexico or Canada for sale to slaughter, there having been no operating horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. since 2007.
(Beth Clifton collage)
BLM violated two federal laws
Judge Martinez found that the Bureau of Land Management violated federal law in starting the subsidy program by failing to conduct an environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, including public notification and a public comment period as specified by the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946.
The Bureau of Land Management indefinitely suspended the wild horse and burro adoption subsidy program following the Martinez ruling. It may now either cancel the program or prepare a National Environmental Policy Act environmental impact report, followed by public notification and a comment period.
Beth & Merritt Clifton, editors, ANIMALS 24-7.
Either way, the subsidy program is likely to remain suspended for at least a year, unless a higher court overturns the Martinez findings.
That leaves the Bureau of Land Management already holding as many as 70,000 wild horses removed from public lands in recent years, with many thousands more to accommodate after the planned 2025 gathers.
Exposing the Big Game 
