Outraged by a federal plan to manage two Wyoming herds of wild horses into oblivion by sterilizing hundreds of mares, activists will gather outside a public hearing at the Bureau of Land Management field office in Rock Springs tonight to denounce the large-scale "experimental surgery" -- the latest flashpoint in an escalating battle over the future of the West's wild mustang population.
The BLM plan (a summary can be found here, the environmental assessment here) calls for rounding up around one thousand horses from the White Mountain and Little Colorado management areas and returning only about a third of them to the range -- with all of the returned mares being spayed. The horses would be managed as "non-reproducing herds," presumably until they died out -- although the plan leaves open the possibility that horses from other (sterile?) herds might be introduced to keep the population stable.
See? The thing is, the cost of spaying a mare is about 20 times that of gelding a stallion. Tells me men are surely the ones who came up with this plan. The neutering part is good, but really, the mares??? Come on! My theory is, they do this so then they can come back and say, yep, it's just too expensive to neuter, so we'll stick with just killing them off. Idiots.
