March 8, 2024 we attended a meeting of the NV Wildlife Commissioners. They decided during the meeting that they would add their name to a petition sent to BLM Director Stone-Manning by a group called Coalition for Healthy NV Lands. Their petition to the Director is asking that she prioritize funds from the BLM budget to remove nearly 75% of Nevada's wild horses and burros. OWHO is firing back and our wild horses/burros need your voices now more than ever. Please read the short letter we are submitting to the Director and consider signing to support these wild equines and make sure that the Coalition for Healthy NV Lands knows that they do not make the decisions for all Americans who own these public lands and the wild equines that live on them.

Dear Director Stone-Manning:

The undersigned taxpayers of the American public urge BLM to expand efforts to effectively address the livestock overpopulation crisis on our public lands. We request that you take all actions necessary to meet the obligations of the BLM’s public lands management requirements to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance (TNEB) and that Nevada (NV) be prioritized for those actions.

Prioritizing gathering and removing livestock is the only feasible way to achieve TNEB and save our arid public lands. Inadequate management of livestock explodes populations and future budgets. Until livestock reductions are made, reducing wild horses and burros (WHB) populations is not effective in management nor cost. Until livestock is reduced, and the fee for grazing is brought up to a realistic amount, that is much closer to what the cost is today for grazing on private lands, BLM cannot sustain cost effective management. Additionally, allowing the retirement of grazing permits will reduce costs further and provide a more balanced budget and less burden on the taxpayer who must heavily subsidize the public lands grazing program.

To address this West-wide crisis we support BLM efforts to obtain additional resources and full management authorities from Congress in the FY2024 and FY2025 appropriations toward fulfilling BLM's obligation to reduce grazing where public lands are damaged from decades of overgrazing, and restore healthy predator populations which in turn will help deal with ungulate populations where there are epidemic level instances of chronic wasting disease. Yet recognizing that annual appropriations are not sufficient to bring success, we support a long term step by step funding plan to retire public lands grazing permits in 5 years.

Nowhere is this crisis more manifest than in our state of Nevada (NV). In 2022, NV had 2.1 million AUM*s, nearly doubling the AUMs from the 1990’s**. Due to insufficient management practices, those numbers will likely remain the same – continuing the practice of ignoring all rangeland health damage, not completing required assessments before renewals and not making adjustments based on those assessments or Executive Orders to include the climate crisis in all decisions made by the Bureau — increasing negative impacts on our native wildlife and fragile arid rangeland ecosystems. We respectfully request that you prioritize Nevada for livestock reductions and grazing permit retirements.

We are unwilling to lose wildlife - from squirrels to mule deer, apex predators, native plants, pollinators - and resiliency of our ecosystems. Current livestock management actions are inadequate to restore health to our native wildlife, our wild horses and burros, our rangelands, and clean water sources. Our public lands and wildlife need BLM to take all actions necessary to meet the obligations of the Taylor Grazing Act and all Secretarial and Executive Orders (especially those regarding the climate crisis), prioritizing NV in those actions.

BLM has a mandate to manage our public lands for multiple uses. This is supposed to be done by those who have no conflict of interest, those who do not lean in the direction of monied interests. Consistently targeting wild horses and burros for all damage done on public lands by removing them from their legal habitats, while typically allowing 30 times the number of livestock and the majority of forage allocation (80%+) on those same lands is not following the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act that still states the areas where horses were in 1971 are to be managed “principally” for WHB. We, as with the Coalition for Healthy Nevada Lands, are requesting that the laws be followed. BLM, may have gotten regulations passed that relabel areas (calling them HA, HMA, Range or Complex), but nowhere has there been any amendment that states a new label removes the mandate to manage that area principally for WHB. So, yes please direct the BLM under your management to follow the WHB Act.

Yours in Conservation,

* An AUM is the use of public lands by one cow and her calf, one horse, or five sheep or goats for a month. The formula used for calculating the grazing fee was established by Congress in the 1978 Public Rangelands Improvement Act and has remained in use under a 1986 presidential Executive Order. Under that order, the grazing fee cannot fall below $1.35 per AUM/HM, and any increase or decrease cannot exceed 25 percent of the previous year’s level. In comparison Nevada allows only 153,732 wild horse and burro AUMs.

** Bureau of Land Management, Nevada; https://www.leg.state.nv.us/Session/77th2013/Exhibits/Senate/NR/SNR259D.pdf

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Oregon Wild Horse Organization

Advocating for our wild equines and their habitats.