The February issue of National Geographic Magazine has an article, by Alexandra Fuller, about the government's round up of Mustangs on behalf of cattle ranchers, headed, "Spirit of the Shrinking West: Mustangs." It includes gorgeous photos of the animals, and disturbing photos of them being chased by low flying helicopters across the plains towards pens.

The article quotes Jay Kirkpatrick, director of science and conservation biology at ZooMontana, in Billings, a center for the development of contraceptives for wildlife. He says, "Wild horses are right in the middle of a culture that wants nothing to do with them." And he says that "the wild horse has been despised ever since white men came west-blamed for everything that can and does go wrong on these grasslands. So in the mid-1800s, when stockmen released up to 40 million cattle on the plains, where horses had lived for centuries without destroying the grazing, at most two million mustangs were held responsible for the suddenly depleted range."

The article explains, "Traditionally ranchers haven't had much time for anything that competes with them for resources. It's not uncommon to find coyote carcasses draped over barbed-wire fences, as if Westerners had gone trolling for whatever offended their souls and, unable to shoot the wind, turned their ire on something more tangible. "

Fuller explains that the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, is required to manage its 258 million acres for "multiple use." She writes, "In theory there should be enough room for everything, but in reality, from the moment pioneers settled here, resources have been extracted with little patience for anything that got in the way of a silver dollar."

The BLM is caught in the struggle between mustang advocates and cattle ranchers. Fuller writes,
"Under the 1971 act the BLM must keep the herds at what it decides are appropriate management levels (AMLs). Some horse advocates believe the AMLs are arbitrarily low, threatening the genetic viability of the herds; ranchers say they're unrealistically high, threatening vital grazing."

The article includes distressing descriptions, as well as the photos, of helicopter chases during mustang round-ups. Chris Heyde of the Animal Welfare Institute says, "Every year they pull more and more horses off the range to keep the ranchers happy. Meantime the scenario for the horses is just awful."

Though it is not supposed to happen, we are reminded that many of the mustangs, the symbol of the Great American West, end up in slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico.

We are told by Fuller that Kirkpatrick, noted above as working on wildlife contraception, "said contraception offers a humane alternative to rounding up the animals, but that the BLM is resistant." We read, "He said the agency is spending too little studying fertility control and too much on helicopter roundups. When he suggested to a BLM official that the agency inject the mares with the wildlife contraceptive vaccine porcine zona pellucida (PZP), he recalled being told, 'That's not how we do it out here. We do it with horses and ropes.'"

And helicopters.

You'll find the full article, including the photos, on line at
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/02/wild-horses/fuller-text

Please check it out. Magazine publishers count web clicks.

It is great to see this issue covered in National Geographic Magazine, which has a circulation of over six million, and which goes to people who generally care about the Earth and animals.
Please send a supportive letter to the editor to ngsforum@ngs.com

I thank Heather Faraid Robbins for making sure we saw the article.

The magazine asks us to include full name, address, and daytime phone number when sending a letter to the editor. Remember that shorter letters are more likely to be published -- National Geographic, in particular, tends to publish letters that are brief.

Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line. If somebody forwards DawnWatch alerts to you, which you enjoy, please help the list grow by signing up. It is free.)

Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com to read reviews and see a fun celeb-studded video and an NBC news piece on Karen Dawn's new book, "Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals," which was chosen by the Washington Post as one of the "Best Books of 2008."