BLM Propaganda
Your article regarding the wild horse roundups (News, “Lesser of two evils,” July 28, 2022) leaves out a very important factor. Many, if not all HMAs (public lands) also let private livestock graze for three to six months for pennies per acre. These grazing leases are the Holy Grail for Big Ag, and BLM is pro-livestock so they refuse to stop the grazing leases.
Horses do not overgraze like sheep and cattle; they crop grasses and move all the time, leaving grasses to recover even in drought conditions. The BLM communications director who is adamant about these animals not being natural to the environment is not a biologist or archaeologist and therefore calling them domestic and feral is blatant BLM propaganda and flies in the face of scientific findings in recent years.
If truly domestic livestock were kept off our public lands and wild horses allowed to co-exist with elk, deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, bears, cougars and smaller wildlife, the ecological balance would eventually come back to support equines that have run wild for hundreds of years.
It is only the intervention by humans with livestock grazing that have caused the problem, and no one can believe wild horses held in feedlots is an answer.
I am positive it costs more to do helicopter roundups and feed horses in feedlots than it would to stop livestock grazing leases on all public lands. We as the taxpayers are funding this ecologically unsound practice without our permission. These same things are being done by Wildlife Services, an agency of the Dept. of the Interior, to kill thousands of wild predators and other animals simply to try and protect privately owned cattle and sheep.
Quoting a BLM employee about science is ‘his slanted opinion’ and not the factual information your publication historically prints.
Anita Wilks/Golden
EDITOR’S NOTE: There is ample research which shows North American horses became extinct 10,000 years ago. Modern “wild” horses are all descendants of European horses brought by the Spanish in the 1400s.
Keep it odd
I completely support City Council Member Bob Yates’ position that we should NOT change our election cycle from odd to even years. His comments during the July 21 council meeting and in the June and July Bulletin provide plenty of facts and evidence on why this would be a bad decision for the City of Boulder and its governance.
The newly elected representatives would better serve their citizens by focusing their time and effort on the much more pressing issues effecting our city including the homeless epidemic and rampant crime that places our city among the worst in Colorado and top 20 in the nation. Progressive crime response policies are proven failures and have resulted in the recall of DAs in both San Francisco and LA. Let’s focus on fixing what is clearly broken.
Brett Kingstone/Boulder
Email: letters@boulderweekly.com
