January 4, 1999...."YOUR TURN"....Reno Gazette Journal.

Do our officials plant seed for horse killings?
 
By Elsie Dupree

     I would like to see your reporters do some more on the estray horses that were killed (98 Christmas holiday slaughter of 34 wild horses).
     In the Gazette-Journal, I read of the bad thing that this shooting is.  There are laws to prevent this kind of thing, yet it is done.
     Are the shooters just listening to our own state officials who hate the horses on the range, be they wild or estray?
     We hear state Senator Lawrence Jacobsen say things like the wild horses should be killed and fed to the prisoners in our prisons. (During a Senate Natural Resources Committee meeting, Senator Jacobsen actually said he advised his (complaining) constituents, "To get their shot guns out".)
     He says most of the calls he gets are complaints about the horses and we must do something about them.
    Senator Dean Rhoads heads the Legislative Interim Public Land Committee that we taxpayers fund.
     He and the committee demanded that our tax money be use to set up a horse council and write a horse report on how to control the wild horses.
     Of course, he seems to forget that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is in charge of the wild horses and we have federal laws that dictate how this is to be done.
    At the last Public Land Committee meeting (Reno), I sat in the audience and heard the report on the horse report.
 The horse council did not put in anything about rounding up the wild horses and selling them at market, even to dog food companies.
 

    
     The Public Land Committee was angry about this and said they would fix it to included this type of wording when it got to the Legislature in the spring.  So who is to say that won't be the defense of the shooters of the horses.
     the perpetrators will just say that they listened to our own state officials and were tired of our tax money going for this type of a Public Land Committee and for the horse report that came from it, so they just tried to help out by eliminating some of the problem.  If everyone who had a weapon just got 25 or so horses, there would be no more horse "problem" in a year and our state legislature wouldn't have to work on horses again nor would Senator Rhoads, who sells horses from his ranch in Tuscarora.
     Nevada would not have to compete with the horse adoption plan at the BLM.
     This is not what the people in Nevada want.  We take pride in our wild horses and go out of our way to show them to our guests from other states.
     We want the federal laws as they are or we would demand changes.
     We want the horses on public lands and we want the public lands to remain public.
     I hope that our new government and new people in our state Legislature will visit with the idea of eliminating the Interim Public Lands Committee and all the money it has cost the taxpayers in working on things that the majority of the people do not want.

     (Elsie Dupree lives in Carson City and has been involved in the wild horse issue. Currently, she is president of Nevada Federal Wildlife Foundation)
 
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