Cruel, wasteful use of tax money

On Feb. 4, the Mark Trail comic focused on the plight of America’s wild horses in the West and how the Bureau of Land Management is treating them with fertility drugs to control their populations. However, that is far from the truth of what is really happening. Cattlemen in the West have put pressure on the BLM to completely remove the wild horses so their cattle and sheep (invasive species) can graze on the public land.

Livestock graze on 160 million acres of public land, yet wild horses are consigned to only 29.6 million acres, just 11% of our public lands, where they are outnumbered by millions of privately owned livestock by an average of 50 to 1. So are the horses really the problem?

I know most people don’t care about the horses, but they should care about the millions of tax dollars being spent on the roundups, vaccinations and feeding the horses in holding. The BLM has been using taxpayers’ dollars to chase and round up these horses with helicopters to get them off our land.

Over 60,000 horses have been cruelly rounded up, separated from their families and kept in feed lots until they are adopted or bought and sent to slaughter in Mexico or Canada. In addition, hundreds have died from broken legs, heart failure and broken necks from the helicopter roundups.

This year approximately 20,000 horses and burros face being rounded up. That is double what they captured last year.

Helicopter contractors earn about $800 per horse. From 2006 to 2022, contractors made $53.2 million. We also paid $87 million for short-term holding corrals from 2010 to 2022 and $333 million for long-term holding from 2004 to 2022.

This is your tax money, is this how you want it spent?

Sharon Lialios

Arlington Heights