Carol Walker is Interviewed on Wild Horses on America Speaks Podcasts Part 1 and 2
May 7, 2019Bureau of Land Management Once Again Threatens Wild Mares with Dangerous Spaying Experiments
June 7, 2019Free the Twins and Their Mother, A Wild Mare From Warm Springs in Oregon
Please listen tonight to Wild Horse and Burro Radio where we will talk to Clare Staples of Skydog Sanctuary. The show will be archived as well:
This article is below re-posted from the Skydog Sanctuary website. This is an absolutely glaring example of how the Bureau of Land Management does not have the best interests of our wild horses at heart, and in fact is actively working toward their extinction and destruction. There is absolutely no reason that this mare and her foals cannot be released to the Sanctuary. Skydog asks you to sign a petition and to email Rob Sharp – I say that he has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he absolutely does not care, so I maintain that your efforts will really make more of a difference if you contact your Senators and Representatives. Please make sure to submit your comments against the new horrifically cruel and dangerous BLM Spay Study which are now due by June 12, and contact your Senators and Representatives to tell them to stop these dangerous experiments.
Carol Walker
Free the Twins by Skydog Sanctuary
Following on from yesterday’s post about how difficult it has been to rescue horses from BLM corrals, I wanted to explain just how hard it has been to adopt mustangs over the last few years. Even though we are an approved and inspected facility with the highest quality of care and success with all the horses we have been able to take. It literally makes no sense that we have had to fight to get so many horses safely to us. Both Red Lady and Gracie would never have been reunited with Goliath and Maestro as the BLM denied both re-assignments when asked by their adopters.
Last summer saw my visit to Bruneau and a photograph of Magnolia and her baby boy, (a Grulla colt coincidentally). Several people offered to give them a home and we asked to adopt them. I was given reason after reason as to why they could not be picked up. When I was told Strangles was at the facility I asked to come get the mare and foal so that they wouldn’t get sick and was denied. The summer went by with further requests to take them turned down until finally the baby passed away. We adopted Maggie but it killed me that her baby never knew he was loved and had a home offer and a good life he never got to live.
This list of horses and donkeys goes on and on, we also asked to take the entire herd of burros rounded up from Warm Springs but were denied, finally last week the biggest blow of all…..
#freethetwins #stopthespaystudy
We were contacted by adoption staff at the BLM Burns corrals to tell us about a mare who had given birth to twins. It was the most incredible news for us. The statistics about any mare conceiving twins is 1 in 10,000 but the chances of those babies growing to term and being born healthy and the mother surviving is nothing short of MIRACULOUS — I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was told one was a little weaker and frailer, understandably, and for that reason the staff thought they would do best with extra supplements, good alfalfa, minerals and for them all to have access to vet care to make sure they were growing in the best health and to make sure they survived.
This was the most positive and beautiful story I had ever heard. Mustang twins born at a BLM corrals. Their mother run pregnant by a helicopter and all the stress and strength that takes only to give birth to her twins in less than ideal conditions in mud and dirty pens. No shelter, no shade and no vet care – and they were still alive. I immediately knew that horse lovers all over the world would celebrate this amazing feat — the perfect story to show the endurance, wisdom, strength, resilience and beauty of these wild horses. This was the perfect happy ending mustangs needed for people to understand just how special they are.
I flew up to Oregon and drove to the corrals in driving rain to see them last week. I sat in the mud and cold watching in complete awe and wonder at the beauty of this mare. I spoke to the babies and told them they were getting out and that their lives were going to count for something and have meaning and love and they would live free with their mother as they were meant to. We arranged to come pick them up at the earliest day we could and I left and flew back down to California staring at the photos of the family, zooming in on their faces and telling them to hang in there.
One of the babies WAS much smaller and I worried about them but said a prayer. The mare was skinny and showing ribs and probably using up much of her nutrients nursing two babies. But I felt in my heart that it would be alright. We would make sure they would thrive with all the extra things that we can provide these precious babies, where a BLM corrals is quite obviously and understandably limited in those regards.
And then I got a message that there was a glitch. The mama mare was on the list for the spay study and for that reason she couldn’t be adopted out or sold. I had to read it several times. We had agreed to take them and they were telling us that instead her babies would be taken away and her ovaries pulled out. I have to admit I cried. Huge ugly tears of sorrow for the life they were being denied.
#freethetwins #stopthespaystudy
For so many reasons this is wrong. The BLM rounding up wild horses off the range and denying them loving homes to do brutal Frankenstein experiments on them instead, is immoral and I believe illegal. Surely a sanctuary offer trumps doing a study on this mare. They rounded up over 800 horses in the warm springs gather and made a list of 300 who were eligible to be turned back out and the mares to be experimented on must make up 150 of those. Add to that the fact that advocacy groups have twice taken legal action against this study and now the BLM have introduced it a third time!! Are we really to believe that this one bay mare is the key to the whole thing? That she couldn’t be given the home she is being offered and the best chance of keeping her twins alive and at her side.
We spoke to three equine vets and the equine hospital where our little donkeys are and they all said that the twin foals would be better off in a private facility with extra nutrients, supplements, minerals and round-the-clock attention, out of the elements and being cared for.
How on earth can the BLM go to Congress and complain that nobody wants to adopt these horses and 50,000 of them are in holding pens and that adoptions were significantly down last year and then deny an approved, and financially successful sanctuary? I would happily waive the incentive money of $1000 a horse that the BLM are now giving people to adopt them. They would have three less horses to feed, care for, process and handle. How on earth can that be denied? It is monstrous.
For me this is the final straw in a long long battle to try and talk reason, to apply common sense, to demonstrate the moral issues that they just refuse to understand. To apply decency, compassion and kindness. These horses are not theirs to experiment on if a home offer is in place. They are not laboratory animals. If you look at the EA all the language revolves around doing the procedure and then studying what happens to the mares.
Whether they bleed out, die of infection, die of shock, hurt themselves in the chutes — it’s just a number in a study. This mare is not a number. I refuse to call her tag no. 4702. Her name is Elsa, named for the Lion in Born Free, and her babies are Faith and Hope. The corrals don’t know the sex of the babies but I know from the photos that one is a girl. Elsa is ten years old which makes her a sale authority horse which even more weakens the argument against saying no to an adoption.
As I wrote yesterday, it is one thing seeing a cold hard number of 100 faceless, nameless mares who will have to suffer this procedure* — but this here is the face of spay. These two babies will be weaned from their mama in a couple of months (August) and the mare taken to an unsterile environment within the corrals where a vet will perform the procedure. I have no idea if the babies will be given back to her or whether she will be released on to the range a week later with other mares who had the same procedure. But it seems to me that when we are offering to take them as a family and keep them together to promote mustangs that might be a better life for them.
#freethetwins #stopthespaystudy
Over the past few years so many people have asked what they can do to help these horses….Here are a few ideas:
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We are in a public comments period for the spay study and you can go here and write your comments on the study until June 12th. We shall later post some guidelines of things to say but it can also come directly from you. You can email your comments or mail them by hand.
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The second thing I would love is for you to go to the BLM adoption application, print it out, and on the top write — Tag number 4702 — fill out your name and address and then write SEND TO SKYDOG SANCTUARY on the rest of the form. Scan the top page and email it to Rob Sharp at rsharp@blm.gov and ask him to please change his mind and let Elsa and her twins come to Skydog.
Please be polite and do not be hostile in any way, be reasonable and measured in your approach. We just want our voices heard. It has been my experience that the BLM always entrenches and defends their position and the likelihood of them turning around and saying yes at this point, particularly after this post, is slim — in my heart I have already accepted that they are not getting out as a family. But the promise I made to them as I sat and fell in love with these horses stands. I want their lives to make a difference. And I hope beyond hope that both babies make it and don’t die in the process like little Maggie’s baby did last summer.
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You can also use these hashtags and post to all your social media sites — #freethetwins and #stopthespaystudy Let’s make this go VIRAL, as it flies in the face of the BLM’s claims that they care and that they want to get these horses adopted.
On the BLM’s website they say, “The BLM works to place excess animals into private care through its Adoption and Sales Programs as well as successful partnerships with organizations across the nation.” We know you read everything we write so here we are, trying to work with you, trying to take horses out of holding pens into sanctuary and we would love to know why we can’t.
* “BLM is determining the feasibility of performing ovariectomies via colpotomy. This is a rare procedure which removes the ovaries by crushing and pulling them out with a looped-chain medical instrument called an ecraseur. This procedure opens the mares up to serious risk from infection, evisceration (should intestines come through the incision) and hemorrhaging. There is a high frequency of post-operative complications affiliated with this some of which can be life-threatening.”
Sign Our Petition:
Comments are due on the sterilization experiment to the BLM on June 12, they extended the deadline.
Government Agency Revives Plans for Perverse & Deadly Horse Sterilization Experiments
52 Comments
This is ridiculous-a rescue ready to take the mare and twin foals-instead you want to experiment on the mare…………..
It is ridiculous only blm would do something like this
Please free this mare and her twins to the refuge.
Please send the mother and two twins to Skydog sanctuary I will be free well taken care of please don’t experiment on the mother leave them alone let them be as God intended
Why must BLM want to destroy everything!
FREE HER AND HER BABIES. RIDICULOUS EXPERIMENTING ON HER WITH FOALS ARE YOU ALL A BUNCH OF IDIOTS?
CRUELTY RUNS TO RAMPANT IN GOVERNMENT. I CONSIDER THIS TO BE CRUEL AND MISTREATMENT OF OUR WILD MUSTANG.
LEAVE HER ALONE AND RELEASE HER TO THE WILD WHERE THEY BELONG!!!
Please please let this mare and her babies be set free or adopted together as a family! She has survived all the heartache and stress from being chased while carrying twins gave birth to them and they have survived! Free is what they deserve if not free let them at least be adopted as a family! I have in the past adopted several of these amazing horses each with there own personality and amazing!
BLM must rethink this situation. Wild horses deserve our protection. They deserve loving homes in sanctuaries or private family adoptions. Please free this mare and her babies to this sanctuary. Stop experimentation!
Please free the mare with twins. They deserve to be free.
Bureaucracy at it’s worst: people doing what they want, not what they were hired to do.
The BLM’s mandate is to protect and preserve the habitat and nature FOR the wild horses and burros. Somewhere along the line that has been perverted to kill the horses and burros to protect the parasitic rangers. Let the spirit of Joseph Mengele reside somewhere else and fulfill the mandate for protecting the horses and their progeny.
PLEASE free this mare and twin foals. What a miracle… and they are beautiful.
Do please sign the petition, call your Senators and Representatives.
Whatever it takes, PLEASE free this mare and twin foals. What a miracle… and they are beautiful.
Dear BLM, PLEASE reach down somewhere deep in your souls & release this beautiful mare & her twins to the Skydog sanctuary, or any other Sanctuary or Adopter who will take them. To deny them a safe haven, & a life free of torture is simply deplorable! The animals best interest should be foremost in your actions. If it is not, then you need to find another job where you will not be inflicting pain & agony on innocent animals!
Our wild horses & donkeys are a great gift & blessing in our country, and have as much right to the land & a life of peace as you & I. Please please please reconsider your heinous plan & don’t bow before the mighty dollar!!
Do please sign the petition, call your Senators and Representatives.
Let our horses be.
You will not get away with this.
Despicable action by government for hire to cattle ranchers only. I wish there was someone in this organization who had some ethics and compassion (and brains).
This is an outrage! The Mare & twins should be free, not used for experiments! Leave these animals alone and put them back where they belong! And stop trying to get rid of the wild animals so that your cattle buddies can take over the land! The land belongs to the horses!
Do please sign the petition, call your Senators and Representatives.
Pls free these horses! They deserve it and BLM needs to stop the cruelty.
Do please sign the petition, call your Senators and Representatives.
Stop experimentation. Free this family up for adoption.
Do please sign the petition, call your Senators and Representatives.
Please free the mare and twins. They deserve America.
Free the mare and twins do the right thing let them have a loving home.
Do please sign the petition, call your Senators and Representatives.
Please save her and her twin babies
The BLM needs to free the mare and her twins as they have been offered a home. The BLM is relaying to the public they are trying to adopt out the wild horses they have captured in their corals and yet they have told Skydog Sancturary they cannot take them. Instead they intend to perform a experiment on the mare by removing her ovaries in one of their dirty corals. So, BLM, you need to think this one over and reconsider giving them to the home they have been offered and keeping your word that you are trying to adopt out the wild horses. Also, the special needs horses that have been offered a home and now you intend to shoot them instead of giveing them to a home they have been offered. Do the right thing and adopt out theses horses!!!!!!!!!!
Do please sign the petition, call your Senators and Representatives.
BLM HAS NO THOUGHT IR CARE ABOUT THE HORSES OR DONKEYS EXCEPT TO REMOVE THEM FROM THE ONLY HOME THEY HAVE KNOWN BECAUSE THE CATTLE RANCHERS WANT THE LAND THEMSELVES – AND SINCE THEY HAVE THE MONEY THEY WILL GREASE THE GOVERMNENTS PALM – AND BLM WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO DESTROY AMERICAS ICONS AND TELL THE PUBLIC THAT THEY ARE LOOKING OUT FOR THE HORSES AND DONKEYS AND THAT THEY ARE DOING THE RIGHT TRYING TO DO THE RIGHT THING FOR THEM EVEN IF IT KILLS THEM- BLM IS FULL OF BS -IF THEY TRULY CARED FOR THE ANIMALS THEY WERE HIRED TO PROTECT THEN THEY WOULD FIND HOMES FOR THEM EVEN IF THEY ARE SANCTUARIES – AND NOT BS ADOPTERS AND THEY WOULDN’T USE A DANGEROUS PROCEDURE SUCH AS SPAYING THE MARES- WE NEED TO SPREAD THE WORD AND SHARE ANY ARTICLES BY THE NEWS MEDIA ETC AND SHOW HOW DANGEROUS BLM IS FOR THE LIVES OF THE MUSTANG
These horses deserve sanctuary. Send them ALL to the loving homes that want them, where they’ll be properly cared for and appreciated. There’s something completely off about this cruel spaying program that BLM is so adamant to push, that they would deny these poor horses the comfort of a good, safe home? Sounds ridiculous, and as if there’s some twisted egos at work. Time to redeem yourselves BLM. Begin with this beautiful, courageous mother and her 2 gorgeous babies. And then follow suit with the rest. Your humanity is at stake.
She and her babies deserve integrity and honor from humans…stand up and act like a decent human!
Adopt this mare and her twins to the Skydog Sanctuary post haste. That you have denied this trio of horses a private home is poor planning, poor management, and heartless. This is NOT a random study and this mare can easily be replaced as a participant without degrading or interfering with the study’s results. Do the right thing, the humane thing and let these horses live a good life in a private facility.
What has happened to the human race and it’s thinking!!! Free these precious twins and their Beautiful Mother to Skydog Sanctuary or to a loving home, to live their life as a horse and one of God’s creatures as they are meant to.
Why do they think we should destroy this part of our heritage? There are no other words for this other than heartless, mean, and cruel. It amazes me how people that can do this sort of act, can actually live with themselves…
Senators and Representative’s YOU MUST DO THE RIGHT THING FOR THESE HORSES THAT HAVE NO ONE!
The ONLY right way to handle these wonderful icons of the west is to bring them to sanctuary. NOW!!!
I was all prepared to do the comments, but I need guidelines on what to fill in the chapter reference, section reference etc. You are running out of time here. Please put up the guidelines NOW.
Comments to the BLM are due June 12, they extended the deadline. We will be doing another blog post about what to put in the comments next week, but you can use this now:
https://rtfitchauthor.com/2019/05/24/government-agency-revives-plans-for-perverse-deadly-horse-sterilization-experiments/
Sanctuary
Mustangs deserve respect
The pain and suffering you will cause this.mare is uncomprehensible and inhumane but she has two beautiful healthy babies that will no doubt suffer as well.
There is a qualified adopter try being decent humans for once and let these iconic creatures.live in peace.
I don’t believe that, again the blm is going forward with these experiments of spaying the mares for population control (unGodly) idea . I would like to know why the adoption of the mare and twins is being shoved around. If you (the blm) would look at the miracle of the twins birth, instead of your numbers, and let her live the life offered to her and her CHILDREN , you just might have your eyes opened instead of your wallets. I, for one, and I am not alone in this, hope you find just a wee bit of compassion, and let them go and live in the peace we all deserve and want.
Sav e wild horses
THERE IS NO OTHER EXPLANATION EXCEPT THAT YOU ARE HEARTLESS.THESE ANIMALS HAVE NO VOICE AND ARE AT OUR MERCY. THEY ARE TRUSTING GENTLE CREATURES WHO WOULD JUST LIKE TO LIVE IN PEACE.A s nature intended……….. please please please LET THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why would you want to hurt this family , they need to stay together having twins is amazing for this mama what a blessing for her and for the ones who want to save them and to control the population experimental spay for the mama that’s unacceptable this is not about money it’s about compassion and love we need to save the horses not destroy them
Frankly, BLM its your job to adopt the horses out to people and sanctuaries who qualify, thats always been the first order of “Business” at an adoption facility. We are taxpayers, we pay you- this is why we talk about your job and hope to remind you of the compassion you once had (very long ago) before forming dubious alliances with the corporate cattle Industry (are you aware that they bully small family ranchers and farmers, to comply with their bidding?) are you doing that too? You ask us to “work with you” or at least your friends do, but you never say a WORD about the livestock damage to the land, and that the wild horses are being scapegoated, etc etc. But most important and relevant to this situation, the barbaric experiments you hope to impose on the animals under your temporary stewardship, has not been approved yet, has not been accepted by the majority of taxpayers (that’s us ) and there is no reason not to allow this mare and her babes to go to Skydog Sanctuary as they qualify and Adoptions are your primary purpose at adoption centers. When you round up horses, it is “to adopt them out” and that is a written into any document that would support the roundups in the first place.
Very well said.
I just don’t understand why this is going on!! Why would they be denied a safe loving home to live out their lives in peace with care and love!!!! The BLM are another government agency that takes what they want like the horrible bully on the block just because they can!!????????????. PLEASE STOP THEM, PLEASE????
[…] https://www.wildhoofbeats.com/blog/free-the-twins-and-their-mother-a-wild-mare-from-warm-springs-in-… […]
BLM has been trying to get rid of our FREE WILD HORSES for about as long as they’ve been in existence. When I was a teenager I owned a colt that was born in Michigan. He was a foal of a Wild Horse Mare by a registered Quarter Horse. He was lovely, but the mare never took to captivity and never lifted her head unless she was running free in the largest pasture they had.
The BLM needs to this mare & twins go to Skydog Sanctuary without risking her life with this barbaric proceedure.
Sterilization of these horses in this manner is barbaric and should be criminal!
It seems that Clare Staples has grounds for a lawsuit against Bruneau and the BLM . She was given permission initially to take the mare and babies and then this was rescinded due to some bureaucratic “mistake”?
Clare, file an injunction and demand that these imbeciles release them to you! I know that you can afford a good attorney. Fight them for the sake of these precious lives! Don’t give up!
Stop the cruelty!