BLM Wild Horse and Burro adoption program: Where are the Photographs?

Paul’s Valley, OK (long term holding facility) added 31 horses Saturday (May 2) to the in-progress Internet adoption auction. Bidding started on this auction on May 21 and ends on May 5, 2015. I’ve been checking in on this Internet Adoption event for several weeks before bidding started and have reviewed each gallery several times a week and have always seen the “Coming Soon” text where a photo should be for the Paul’s Valley facility. But it was only tonight that I saw that there were 30 boxes of “Coming Soon” in the photo’s location except for one box. (See her photo below, Necktag: 1997)

What’s Wrong with the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program? LOTS!

While reading Necktag #5846 profile information on the bidding page I realized she was a a young foal when captured and now has spent 5.5 years in short term holding. As I reviewed the Elm Creek, Nebraska photo gallery, I noticed some of the horses available for internet adoption auction had been in short term holding facilities all their lives, 6 years for some while others were “born in a holding facility” and some of these did not indicate which holding facility or the HMA of origin.

It is annoying that they can’t keep good records about the cattle grazing on public lands, or have solid data on the numbers of horses and burros still running free so it’s not new that the Wild Horse and Burro Program cannot track foals in holding pens and know their HMA of origin. Or, maybe they do know but can’t recall or find the missing data? It doesn’t help that any foals born in a holding facility aren’t counted if they are under 6 months old. And if they die, they still don’t count! Yet vetting, food and care during the first six months of their lives is still paid for via tax dollars. What a way to run a federal program! They don’t count everything we pay for….

 

Gray 6 old mare from Lost Creek (Cyclone Rim) Herd Management Area

For the past few weeks, I’ve been checking the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Internet Adoption pages to see what horses are there and prepare to make some tweets in advance for more exposure to find homes for the wild horses and burros. However, this isn’t easy or quick to do because there are no social media share buttons on their pages!

Remembering Triple B

Fillies (TRIPLE B HMA) at Palomino Valley Center August 2011
photo ©2011 afroditi katsikis

More roundups in Nevada are  scheduled to start soon and one of them is Triple B HMA.  It’s been more than 3 years since the Triple B roundup in the summer of 2011 – my first roundup! Going to this roundup (BLM speak: ‘gather’) was an eye opener for me and deepened my commitment to speak out about the roundups. [My first posts on this blog were about going to the Triple B roundup!]

Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board Meeting, September 10 (part 4 of 4) last session of the day

Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board Meeting, September 10, 2013

(part 4 of 4) last session of the day

Many people have sent the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board comments prior to this meeting. What follows below is the text I captured from the live-streaming meeting.  If you would like to share the comments you sent in before this meeting took place, please add them to the comments.  I think it helps us all to know what was sent to the advisory board.

Additionally, if you have screen shots from the live-stream or video of the live-stream (I’ve seen some floating around facebook over the last few days), please post a comment below the appropriate session’s blog post with a link to your video or screen shot.

For this last session of the meeting on September 10, I lost all the text I had captured; several of my friends knew what I was doing and sent me the text they had captured. Nancy Canarelli Watson had by far more than any of others who captured text that was  sent to me.  I also want to thank Diane Bozarth and Sonya Malaecky Spaziani and Pam York who tried to help me and sent me captured text from the last session on September 10, 2013

Note to my readers:

   AS I watched the live-stream and the captured text, I noticed various problems with the captioning. It is evident to me that voice recognition software was used to capture the text from the speakers instead of a professional transcriber like a court reporter.

 There are many words here that are not spelled correctly. When trying to read this captured text, and the word is unintelligible, trying saying the word out loud phonetically. I hesitated to change any text or make corrections as I did not want to be accused of modifying it to suit any particular person’s benefit or detriment. Please consider this not as an essay, but more as notes and a guide for further conversations.

–  When you see this: >>   it means there’s a change of speaker. Sometimes the live-stream captioning added the names of the speakers and sometimes it did not.

–  The multiple dash – – means that live captioning dropped some text.

–  Sometimes the live captioning repeated the beginning of a sentence and sometimes whole sentences were dropped.

–  I added double stars  **  when I believe the speaker changed

–  Occasionally, I’ve added bracketed text for clarification purposes