Chris Blankenship's Ramblings

This morning I was briefly watching the news and ran across a story about rounding up wild horses in Wyoming.  For those without the time to watch this short video the gist of the story is how the Bureau of Land Management is rounding up wild horses on the border of Wyoming in order to control the environmental impact to the area.  After rounding up these horses, currently 33,000 of them, they are tagged, given birth control shots, and then housed until someone adopts them.  Unfortunately right now there aren’t a lot of people adopting the horses and they end up standing around waiting…  eating…

So all the while the horses await adoption the government has to keep feeding them and paying for their care.  Local residents and animal rights activists are upset that these horses are being rounded up instead of allowing nature to fulfill the natural order of things with regards to health and food availability in the wild.

I am sure there must be more to the story but doesn’t it seems hard to understand the logic in this effort:  Spending tax payers dollars to take horses from the wild, countless dollars on housing and feeding these animals?

Have a watch and see if this makes any sense to you?

UPDATE – As of December 7th, 2009 the latest figures on the amount spent has gone up:

The BLM spent about $50 million this year to feed, corral and otherwise manage the nation’s wild horses, up from $36 million last year.

So the costs have almost doubled in one year…  Where will it end?