[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 9 (Monday, January 24, 2011)]
[House]
[Page H420]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    BLM MISMANAGEMENT OF WILD HORSES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, last week, at the request of a 
lady named Madeline Pickens, I met with Mr. Bob Abbey, who is the head 
of the Bureau of Land Management, to talk to him about dealing with the 
wild horses, the mustangs that roam out west in the western States. The 
Bureau of Land Management has somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 of 
these mustangs in pens around the country; and the cost of this is 
estimated to be as much as $2,500 per horse per year. The Bureau of 
Land Management just last week started rounding up another 3,000, 
4,000, 5,000 of them to take them to holding pens and move them to 
Oklahoma.
  Now, the thing that's interesting about this is that when I talked to 
Mr. Abbey, he admitted that they want to move these horses from Nevada 
1,000 miles to Oklahoma in order to put them in these pens. Now Ms. 
Pickens, she is very concerned about these mustangs because they're 
part of America's heritage, and she wants to protect them as much as 
possible. Toward that end, she bought two ranches, the Spruce Ranch, 
which has 14,000 acres in it, and the ranch next to it in Nevada, the 
Warm Creek Ranch, which has about another 4,000 acres; and then she got 
permits for another 550,000 acres so that they could put those horses 
on this land, protect them, and save the taxpayer money and make sure 
that these horses will not be put in pens and shipped all over the 
country.

                              {time}  1940

  But the Bureau of Land Management is recalcitrant. They want to move 
these horses 1,000 miles into these pens, and they want to keep them 
there at a cost of as much as $2,500 per year per horse.
  Now, Ms. Pickens says that for $500 a year, she can keep them on her 
range and protect them, create a kind of museum for these horses so 
that people can come and see them in the wild. And she would have them 
injected so that they can't reproduce; therefore, they wouldn't have to 
worry about an expanding population of mustangs, but they would be 
protected. But the Bureau of Land Management wants to move them a 
thousand miles, where her ranch and her permits are within just a few 
miles of where the horses are right now.
  Now, when I talked to Mr. Abbey last week, he said that they couldn't 
reach an agreement with Ms. Pickens, that there'd have to be some major 
changes made over at the Bureau of Land Management in order for them to 
facilitate what she wants to do.
  This is another bureaucratic nightmare that we in this Congress 
should not--and I don't believe will--put up with. And I'm going to ask 
the Appropriations Committee to cut the budget of the Bureau of Land 
Management because they're wasting the taxpayers' money by millions and 
millions and maybe hundreds of millions of dollars.
  Last year, the government spent about $144 million managing private 
livestock on Federal public lands, and they only collect $21 million 
for grazing rights. So they lost at least $123 million per year. And 
some people estimate that they lose as much as $500 million a year, 
half a billion dollars, by keeping these grazing lands in private hands 
where people get them for almost nothing. $21 million was what the fee 
was that they got last year.
  So they're losing as much as $500 million; they're moving these 
horses up to a thousand miles, and they're doing it for no good purpose 
other than the bureaucracy wants to keep control of them.
  Now, the reason Ms. Pickens started this organization to protect 
these mustangs was because, in 2008, the Bureau of Land Management 
said, well, they weren't sure they could take care of all of these 
horses--they have almost 40,000 in these pens right now--so they were 
thinking about killing them, euthanasia, starting to kill these horses.
  Well, the people who love these mustangs and love the West the way it 
was don't want this to happen. So they came up with this organization 
to deal with the problem in a realistic way so that the horses wouldn't 
be killed. The organization they started when they heard they were 
going to euthanize them was called Saving America's Mustangs, and they 
offered to enter into a contract with the Bureau of Land Management to 
relocate at least 9,000 of these horses into these lands that they just 
bought and got permits for so they wouldn't have to be shipped to these 
pens a thousand miles away.
  Now, it makes absolutely no sense to me, at a time when we're 
fighting fiscal problems in this country--we've got trillions of 
dollars in debt, and unless we start cutting spending, we're going to 
see this country go into bankruptcy. Moody's has already said they may 
have to reevaluate the bond rating for the country.
  Let me just end up, Mr. Speaker, by saying it seems to me that we 
ought to be frugal with the public's money. We ought to cut the Bureau 
of Land Management's budget so that we can save the money and save the 
mustangs. That's what this is all about--a humane way of treating the 
mustangs in this country, which are a part of our heritage.

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