Thursday, September 12, 2013

Where Have all the Mustangs Gone?

Broken Arrow, broken promises

The public is barred from Broken Arrow Ranch on Indian Lakes Road in Fallon, Nevada. Though privately owned, it is supported by the Bureau of Land Management as a feedlot for thousands of "protected" wild horses.

Public Property:  Keep Out

Except for a few highly-orchestrated visitation days, members of the press and public have been considered trespassers since May 2010. 
According to an internal email, BLM cut off public access due to "the damage that is being done to the BLM’s image as the result of the tours." *
*BLM denied this information. Read more in "There Are No Secrets at Indian Lakes."
Eyes Wide Open


In my blog entry from March of 2010, you'll see why Broken Arrow gates are literally chained shut. 

We saw too much.

My March 26, 2010 phone interview with John Neill (then-director of both Palomino Valley and Broken Arrow wild horses) was an honest one in which he revealed the existence of "phantom foals."  The unrecorded birth and death of foals born inside BLM facilities was and remains standard procedure.




Friday, March 26, 2010 --Fallon Foal Death



Mare stands guard over new foal, photo by Tara Kain

There's a new set of hooves in Heaven.

BLM's death tally for the week doesn't show what happened.
However, visitors are allowed to tour the tax payer funded Indian Lakes wild horse facility. It's land-locked inside a private ranch in Fallon, Nevada, but opened once each week by reservation only for two hours.
Three observers from the CalNeva Cloud Foundation and photographer Cat, visited Sunday, March 21 and took photos, video and notes.


Saturday, March 20

a pale dun foal is born to a buckskin mare

Sunday, March 21
11:00 Members of the public arrive to tour the Fallon facility. Director John Neill is their guide and he waits for a late arrival
11:37 tour begins
11:45 visitors observe buckskin mare and newborn foal in a pen with other adult horses. Foal looks like "he had melted into the contours of the ground" according to one observer and Mr. Neill said the foal was a weak newborn from the night before.
12:30? Sometime during the tour, members of the public notice a nursery pen with just six mare and foal pairs inside and wonder why the buckskin and her foal aren't with them*

(RIGHT: As adult horses move, mare makes a protective barricade of her body, photo by Tara Kain)

1:45 Tour ends, passing by the buckskin mare and her foal. Mr. Neill agreed with visitors that foal might be sick and indicated he would check on it. If necessary, a vet would be called. He added that volunteers from WHOA might be asked to bottle feed the foal if it couldn't rise to nurse.

2:00 as observers depart, foal is still down.

Monday, March 22
no deaths are listed on the BLM's facility update, so CalNeva Cloud observers hope for the best

Tuesday, March 23
9:55 am
Still no deaths listed for the weekend**, but one observer calls and talks to John Neill who says "the colt was euthanized." She understands Neill to say the vet had determined the colt had a broken femur and must have been kicked.
The caller commented, "Oh, that's why he never got up."
Neill replied, "No, he was up that morning nursing." Sometime after that, he speculated, the colt must've been kicked."
Neill said the foal was destroyed via chemical injection.


(with freedom tantalizingly close, mare urges foal to rise and nurse, photo by Tara Kain)

Friday, March 26
I reached John Neill at Palomino Valley wild horse corrals and he answered my questions about the Medicine Hat stallion I've told you about before and this foal.
He clarified two points from the timeline above:
* "Once we know the colt's strong, we put them in the nursery pen" along with their mothers
** Live births are not entered into BLM's system until horses have been freeze-branded, which takes place after four or more months.
Since foals delivered "in facility" are not listed as born, they are not listed as dead. So, they are not posted on BLM's online Calico Round-up updates.
John Neill described the last hour of the little dun's life.
"He was down during the tour. Afterward I went out to check on him and he was packing a right hind leg and he had to be put down."
"When did the vet come?" I asked.
"He didn't."
"Was it a compound fracture so that you could see it was broken?"
John answered, "I could just tell, so I took care of it."
***
After our call ended, my English teacher brain flashed to "I am cruel only to be kind." Hamlet, I remembered, and knew that if I were watching over a newborn foal with a fatally fractured femur, I would not want it to suffer.
But "Hamlet" ends with a stage strewn with corpses.
I tried to get confirmation that such a leg injury is easily diagnosed, but the two vets I consulted disagreed on both diagnosis and prognosis.
John Neill told me "We have births daily and if something happens like this or there's a bad mother, we can't track them all accurately."
Is it fair to the public that our mustang foals are born and die without notice?
This is not Neill's decision; it is BLM policy. As with so many other BLM policies, the numbering of lives and deaths are rough estimates.
That's wrong.
There are no disposable mustangs. Taxpayers have no disposable income, especially for a system they hate.
There must be a moratorium on the capture of our wild horses, before a ruined system erases an entire species.

Labels: Broken Arrow ranch, Indian Lakes, John Neill, Palomino Valley, phantom foals

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Posted by Terri Farley @ 11:43 AM   0 comments

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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

"There Are No Secrets at Indian Lakes"



On June 9, 2010, BLM closed the facility on Broken Arrow ranch in Fallon, Nevada, locking wild horses in and the public out.
Since then, horses from the Calico Mountains, Tuscarora, Twin Lakes, Ely and other ranges have been corralled, castrated, and processed there. And they've died.



Many of us have requested public viewing of the wild horses and most have been denied. BLM's John Neill and Dean Bolstad have refused my requests because:
1) Indian Lakes isn't a public facility, but an overflow facility on private land
2) Visitation ceased because of the associated workload
[America's horses should be on rent-free American acres & beyond asking questions & taking in two horses -- I don't think I've interfered with chores]
3) Indian Lakes is not unique in infrastructure, animal viewing opportunities or health/handling protocols and the Palomino Valley is more convenient to visitors.
Indian Lakes may not be unique -- BLM updates showing deaths from routine gelding, and horses "found dead" "reason unknown" makes me wish it were -- but the mustangs are individual creatures.
Wild horses are tough. They take care of themselves in the wild, but they cannot when they're captives. One vet can't check -- let alone doctor -- thousands of horses. BLM staff, for many reasons, don't check wild horses carefully enough to notice injuries, disease, even starvation.
The public sees wild horses with fresh eyes,even when it hurts to look.
If we'd been at Palomino Valley instead of Indian Lakes, suffering foals with hooves sloughing off, with broken bones, with no mothers to nurse them, would be BLM secrets because they do not exist in the world of BLM until they are branded.
If we'd been at Palomino Valley instead of Indian Lakes, respiratory disease, draining pus pockets and facial injuries would have been treated as business as usual.
Because we're locked out, we can only guess at the welfare of foals born at Indian Lakes.
In a recent email, Dean Bolstad told me "There are no secrets at Indian Lakes."
But this year has proven I'd be a fool to take BLM statements on faith.
The Department of Interior won't open the gates to the wild horses, but they can open them to the American public.
BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program Chief Don Glenn has the power to
RE-OPEN Indian Lakes. Ask him to open the gates: Don_Glenn@blm.gov























Cat Kindsfather,Elyse Gardner, Laura Leigh photos from Indian Lakes January-June 2010

Labels: Broken Arrow ranch, Dean Bolstad, foal death, Indian Lakes, John Neill, secrets

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Posted by Terri Farley @ 10:25 PM   14 comments

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Thursday, June 10, 2010

Don't LOCKDOWN our wild horses

June 9, 2010


Mr. John Neill
Palomino Valley Wild Horse Adoption Center
17800 Pyramid Highway
Reno, Nevada 89439


Dear Mr. Neill:

Please keep the Indian Lakes wild horse facility on Broken Arrow Ranch open for public visitation at least two hours each week.

This facility has had its share of problems, but citizen vigilance alerted BLM staff to problems which might otherwise have resulted in the deaths of more captive wild horses.

The decision to lock out the public is "explained" in a BLM press release by the fact that Indian Lakes is a privately-owned and operated facility that was never intended as a public facility and isn’t staffed to serve the public. If it was never intended to be a public facility, why not? Americans have a right to view the care of horses deemed theirs by law. As for staffing, during my many visits to Indian Lakes I was never guided by more than one BLM staffer until a recently-arrived PR person was added to a late May tour. If BLM has a five year lease on this private property, two hours a weeks is a paltry bit of time, but I’ll settle for it.

The press release indicates weekly facility web site updates will be published. I welcome that, but not in place of visits. There may be other gaps in business-as-usual like the one which does not keep track of foals born in the facility.
The same press release claims the Calico Mountains horses have “successfully transitioned” to their new environment. BLM's own numbers say over a hundred (including premature foals) have died at Indian Lakes and dozens remain in hospital pens.

Wild horses are tough. They take care of themselves in the wild, but they cannot when not in fenced they are drugged, castrated and captive. They have not regained the health they had on the range. To say they have contradicts what visitors have seen with their own eyes.

Secrecy breeds suspicion and, in this case, death.

Please reconsider the decision to hide America's wild horses.

Sincerely,



Terri Farley

Labels: Broken Arrow ranch, Fallon, Indian Lakes, lockdown, wild horses

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Posted by Terri Farley @ 11:18 AM   0 comments

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