TITLE: Wild horses put up for adoption by the government are ending up at risk for slaughter
EXCERPT: “The Bureau of Land Management is wiping its hands clean of the fact that advocacy organizations like the American Wild Horse Campaign have been documenting wild horses and burros in droves ending up at kill pens all across the country because of the incentivizing of the cash for the adoption incentive program,” said Grace Kuhn, communications director at the American Wild Horse Campaign.
Indeed, the issue is not new: A 2021 New York Times investigation found that some adopters were pocketing the incentive money and then selling the horses at auctions frequented by slaughterhouse brokers.
The BLM told NBC News that it “continues to work with wild horse advocates and other interested parties on additional potential changes to the adoption program to strengthen protections for adopted animals.”
The agency maintains that the program is essential. There are more than 82,000 horses and burros on public land, BLM officials say, which is far higher than the roughly 26,000 the agency considers the appropriate level, and slightly higher than the total in 2018, before the adoption program began.
“That is a crisis that’s headed towards ecological disaster,” Waddell said.
Last fiscal year, the BLM spent $83 million in taxpayer funds to care for captured horses. It costs $2,000 per year to care for a horse in a federal corral, according to Waddell.
“About 60% of our budget annually is spent to care for animals that have been previously removed from public lands,” she added.
The goal of the adoption incentive program is to find other safe homes for the horses while reducing government costs.
TITLE: Grizzlies are getting killed by roads, but the risks are bigger than roadkill
EXCERPT: In a 2022 study in the journal Current Biology that included more than 1 million deer killed on roads in the US, researchers found that collisions are most likely to happen within an hour or two after it gets dark. “It’s kind of the coincidence of a period of the day when humans are driving a lot, and a time when animals are moving around a lot,” says co-author Calum Cunningham, a wildlife ecologist and postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Tasmania who studies animal-vehicle collisions in various countries. Ungulates like deer and elk are crepuscular, so they tend to be most active around dawn and dusk. “That’s kind of the perfect storm for creating very high periods of collisions,” Cunningham explains.
In their study, Cunningham and his team also noted that collisions were more common in places located on the eastern side of a time zone, where the sun sets earlier. A strategy like implementing pushing the clock back an hour all year, he says, would not only reduce these accidents, but save about $1.2 billion associated with injury costs, vehicle damage, and insurance. (Researchers say wildlife-vehicle collisions cause more than 9,000 injuries and 440 fatalities among Americans each year.)
In another paper, Cunningham and colleagues found that moose collisions in Alaska, the Yukon Territory, British Columbia, and Alberta ramp up during the winter likely due to low visibility, increased moose activity on roads (which are easier to walk on than snow-laden wilderness), and the difficulties of driving and controlling a car in the winter. More recently, researchers from the University of California, Davis calculated that cars kill about 70 mountain lions a year on California highways alone. That estimate is likely an undercount because it didn’t include incidences on city or county roads, and because many hit-and-runs with mountain lions go unreported.
TITLE: Hunting wolves won't save Bambi
EXCERPT: Not far south from our study area along Hwy. 53 there's a new billboard with a spotted and spindle-legged deer fawn standing alert and angelic in summer grass. In the image, the forest edge beyond the fawn appears as if on fire, with glowing sparks and embers flying from blurry flames that fade right to left into a smoky then charred background that highlights yellow letters stating: "Wolves devour over 54,000 fawns a year in Minnesota."
What's the point? Let's ignore that the "over 54,000" figure is likely an overestimate. Visually, the billboard makes a plea to save helpless Bambi from ending up in the belly of a wolf. The background message is that wolves are just as big a threat to fawns as forest fires. The statement is meant to be sensational: Wolves aren't just trying to survive and feed their pups, they devour deer. Baby deer. 54,000 baby deer a year, right here in Minnesota.
The billboard's appearance is well-timed and placed along the northbound lane to anticipate the fall hunting seasons and appeal to hunters traveling up to deer camp in coming months. Those who paid for the billboard, the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association-Sturgeon River Chapter, write on social media that the point of the message is: "We support wolf management. The wolf numbers are over the states [sic] recommended projections for a healthy wolf population, yet no wolf hunt."
Set aside the fact that policy to not hold a hunt is a form of wildlife management and that Minnesota wolves are federally protected currently, precluding state wolf hunts. Billboard supporters would have you believe that hunting wolves would surely help more fawns survive. But this stands in stark contrast to the best available science and instead makes the faulty assumption that if a wolf doesn't devour a fawn, that fawn survives.
A fawn not eaten by wolves might get shot by hunters. Over the past five years, deer hunters have reported to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources that they have killed an average of about 25,000 fawns annually. A fawn not eaten by wolves might be among the 40,000 or more deer hit by vehicles in Minnesota each year. Or maybe it will be eaten by a coyote or bear, or slowly starve, or get killed by a combine in the first hay cutting, or be moved by humans and abandoned by mom, or die from a viral disease that is spreading north and is uncontrollable, such as epizootic hemorrhagic disease.
Fawns die from many causes and the causes of mortality can compensate for one another. Increased mortality due to one cause often means less mortality from a different cause. And yet — very importantly here — the overall rate of fawn survival can remain unchanged.
Put another way, if bears and coyotes don't get them, wolves and hunters will, and the same number of fawns will survive either way.