Three alerts for wolves, horses, and buffalo
Please click on and sign the following:
1. Stop the Sneak Attack on Wildlife
2. Postpone the Antelope Complex Wild Horse Gather
3. US Friends, Stop the slaughter of Yellowstone’s buffalo
1. BACKGROUND | From DOW
Some in Congress are attempting to use a must-pass spending bill to eliminate protections for wolves and other wildlife.
If they are successful, life-saving protections for wolves will be eliminated, the Endangered Species Act will be compromised and vital funding to protect our wildlife and environment will be slashed.
Speak out for wildlife! Urge your U.S. representative to pass a clean continuing resolution – without provisions that hurt our wildlife.
MESSAGE TEXT
As a supporter of Defenders of Wildlife, a constituent and someone who cares about protecting America’s natural treasures, I strongly urge you to reject attempts to include provisions that would remove Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves, implement draconian cuts to the Department of Interior and/or prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from taking necessary steps to address climate change.
Removing Endangered Species Action protections for gray wolves would open the door to widespread trapping and poisoning of wolves in the Northern Rockies and Greater Yellowstone.
Worse, it would also set a terrible precedent for enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, allowing politics to replace sound conservation science as the guiding factor in how we protect our most vulnerable wildlife.
Similarly, deep cuts in the funding for the Department of Interior broadly (and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in particular) and other programs that support wildlife conservation and sound science could be disastrous. The bill slashes programs that protect imperiled species; acquire key habitat around the country, including for our national wildlife, refuges, parks, forests and other public lands; help states protect wildlife before they decline to the point where they are endangered; and assist wildlife in surviving climate change.
These programs already lack the necessary resources to fully protect our natural treasures. Funding cuts would only worsen an already bad situation.
Finally, prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency from working to address climate change is at best short-sighted, and at worse a prescription for disaster for polar bears, walrus and other wildlife threatened by climate change.
For all of these reasons, I strongly urge you to pass a clean continuing resolution to fund the government and reject any attempt by Congress to legislate on these important issues through this resolution.
RELATED | Madeleine Pickens on Jane Velez-Mitchell
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2. BACKGROUND and TEXT | From Madeleine Pickens
In a sign-on letter to BLM director Bob Abbey, the organizations, including: the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the Western Watersheds Project, the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), PBS wildlife filmmaker Ginger Kathrens and The Cloud Foundation, and others are urging the BLM instead to pursue a plan offered by Saving America’s Mustangs to construct holding facilities for the horses on private lands adjacent to their home range. The proposal would prevent the waste of tax-payer dollars incurred by shipping the horses thousands of miles to off-the-range holding facilities.
Saving America’s Mustangs’ proposal would save the government an estimated million dollars or more, while protecting the over 2,200 wild horses scheduled for removal from the trauma of shipment to holding facilities far from their homeland. SAM is in the process of developing a wild horse eco-sanctuary in the Antelope Complex.
The letter urges the BLM to postpone the roundup for a few months while Saving America’s Mustangs builds state-of-the-art holding facilities for the horses. It states:
The BLMplan to proceed with a late-January gather in the Antelope Complex makes no fiscal or operational sense. Antelope horses will be captured during treacherous winter conditions and shipped thousands of miles to the Midwest, instead of being gathered at a safer time of year and held on adjacent private lands that will eventually become part of larger wild horse eco-sanctuary.
The BLM’s refusal to postpone the roundup and pursue Saving America’s Mustangs alternative directly contradicts the agency’s stated commitment to pursuing public/private partnerships and alternatives to expensive off-the-range holding of wild horses.
The letter notes that any concerns about future emergency water sources should be eased by the fact that there has been no livestock grazing on the public grazing allotments associated with Mrs. Pickens’ ranches since June 2010.
In addition to the aforementioned, other groups signing the letter include: Return to Freedom, Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue, In Defense of Animals, the International Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros, and the Wyoming Wild Horse Coalition.
The sign on effort was spearheaded by the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign (AWHPC), a coalition of more than 40 horse advocacy, conservation, animal welfare and public interest organizations. The coalition is calling for:
A suspension of roundups in all but verifiable emergency situations while the entire BLM wild horse program undergoes objective and scientific review;
Higher Appropriations Management Levels (AML) for wild horses on horse those rangelands designated for them
Implementation of in-the-wild management, which would keep wild horses on the range and save taxpayers millions annually by avoiding the mass removal and stockpiling wild horses in government holding facilities.
Please join us and other animal welfare groups in the protection of these magnificent creatures.
3. BACKGROUND | From NRDC, for US friends only
This winter, hundreds of Yellowstone buffalo that roam outside the Park are being captured, with many slated to be sent off to slaughter. Please send a message demanding that Interior Secretary Salazar call a halt to the senseless harassment and killing of these magnificent animals.
MESSAGE TEXT
As wild buffalo continue to leave Yellowstone National Park for Montana in search of food this winter, I call on you to end your agency’s hazing and slaughter of these iconic animals.
Yellowstone’s buffalo herd numbers about 3,900 animals — the only continuously wild, free-roaming population remaining in the United States. They are critically important to the long-term conservation of the species.
Yet, government agencies, including your department’s National Park Service, continue to stop buffalo from roaming outside the snow-covered park in search of better forage in winter. The justification for hazing and slaughtering them — the fear they will spread brucellosis to domestic cattle — is overblown. In fact, there has never been a documented case of such transmission in the wild. Recent science finds the chance of a buffalo-to-cattle transmission occurring outside Yellowstone in Montana to be very small.
Moreover, the Department of Agriculture just made sweeping changes to the brucellosis management regulations, which significantly ease the regulatory burden for livestock producers. Under the new rules, ranchers are no longer required to slaughter their entire herd if one of their animals tests positive for brucellosis, and states no longer automatically lose their brucellosis-free status if the disease shows up in two or more herds in a two-year period. The risk of brucellosis is now of much smaller consequence for livestock producers. In response to this game-changing development, you should show Yellowstone’s wild buffalo much more tolerance outside the Park.
Please do not use my taxpayer dollars to harass and slaughter Yellowstone’s buffalo this winter. I urge you to be the buffalo’s protector, not their executioner.
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we fight these battles
our souls are tossed
as long as we keep fighting
we have not lost!!!
Karen Lyons Kalmenson
Our Compass 
we fight these battles
our souls are tossed
as long as we keep fighting
we have not lost!!!1
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