I’ve blogged a handful of times about the round-ups of wild mustangs that are occurring in the US just now, and the furious debate over them. I haven’t kept fully up to date, although I did get an excellent grounding in the history and issues from Deanne Stillman’s Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse if the American West. I’m not in a position to go into the discussion as to how many horses should be left free-roaming and how the population should be managed, if at all, but this video highlights something that’s obvious to anyone who watches it: abuses are occurring. Horse Talk reports here (quoted below):
The pro-horse campaigners have just won a small victory, however, as a Nevada judge criticised the Bureau of Land Management for denying that mistreatment took place:
US District Judge Howard McKibben denied a request late on Tuesday to halt the well-advanced roundup in the Triple B complex in northeast Nevada.
But the judge did issue a temporary restraining order banning any mistreatment of mustangs like that caught on camera earlier this month by the Wild Horse Freedom Federation, a Texas non-profit group.
McKibben voiced his concerns over the defence raised by the bureau.
The judge, sitting in a Reno, Nevada, federal courtroom, granted the Temporary Restraining Order against the continuation of documented helicopter pilot conduct during the muster.
In issuing the order, he cited his authority as a federal judge to enjoin an agency’s conduct where their actions have been demonstrated to be “in violation of an act”.
“I am deeply concerned,” McKibben told the bureau’s legal counsel, Eric Petersen, “that declarations presented to the court by the agency do not address the issue, but simply deny wrongdoing.”