To the editor:

I was shocked to read the AP article on the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to consider euthanizing wild horses, and a big part of my shock was in seeing the one-sided nature of the article.

To give your readers balanced, objective news, please follow up with an article that includes more than just quotes from the BLM and truncated responses from a horse advocate or two.

Your readers deserve to see the whole picture, and that picture includes things like this:

¢ Those 30,000 wild horses share public lands with 4 million privately owned cattle.

¢ What the BLM calls “overpopulation” is called “dangerously low” and “extinction level” by critics.

¢ The U.S. Humane Society and others have criticized the BLM’s “mismanagement” of wild horses for decades.

¢ The BLM’s “appropriate management level” figures are widely disputed.

¢ The impact of wild horses on the land is nothing compared to the “ecological disaster” that cattle ranching has created over 150 years.

There is a bigger story here than the tale of a government agency between a rock and a hard place because of budgetary issues. Congress passed a law in 1971 to protect wild horses because outraged Americans demanded it when they learned that horses were being rounded up and slaughtered. You can expect more public outrage if the BLM starts killing horses or sells them without restriction (which puts them at great risk to be bought by “kill buyers”).

Please put the story in context.

Elizabeth Stevens,
Lecompton