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“Disappointment Valley” A Modern Day Western about the plight o America’s Wild Horses premiered as a work in progress at the Santa Fe Film Festival. The reaction of the audience during the screening was profound with the sound of crying heard in the darkness of the theater during the scenes of the horses that had been brought to their end in Mexico on trucks with Oklahoma plates. The question on everyone’s mind was: Are these America’s Wild Horses being slaughtered?
The film has breathtaking scenery and absolutely magnificent wild horses and undeniably heartbreaking facts about the systematic extermination of America’s Wild Horses. Disappointment Valley features horse advocates Viggo Mortenson, Daryl Hannah, Sheryl Crow and Raoul Trujillo. In addition to this list of stars a long list of others speaks out on what is happening to our horses. They include former Director of the Bureau of Land Management Jim Baca, energy consultant, Randy Udall, Horse Advocate Madeline Pickens and Michael Blake who wrote “Dances With Wolves.”
The film chronicles the gross mismanagement by the BLM, the brutal capture methods, the inhumane conditions the horses are held in, plus the wanton waste of taxpayer’s money. The reaction of the audience was outrage, anger, frustration and confusion on why the wild horses have been pulled off of millions of acres of public land. The film detailed the cost to taxpayers to capture them at $2,500 per horse.
According to the BLM web site holding costs for 2008 were $27 million and the overall costs of capture and holding will reach $85 million in 2012. The BLM site goes on to say they have removed over 79,000 wild horses and burros from 2001 to 2008. Estimates of the number of horses remaining in the wild range from the BLM estimate of 37,000 to a private count commissioned by Michael Blake that put the number at less than 15,000.
The BLM site states “by not removing excess horses from the range, the result would be an ecological disaster for Western public rangelands: overpopulation of herds, overgrazing of forage, eventual malnutrition and starvation of horses and burros, damage to native vegetation and riparian areas, damage to wildlife habitat, increased soil erosion, and lower water quality.”
An audience member commented that BLM land contains millions of cattle which are known to eat grass down to the ground. He went on to say horses on the other hand eat the tops of the grass allowing it to grow back.
To learn more about the plight of America’s Wild Horses and Burros visit Madeline Pickens web site www.MadelinePickens.com and The American Wild Horse web site www.theamericanwildhorse.com.
