Dear Editor:
In response to the gathering of wild horses in the Western states. All animals, domestic or wild, have to be controlled in numbers that match the feed they consume or they will all starve to death.
You and I, the taxpayers, are paying somewhere between $50 million to $60 million a year to feed and care for somewhere between 45,000 and 50,000 wild horses in captivity, and it will get worse as time and more horses are gathered and put in horse prisons.
I like a horse as good as anyone, but I don’t like them good enough to see them locked up and not being able to live as God intended, starved, mistreated or suffering from disease or old age with pain.
Like it or not, people have been eating horse meat for hundreds of years and will do so for more hundreds of years if you let them. So, if you slaughter 90 percent of unwanted horses—wild or domestic—and let 10 percent reproduce, that 10 will be doubled in four years, so there will always be plenty of horses.
Oh, my mistake, the word slaughter is not politically correct. The new word is harvested like as in harvesting grain. Canada is now harvesting 100,000 to 150,000 horses a year and is making lots of money and creating lots of jobs that makes the economy better as jobs pay money, which, in turn, gets spent on cars, homes, clothes, food and so on, which also cuts unemployment.
Lets do the math. We taxpayers spend $60 million to $80 million a year keeping wild horses in horse prisons. If we harvest the extra 40,000 to 45,000 wild horses and take in possibly $25 million to $30 million, we create jobs and paychecks, which turn into more money and more jobs.
These figures are probably not accurate, but you get the picture close enough to maybe a $100 million saving a year. These figures are on wild horses only.
The last figures I could find that horse harvesting in the US was about $60 million to $65 million a year sometime in the ‘70s.
So if you people want to save the wild horses, do like some nice folks in Mesa County are doing to save and maintain the herd in the Little Bookcliff area. These folks are opening their wallets and not their mouths. They are doing the walk, not the talk, and my hat is off to them.
I beg you people to not donate to Humane Society of the United States, PETA, the EPA, the ESA and other groups as they spend less than 2 percent of the money they take in on animals welfare; the rest goes into their pockets and more advertising to beg for more money.
They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers suing the U.S. government and then we, the taxpayers, pay them back all lawyer fees if they win their lawsuits.
Bryce W. Purkey
Meeker
