thewinterotter:

Here’s the thing about this… this has been coming for years. Decades, even. The BLM rounds these horses up off of truly marginal rangelands, usually to make more room for cattle. When there are 10,000 head of cattle (which means cow-calf pairs, which means closer to 20,000 actual animals) on a range, and 200 wild horses, the BLM will round up the wild horses and claim that they’re responsible for damage to the range. They round up horses they absolutely do not need to round up, they manufacture numbers out of thin air to justify the round-ups… and I’ve been saying for years that all it’s in aid of is absolutely packing these captive horse facilities, and then they’re going to manufacture a crisis in which they’ll need to kill all those horses because, IDEK, budgets. Or whatever works.

A lot of the folks on the ground in the BLM’s wild horse programs are good people doing their best in a broken system. But I’ve also met several upper level managers of the BLM’s wild horse programs – who apparently didn’t realize as they were very freely airing their opinions moments after meeting me that I’d worked in wild horse rescue for a number of years – who had one thing in common, and that was general all-out hatred for America’s free-roaming horses. Asking the BLM, which generally exists to cater to cattle, mining, and gas interests, to be responsible for the management of wild horses, is a lot like asking the fox to keep an eye on the henhouse. The agency has a very long history of working to corral and eradicate these animals rather than protecting them in the wild.

I know a lot of people don’t even realize America even HAS wild horses anymore. I know there’s a lot of discussion about “wild” versus “feral” and all the rest. But these horses are a part of our heritage, they evolved on this continent, and if we have room on the public range for cattle and sheep – owned by private ranchers, and actually costing the public money rather than bringing funds in to the federal government – then there is room for these horses. They shouldn’t be mismanaged into extinction. Since the Wild Horse & Burro Act was passed in the 70s, the legal protections it was meant to afford these horses have been steadily eroded, and this absolutely won’t be the last time that the BLM’s solution will be to slaughter these animals wholesale. Please learn how you can help by visiting American Wild Horse Preservation and The Cloud Foundation. If you’d like to learn more about the policy and history behind these kinds of truly terrible decisions, Joe Camp’s blog has some pretty good posts about it.

weneeddiversebooks:

At the 2016 ALA Annual Conference, author Tameka Fryer Brown presented the Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s (CCBC) multicultural publishing statistics during the panel “Celebrating Diversity: The Brown Bookshelf Salutes Great Books for Kids.” She displayed Tina Kügler’s oft-cited 2012 infographic, with the comment that even though the numbers are now 4 years old, the image communicated inequity in publishing so well that she would use it at every opportunity.