posted
By the way, I'd just like to randomly brag. You know Senator Conrad Burns (R-Montana) that was sponsoring this legislation? I've had a beer with him.
OK, he had a beer and I had a 7-Up, but we were in fact at the same table and both ate prime rib. He's a very charming man when he's drunk. He offered me a job 5 times.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
by the way.. maybe I didn't read the story closely enough...
What does this have to do with Bush? I mean, yes, he signed it into law, but he wasn't ADVOCATING eating horses. He did not sponcer the bill. There have been no "I'm George Dubya Bush, and I endorce eatin' Trigger" TV commercials. He hasn't toured the butcher shops of the country with adoring crowds waving inflatable horses. And I have yet to see an Outback commercial that says "Come on down undah and we'll put a horse on the barbie for you, courtesy of your president Dubya". Back in the election, I don't remember seeing "Re-Elect me and I promise a Seabiscuit in Every Pot." in any of the literature...
So is this just another pot shot at Bush? More focusing on minutia?
Posts: 7085 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote: It sounds like the bill doesn't allow indiscriminate slaughter. I'm not sure if it limits by numbers, age, percentage, or what, but it seems this concern was present when the bill was written.
That's why I said it sounded good on paper. Of course it's one thing to say that all the rules will be followed, and only the old, sickly, unwanted horses will be killed. But come on, do you honestly believe that those guidelines will be strictly adhered to? I just can't see whoever is marketing the horsemeat being satisfied with spending all of this money on adoption programs and the maintenance of these horses until they are adopted or slaughtered, unless they are planning on selling the meat at a radical price. Call me skeptical, but somehow I don't suspect those who are pushing the slaughter of the horses really have the horses' best interests at heart.
Posts: 1225 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
How can you be so sure? There are supposed to be strict guidelines on the humane slaughter of animals already, for food, leather, fur, etc. Are THOSE guidlelines followed? Heck no! That's the sole reason I'm vegetarian. I'll eat free-range meat, no problem. I believe God put animals on this earth for our consumption, but I also believed that He intended for us to treat them with respect. The food and fashion industries don't care where their products are coming from, as long as they get a profit. Is there any feasible way to control it? Probably not in the immediate future, but I think there's hope out there eventually. This bill could lead to a similar situation. I don't expect that once these horses are captured for slaughter that they are going to be treated any better than any other food animal. Money always wins. What's cheap is to capture horses until the population is cut down. It'll take millions of dollars to do what this bill is proposing, and sorry, I just don't have enough faith in American law or the morality of the food industry, etc, to believe that it's actually going to work.
Posts: 1225 | Registered: Feb 2002
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The roundup programs already happen and are run by the government. The horses will be selected by government employees and sold. This will defray some of the costs of the roundup. It will not be a profit-making operation.
quote:I don't expect that once these horses are captured for slaughter that they are going to be treated any better than any other food animal.
This is where your mistake is: the horses are captured already for other reasons. This happens now. The difference will be that some will be selected for slaughter.
I'm not sure that they won't work. I'm just extremely skeptical, given that the humane laws already in action clearly don't work. I'm having sort of a mental picture of a breaking news story of some scandal involving the mistreatment and wrongful slaughter of too many of these horses, and I'd like to avoid that sort of situation.
quote: This is where your mistake is: the horses are captured already for other reasons. This happens now. The difference will be that some will be selected for slaughter.
Yeah, some horses are captured. But not the 9,000 or so that the bill calls for. And the horses that are captured aren't being killed, they're being adopted out by organizations promoting the welfare of the mustang. But 9,000 of them....where are they going to put all of these horses, exactly? Who's going to pay for feeding them, giving them veterinary care, etc? Surely not the same folks who want to market their meat. Again, I could be wrong, I'm just skeptical.
Posts: 1225 | Registered: Feb 2002
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quote:It allows for the sale for slaughter of some older and unwanted horses that are captured during the periodic government roundups aimed at reducing the wild population, now estimated at 33,000 across 10 Western states. About 19,000 of the horses are in Nevada.
quote:Since 1971 nearly 159,000 horses have been gathered by the BLM. But a quarter of them never find homes. While the government has recently opened sanctuaries in Kansas and Oklahoma that can each take in 2,000 of the older "unadoptable" horses—horses that remain unclaimed after at least five auctions—there are, on average, 5,000 animals in BLM holding facilities at any given time.
posted
"So is this just another pot shot at Bush?"
Good grief, ThePixiest, of course it is. Just look at the bushwhacker who posted it. But ya gotta admit that there is a certain irony in the wishy-washy whichever-way-the-wind-blows of our France-bashing BelovedLeader from "Thou shalt not eat horses!!!"Texas kissing French tushes on his way to bowing down before special interest groups.
However, there are some very serious issues which weren't addressed in the article; or by the posters thus far, except a maybe unnoticed touch by Annie.
posted
First, a bit of history&science relevant to later postings...
The current DesertSouthWest extending westward from DallasTexas though Arizona to parts of California and northward through parts of Nevada into parts of Utah/etc is to a large extent man-made. If you read early EuropeanAmerican settlers' accounts, they talk of the land as the HighChapparal: ie desert grasslands. As settlement grew, more and more of those grasslands -- on both public and private lands -- were overgrazed by cattle, sheep, etc. Where grasses died off because of overgrazing, the land was colonized by the mesquite, creosote, cactus, tumbleweeds**, and similar scrub species.
Now the thing about those particular scrub, mesquite, creosote, cactus, and tumbleweeds is that they have extensive root systems which draw water from a large area surrounding themselves. So any bush, tree, or grass seeds which are deposited (by birds, high winds, etc) around them pretty much just dry up and die. Their own seeds are adapted for such conditions. Without those covering trees, bushes, and grasses, the most fertile soil is blown away, washed away. With the soft/absorbant soils blown away, raindrops directly hit hardpan. Gullys form, enlarging in size to channels and flashflooding rivers. Rain doesn't have the time to soak deeply into the soil, to be later osmoticly drawn upwards as the surface dries.
There are a lot other factors -- eg trees sunscreening themselves by emitting gases&particles which in turn nucleate water vapor into rain droplets which turn into rain -- which allow an ecology to affect its climate into producing weather more favorable to itself. But, in this case, the end result is that overgrazing tripped a fragile balance of grasslands, the few trees left*, and bushes into one that favored an ecology of the "good for nothing" scrubland viewed as "the classical desert" by most folks. A self-perpetuating scrubland, grasses/etc can't penetrate inward. Besides what's already been mentioned, some of those scrub species engage in chemical warfare: poison the soil against return of the species they have displaced. A self-expanding scrubland, the scrub species are perfectly comfortable at the edges where they meet grassland. And draw water from an extensive region surrounding themselves, etc to push those edges ever outward.
* Long before the coming of Europeans, NativeAmericans such as the Anasazi downed an overly large number of trees to build and fuel their settlements, and caused/strengthened the drought/climate which destroyed their civilization; which created the desert of high chapparal.
** Tumbleweeds are an invasive species imported from Russia
posted
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the definition of a desert is a place that receives less than a certain amount (12 inches/year) of percipitation per year.
If that's a case, why would the die-off of trees and grasses in the region turn it into a desert?
quote:Long before the coming of Europeans, NativeAmericans such as the Anasazi downed an overly large number of trees to build and fuel their settlements, and caused/strengthened the drought/climate which destroyed their civilization; which created the desert of high chapparal.
This makes me ask the same quesiton. How much can changes in the ecology of a region affect the climate/rainfall? It seems to me that they really can't.
Posts: 1002 | Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
While seabiscuits soaked in stews is traditional fare, wild horses couldn't get me to munch on hardtack.
Here is a good start regarding the desertification process, AntiCool. Googling desertification "feedback loop" will get you a lot more info. I'm hesitant to answer further here, cuz I suspect that the GlobalWarming will arise to end up derailing this thread, which is an important topic in its own right.
If you are truly interested, could you please start another thread titled Hey Rabbit... Biospheric Effects on Climate and Weather Add a link -- http://www.hatrack.com/ubb/forum/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=032189;p=2#000070 -- to show the topic's origin. I'd like to draw her into the discussion since Rabbit's strong interest and her husband's speciality is climate change. Besides being more capable of discussing the topic, they should know better than I the jargon to use as searchwords to find links to appropriate articles.
posted
Dag is right, and a closer reading of this bill is important. This is not a license to go out and capture mustangs for meat. The horses are already rounded up each year as part of a continued effort to keep the population manageable. This is all managed by the BLM, an organization which is infamous among farmers and ranchers for putting environmental concerns first before agribusiness concerns. I trust the rules to be followed very well.
quote: NativeAmericans such as the Anasazi downed an overly large number of trees to build and fuel their settlements
Ah. I always wondered about all those little log cabins at Mesa Verde. Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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