Elliot M. Katz: BLM has mismanaged public lands to benefit ranchers

When the government misinforms the public and puts special interests over what’s best for the general public, citizens become outraged. So it is with the government’s mismanagement of wild horses and burros.

Congress protected the wild horses as living symbols of freedom and important parts of our national heritage, but for nearly 40 years, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has ignored this mandate.

The agency has mismanaged our public lands to cater to livestock and other commercial industries that use public lands for profit. The horses and the American public come out on the short end of this deal.

Each year, ranchers graze livestock on public lands for rock bottom rates, paying $1.35 per month per animal instead of the private-land rate of more than $13 per month per animal. The taxpayers further subsidize private ranchers through government programs that kill predators and remove wild horses and burros.

Sadly, President Obama sided with the special interests instead of the American public when he appointed Ken Salazar, a rancher, as secretary of the interior. What we’ve gotten under Mr. Salazar is more of the same government policies that favor the commercial interests over the public itself.

Absent in the government’s claims about wild horses is the fact that these iconic animals comprise less than one-half of one percent of large grazing animals on public lands, where horses are outnumbered by cattle at least 200 to 1.

The BLM currently authorizes livestock grazing on 160 million of the 256 million acres of public land it manages. Wild horses are allowed on just 26 million acres, land that is shared with livestock. The BLM scapegoats wild horses and burros for virtually all range deterioration, despite the agency’s own data showing that the majority of rangeland deterioration is caused by livestock.

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