We have not put any donations jars out anywhere. So if you see a donation jar with Heber Wild Horses on it, it has nothing to do with anything we are doing. Please let us know if and where you see any so we can find out who is putting them out, who they are collecting the money for, and what it's intended use is. Thank you!
The Heber Wild Horses Facebook page was opened on June 29, 2014. I opened that page because I noticed nobody else had opened a page for that herd of approximately 400 wild horses consisting of many individual bands of varying sizes living in what has been named the Heber Wild Horse Territory in the Apache-Sigreaves National Forests in Arizona. I felt those horses needed their own page to be recognized just as the Salt River Wild Horses in Arizona have.
I have been taking pictures of some of the horses for ten years. I figured other people must have a lot of photos of them too that maybe they would enjoy sharing. I also thought that perhaps in the future, if the US Forest Service ever decided to remove the horses from the forest, as they tried in the past, that the Facebook page would be a good place to rally the troops against a potential roundup, so to speak. Little did I know that the "future" was already here and the US Forest Service and the Arizona Game and Fish were already making plans to open up the horse gathering project from the past. The ESA petition’s introduction states:
The primary threats to wild horses on federal public land are habitat loss, inadequate regulation, and excessive round-ups and removals. Overall, wild horses on federal public lands face the threat of extinction due to at least four factors identified in the ESA. First, habitat loss, particularly from cattle grazing, mining, energy exploration, and urban expansion, endangers the distinct population segment (“DPS”). Second, human utilization threatens the species, specifically removal and sterilization to reduce the population and allow commercial grazing. Third, existing regulatory mechanisms are inadequate to manage the threats that face wild horses and may, in fact, constitute an independent threat to their survival. Finally, other natural and manmade factors also threaten the continued existence of wild horses in the United States, including their artificially fragmented range and small population size. Thus, it is vital to the survival of this population segment of wild horses that it becomes federally protected under the ESA “With the myriad of threats posed to the remaining wild horse herds in America, it is past time that we look to science to guide their management on our public lands,” states US Representative Raul Grijalva (AZ). “I support The Cloud Foundation’s call for wild horses to be federally protected under the ESA.” |
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