Protecting Our Wild Horses

Floor Speech

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Mr. COHEN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to include in the Record a statement from Josselyn Wolf, a young woman from Rhode Island, who appears with me in the documentary film ``Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West'' about the plight of America's wild horses. She is an advocate for H.R. 3656, the Wild Horse and Burro Protection Act, of which I am an original cosponsor, and has some insightful thoughts to share about how the Wild Horse and Burro Program is being run by the Bureau of Land Management. This is her statement:

``We need the tonic of wildness.'' This powerful sentiment, articulated by Henry David Thoreau in his reflective piece Walden, was embodied when millions of children sent letters to Congress--more letters than any non-war-related movement has generated in American history--begging for the protection of one of our nation's most treasured species: the wild horse.

Harnessing the power of our democratic republic, these voices inspired the unanimous passage of the 1971 Wild Free- Roaming Horses and Burros Act. The Act reserved roughly 47 million acres of Western rangelands for the unbridled existence of wild horses and burros and promised the dwindling numbers of mustangs--then at extinction level-- protection from ``capture, branding, harassment, or death.''

Over fifty years since the passage of that vital legislation, half of designated herd management areas have been eliminated and the protections promised by the Act continue to be grossly and sometimes violently violated under a system that misleads and misinforms Congress, the media, and the American people.

Each year, Congress allocates over one hundred million dollars to the Bureau of Land Management to support the Wild Horse and Burro Program: a system that endangers, kills, incarcerates, and separates close-knit equine families through the use of traumatic helicopter-induced stampedes and dismal holding facilities, a system overseen by land managers who claim to restore the land while destroying it, a system that has sent thousands of wild horses--wild horses: the icons of freedom and grit that define our great nation--to the slaughter pipeline.

Why? To support millions of livestock who produce less than two percent of American beef, much of which is shipped overseas to China. Livestock who, by the Bureau of Land Management's own statistics, graze nearly six times more public land than wild horses, vastly outnumbering them on their own designated territories. Not only does public grazing of cattle and sheep degrade biodiversity, it also subsidizes billion-dollar cattle corporations at the expense of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars: a stark contrast to small ranchers who are forced to pay rising grazing fees.

As human beings, we wield unprecedented power to disrupt the thriving natural ecological balance of our planet and therefore unprecedented responsibility to sustain it. As the National Academy of Sciences along with a multitude of independent scientists and researchers have attested, our land's ecological harmony is, in its current state, fundamentally broken. As law scholars have passionately voiced, our legal compliance with the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act is fundamentally broken. As Indigenous representatives have testified, our relationship with the land is fundamentally broken.

You, Members of Congress, wield the power to defend this untamed wildness that is the history and heart of America before it reaches extinction level. Each of you, Members of Congress, are in a unique position to rectify this dysfunctional system that is compromising our environment, our economy, and the natural wonders and gifts we are collectively responsible for, to pass down to our children untarnished and undestroyed.

Therefore, I am not asking for a radical, partisan rewrite: I am asking for a conversation. It is up to you to reevaluate the priorities of our nation . . . before it's too late. As a sixteen-year-old constituent, it is of imperative importance to me that the planet of my future is managed sustainably, and that carelessness does not forever eliminate the tonic of wildness that makes our Earth a home.

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