For so many reasons this is wrong. The BLM rounding up wild horses off the range and denying them loving homes to do brutal Frankenstein experiments on them instead, is immoral and I believe illegal. Surely a sanctuary offer trumps doing a study on this mare. They rounded up over 800 horses in the warm springs gather and made a list of 300 who were eligible to be turned back out and the mares to be experimented on must make up 150 of those. Add to that the fact that advocacy groups have twice taken legal action against this study and now the BLM have introduced it a third time!! Are we really to believe that this one bay mare is the key to the whole thing? That she couldn’t be given the home she is being offered and the best chance of keeping her twins alive and at her side.

We spoke to three equine vets and the equine hospital where our little donkeys are and they all said that the twin foals would be better off in a private facility with extra nutrients, supplements, minerals and round-the-clock attention, out of the elements and being cared for.

How on earth can the BLM go to Congress and complain that nobody wants to adopt these horses and 50,000 of them are in holding pens and that adoptions were significantly down last year and then deny an approved, and financially successful sanctuary? I would happily waive the incentive money of $1000 a horse that the BLM are now giving people to adopt them. They would have three less horses to feed, care for, process and handle. How on earth can that be denied? It is monstrous.

For me this is the final straw in a long long battle to try and talk reason, to apply common sense, to demonstrate the moral issues that they just refuse to understand. To apply decency, compassion and kindness. These horses are not theirs to experiment on if a home offer is in place. They are not laboratory animals. If you look at the EA all the language revolves around doing the procedure and then studying what happens to the mares.

Whether they bleed out, die of infection, die of shock, hurt themselves in the chutes — it’s just a number in a study. This mare is not a number. I refuse to call her tag no. 4702. Her name is Elsa, named for the Lion in Born Free, and her babies are Faith and Hope. The corrals don’t know the sex of the babies but I know from the photos that one is a girl. Elsa is ten years old which makes her a sale authority horse which even more weakens the argument against saying no to an adoption.

As I wrote yesterday, it is one thing seeing a cold hard number of 100 faceless, nameless mares who will have to suffer this procedure* — but this here is the face of spay. These two babies will be weaned from their mama in a couple of months (August) and the mare taken to an unsterile environment within the corrals where a vet will perform the procedure. I have no idea if the babies will be given back to her or whether she will be released on to the range a week later with other mares who had the same procedure. But it seems to me that when we are offering to take them as a family and keep them together to promote mustangs that might be a better life for them.