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Crooks and Liars
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New Nevada Agriculture Director
Takes Aim at Wild Horses
Part Twenty Four
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News From the Front - May 7, 2008
Change-up
We had scheduled an awesome collage of photos of the current range and horses contributed by a bunch of folks who regularly tramp the range, however we decided to run the "Our Tax Dollars at Work - the Chain of Lies" edition since that's what we covered on the
Nevada Trails television program last night. The "talking heads" on Nevada Trails were Lacy J. Dalton, Craig Downer and Willis Lamm. The producers apparently liked the show and are moving the two horse related segments ahead of some other shows in the program schedule. We'll post how the shows can be seen on TV or on the internet as soon as we have the revised schedule.
These episodes also included a whole bunch of contemporary photos of the range and horses taken by volunteers and nature photographers Anne Hall, Carrol Abel and Mark Terrel. So if you don't want to hear about government sponsored deception, just turn the volume down and look at the pictures for an hour.
The Horse Wars photo collage (definitely worth viewing) will be posted later this week.
Our Tax Dollars at Work
Citizens often express a sense of frustration when government gets out of touch with its constituency. What transpires often defies common sense and logic. With the Virginia Range wild horses we can see where public policy takes a wrong turn - influenced by the typical chain of lies.
The Chain of Lies
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Link #1
Renegade rancher Don Alt claims to own land that he doesn't, runs cattle on public lands where he has no authorization, and then complains that wild horses are eating his grass. Alt also brags (while being recorded) that Governor Gibbons is going to remove the wild horses and give them away.
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Link #2
Governor Jim Gibbons hires his pal and anti-government crusader Tony Lesperance to be the Nevada Director of Agriculture. (Since the Virginia Range horses are not on BLM lands, they fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture.)
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Link #3
Tony Lesperance, an avowed enemy of environmentalists, all of a sudden claims to be one, claims that the Virginia Range horses are starving and claims that "There is a total loss of forage." Of course anyone stepping outdoors pretty much anywhere in the horse range could see differently. "Chicken Little" Lesperance ran around the state capitol crying that the range was dying and got money from the state treasury to round up horses even though the state budget is hundreds of millions of dollars in the red.
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Link #4
Tom Grady is a retired banker who is also in the State Assembly and on the Interim Finance Committee. He was one of the legislators who gave the Department of Agriculture money for their contrived crisis. Grady told the news media, "There are 1200 horses up there and no feed for them. Where are you going to get the money to buy hay for them?"
Revised notes. What we later found out was that Assemblyman Grady's opinions and actions were based on Tony Lesperance's testimony, which under Nevada law, was supposed to be truthful. As Mr. Grady learned more about the real goings on in the Virginia Range, he became an voice for practical solutions, earning the respect of the horse advocates.
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Link #5
Phil Larussa is the State Veterinarian. He came from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS.) Larussa met with wild horse group leaders under the pretext of collecting ideas regarding the management of the Virginia Range horses. Meanwhile his boss, Tony Lesperance, was making a run to the Interim Finance Committee to get money to remove horses "as rapidly as we can."
After the Governor's Office announced that there would be no action regarding the horses until after a study was completed and a report was compiled with input from the wild horse groups, Larussa tried another fast one claiming that Lacy J. Dalton had asked TV personality John Tyson to present some "new plan" to the groups regarding the Virginia Range horses. Unfortunately the horse group leaders already knew that Lesperance had gone to Tyson to take a plan to the horse groups with a possibility of a job for Tyson in the bargain.
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Link #6
Ed Foster is the official spokesperson for NDoA. He went on television stating, "That range has no forage on it" and he made up some hypothetical scenario about 2 - 3 - 4 thousand horses. When challenged, Foster denied making the statement. (These folks forget how easy it is for viewers to record television events.) When pinned, Foster tried to say that he came up with the hypothetical figures using simple calculations and challenged his critics as to their credentials. When Kathy Graves, a retired nurse from Silver Springs, demanded to see his basis for his population projections, he labeled her a "threat" to the agency. "I urge you to act responsible regarding this issue Ms. Graves."
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Link #7
Mark Amodei is a lawyer who represents developers who want to densify the wild horse range. He is also a state senator.
Amodei has been claiming that a "comprehensive habitat capacity analysis" indicated that the range could sustain between "500 and 600 horses." Of course he leaves out the part about the study addressing only 85,130 acres in the Virginia Highlands and that the total range (that Amodei admits) is around 440,000 acres.
Revised notes. We found out, as with Assemblyman Grady, that Senator Amodei based his opinions and comments on what was presumed to be truthful testimony by Director Lesperance. Senator Amodei has also since demonstrated his willingness to seek practical approaches for mananging the Virginia Range horses.
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Link #8
The last link connects back to the Governor's office where official spokespeople are telling those who call or write that Mr. Lesperance and Mr. Foster didn't say what folks have recorded them as saying on television, and that the Department of Agriculture is not going to do anything until after they conduct a study with public input, even though the Department has clearly tried to make an end run on the study and to our knowledge doesn't have the funds to conduct a study.
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Considering the state's budget crisis, why not use the study already published and project the figures from that 85,130 acre study area to the entire 440,000 acre range?
Maybe it's because doing that wouldn't help developers and crooked cattlemen.
Now you see our tax dollars at work - and why our government is always broke.
Webmaster's note: Most wild horse advocates are not patently anti-development. Growth is inevitable and there are developers on the range who take great care to protect open spaces, wildlife and the environment. We support "Nevada friendly" development ideas. We just don't want to see the wild horse range turned into suburban Los Angeles. We've seen where that road can leads and the sign at the end says, "Welcome to California."
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Hot off the Presses
Here's a new article about the Virginia Range wild horse issue:
Conservation or Eradication?, Old Virginny Ink, May, 2008.
The spirit of Thomas Paine lives
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