Devils Tower lawgiver backs horse slaughter resolution

In 2013 the Oglala Lakota tribal council heard testimony from members with a plan to operate an abattoir on off-reservation land that would process horse meat for human consumption. 

In 2021 alone some 24,000 horses were exported to Mexico and Canada for slaughter but legislation to prohibit the export of horses for meat has been introduced in the Colorado Legislature.

As of October, 2022 the US Bureau of Land Management has removed over 19,000 horses and burros from public land and holds over 64,000 in confinement although the data clearly show domestic cattle are far more destructive. Although officials at North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park dispute it the nuisance horses there are believed by some to be the descendants of those belonging to Sitting Bull.

Ogden Driskill is an Earth hater Wyoming legislator running cattle near Devils Tower National Monument in the Belle Fourche River watershed. Driskill has adamantly resisted renaming America's first national monument and Senators Cynthia Lummis and co-sponsor John Barrasso introduced a bill to permanently cancel Indigenous culture by blocking the name Bear's Lodge or Mahto Tipila in the occupied Wyoming Black Hills. But even Driskill isn't white enough for some Trumpers and faced a solid write-in campaign from a former chair of the Crook County Republican Party.  

During the current session of the Wyoming Legislature Driskill is co-sponsor of a resolution that calls on the federal government to amend the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 and allow horses wrangled from public lands to be diverted to meat processing domestically for shipment abroad. Wyoming's wild or feral horse population has been as high as 7,000 but is about 4,000 now and the Arapaho and Shoshone tribes manage some mustangs on their reservations. 

Even in Wyoming the resolution is only symbolic as the Democratic-led US Senate is unlikely to pass any laws that would alter America's obsession with Equus ferus.

Anyone who believes political retribution for the removal of invasive cattle or feral goats from public property will go without retaliation is probably already dead.

Learn more at Wyofile.

ip photo: beyond the Belle Fourche River Paha Sapa rises above the surrounding prairie as seen from Thorn Divide in a Wyoming county named for a war criminal.