With the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) chasing and trapping horses on public lands and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service refusing to intervene, activists with Friends of Animals (FOA) will, on Monday, engage in civil disobedience to disrupt, protest and raise awareness of the government’s reckless roundup of America’s wild horses. The direct action will take place at a location in Rock Springs, Wyoming being disclosed only the media.

Edita Birnkrant, Friends of Animals

During the most recent roundup in Wyoming, the BLM kidnapped 179 horses, tearing apart families and killing three horses in the process. The government is clearing the land of horses on behalf of cattle ranchers, who covet the public land for grazing.

In addition to engaging in civil disobedience, FOA plans to sue the government for its failure to list the quickly vanishing horses as “threatened” or “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), a designation that represents the best hope for their survival. Wild horses have already been exterminated in six states.

Wearing t-shirts with slogans like “Climate Justice Starts Here,” hundreds, if not thousands, of Climate March participants in NYC lined up at food trucks at the street fair after the parade to buy meat, fish and dairy products, demonstrating either a lack of awareness or disregard for what the United Nations says is, by far, the number one contributor of climate change and the planet’s biggest polluter — animal agriculture.

How can the nation’s leading environmental groups expect the general public to make eco-friendly choices if their own members engage in the most environmentally destructive activity — and if they themselves don’t promote a plant-based diet? Can we really expect world leaders at this week’s United Nations’ Climate Summit to take drastic measures to reverse climate change if “environmentalists” can’t take the most basic one?

At Climate Change marches around the world, plant-based/vegan participants displayed compelling posters and distributed information about the impact of animal agriculture on the environment, and their efforts will assuredly effect some change. However, as evidenced in the groundbreaking documentary film Cowspiracy, animal agriculture must be eliminated altogether in order to reverse climate change and save the planet.

Sam Simon, the Simpson’s co-creator who has donated millions to animal rights causes since being diagnosed with terminal cancer, is probably having a bigger impact than he ever imagined. That’s because the media are not only reporting on the extent of his philanthropy but are also describing, in detail, the animal abuses that motivate him to give.

In Vanity Fair, a reporter writes about the plight of 17 captive bears whose rescue was funded by Simon: “The bears lived their lives pacing back and forth in the concrete holes of a grim roadside bear-pit attraction in rural Georgia, subsisting on white bread and soda thrown to them by tourists.”

Sam Simon Liberates Bear

In a Reuters story about Simon’s decision to purchase of a fur farm in order to permanently shut it down, the reporter writes that, as Simon walked through the facility’s “cramped rows of mesh-wire cages,” he said to the animals, “This is your last day of abuse. This is your first day of freedom.”

Photo: REUTERS/Mike Blake

During an interview on NBC, Simon talks about “liberating animals from abusive situations” and says that horses in the racing industry are treated as poorly as animals on factory farms.

These are the kinds of messages that animal rights groups would kill for (figuratively speaking) when they talk to the press.

In 2012, Sam Simon bought a $2 million ship for Sea Shepherd, which is being used to protect dolphins, whales and other sea animals from slaughter. If only the Sam Simon could have saved these salmon who, oddly, share his name.

The Bay Area Reporter, which is San Francisco’s LGBT weekly newspaper, published two of our letters in response to its story about the controversy surrounding gay rodeos. On September 11th, TheirTurn wrote a story about gay rodeos from an animal rights point of view.

If you feel strongly about certain issues, please submit letters to the editor when a media outlet reports on them. These letters provide us with an opportunity to convey the message points about animal abuse that are so often missing from the stories.

People who care about animals are especially sympathetic towards those who are abused and killed in the name of sport or entertainment. So, on the rare occasion when we see a tormented animal fighting back, it’s hard not to rejoice.