AR-News: Kisatchie Wild Horses: appeal for help

[p.a.wood at juno.com]

[Please circulate widely and contact me back at <p.a.wood at juno.com> if
you are willing to help try to protect the wild horses, and prevent their
capture and "disposal", which more often than not ends at a
slaughterhouse regardless of the best humane intentions. For a wild
horse, capture, transportation, and being crudely killed in a
slaughterhouse are particularly terrifying and cruel.]

GOVERNMENT TO HOLD MEETINGS ON POSSIBLE REMOVAL OF WILD HORSES

Dear friend of horses,

This is to let you know that the U.S. Army at Ft. Polk, Louisiana is once
again (at the urging of Bob Odom, Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture
and Forestry) considering removing the wild horses from the Army training
grounds in the Kisatchie National Forest. According to statements made by
Odom, the horses are a source of equine infectious anemia (EIA). This is
hysteria driven nonsense. Even if there was EIA among the wild horses,
that would not be a sufficient reason to have them removed. It would be
impossible, in any practical sense, for the wild horses to transmit EIA
to any known horse. (See below.) Tests of six captured wild horses showed
none to have been exposed to EIA virus.

There will be "scoping" meetings held this week to assist the public in
preparing comments on the issue that will be received until May 15th.
Here's the schedule:

April 13th (Tuesday), 3-6 P.M. at the Landmark Hotel on U.S. 171 south of
Leesville (near Ft. Polk).

April 15th (Thursday), 3-6 P.M. in Baton Rouge at the AmeriSuites Hotel
on Bluebonnet Boulevard.

The meetings will be conducted in an "open house" forum. There will be
information booths and public comment forms available at both meetings.

________________________________________________


Relevant Information

(most of which the Army is not in a position to share at the scoping
meetings). What informatrion they will provide is sure to prejudice any
ordinary person, and cause one to conclude that the horses must go.

The Army mentions that the horses may be in danger from live fire and
antipersonnel wire. Capturing the horses would produce far more injuries
than the injuries they might receive on an incidental basis in everyday
life. The Army has not been able to tell me anything about the rate of
occurance, but it is apparently very small. There will be iujuries no
doubt, but all wild animals are subject to hazards in their environment
and injuries. The fact is that the horses make themselves scarce during
Army training activities.

The only legitimate "reason" the Army might have to justify doing
anything with the horses would be wild horse eating of grass that is
seeded the help deal with erosion in specific areas where Army operations
cause denuding of the ground. However, this needs to be carefully
analysed before any decision is made to do anything regarding the horses
because of this.

An Army spokesman said: "Fort Polk nor the Army is not in the horse
management business.  We are just trying to comply with the state
requirement that all these horses be tested for EIA." This is the real
reason the Army is doing anything at all with the wild horse situation at
this time.

It is Bob Odom, a very powerful political animal and Louisiana
Commissioner of Agriculture and Forestry, that is pressing this matter
(in my opinion as a political favor to some in the horse racing business
who would just as soon see all EIA-positive horses dead). He has said (as
I recall) that he is acting on behalf of the horse industry. But the Army
construes that Odom's request is a legitimate appeal from a state agency.
To comply with Odom's request, the Army believes it would have to
round-up and test the horses annually. This would not be practical. So,
the Army would have to round-up and remove the wild horses. And that may
not even be possible since the wild horses range widely over a vast
region of the National Forest and surrounding lands. Even if the horses
were removed from Army training area, they would no doubt re-populate
those areas by immigration from other areas.

In a seminal paper on EIA, Tim Crawford, DVM and S. Lynn Kittleson, DVM
state: "This irrational fear is a result of many distorted accounts of
the severity and contagiousness of the disease ..."

A USDA-Veterinary Services document (publication 9I-55-032, 1996) on EIA
by Tim Cordes, DVM and C. Issel, DVM, PhD states: "In general terms,
there is a low risk of acquiring EIA from an inapparent carrier of EIAV.
In fact, the perceived threat of transmission from this source often
exceeds the actual risk by several orders of magnitude."

Dr. Issel reported that transmission is not always successful even when
several milliliters of blood are transfused from EIA-positive,
asymptomatic animals to EIA-negative animals. He stated further that
during an intentional attempt to infect 17 horses from horses that were
ill with chronic cases of EIA, 14 became infected, only
4 experienced disease episodes, which were mild and brief. None died. In
field studies, he found that there is a 99% probability that horse fly
vectors do not transmit EIAV between horses that are separated by 160
feet. He therefore recommended a safe quarantine distance of 200 yards
(600 feet).

Here's an indication of the rarety of natural transmission, even in
conducive circumstances: EIA-negative horses that were kept for long
periods of time (9 years for 8 of the horses, and 15 years in one case),
on a quarantine farm located next to the Florida Everglades among
EIA-positive horses, continued to test EIA-negative.

Here are the simple facts about EIA as I recall them from my studies and
interviews:

1. EIA is not often fatal, it only seemed that way because in the
atypical cases where the horses show pronounced symptoms of the disease
(i.e., in cases where EIA infection was distinctly noticeable) the horses
might have become deathly ill or even in fact did die. However, horses
that show pronounced symptoms after infection with the EIA virus are in
the extreme minority. It is the usual case that symptoms often go
completely unnoticed, or only a slightly elevated body temperature is
noticed.

2. After the initial (unnoticeable or barely noticeable) infection, the
level of EIA virus in the horse usually remains so low as to cause no
debilitating effects and to be untransmissible to any other horse.
However, horses that are severely stressed may relapse where the level of
virus in the body becomes high. Only horses with high levels of virus in
their blood are capable of serving as a source of EIA infection, such as
would be the case in a strongly symptomatic initial infection or similar
relapse.

Note: the 1996 USDA monograph on EIA says: "The decision to treat all
test-positive horses by the same rules was reached because it is known
that each infected horse may develop clinical signs of EIA upon treatment
with immunosuppressive drugs and/or in response to natural stressors
(Kono 1972)." However, the Kisatchie wild horses are not going to be
given immunosuppressive drugs. It also says: "In general terms, there is
a low risk of acquiring EIA from an inapparent carrier of EIAV. In fact,
the perceived threat of transmission from this source often exceeds the
actual risk by several orders of magnitude."

3. Still the EIA virus cannot be transmitted from an infective horse (one
with a high level of EIA virus in its blood) until special factors exist.
Blood can be transferred by accident as a result of careless veterinary
practices. In nature, blood may possibly be transferred by direct contact
between exposed wounds or other sources of infected tissue, however blood
is usually transferred by large biting flies (horse flies or deer flies),
but only under a special set of circumstances. The files don't "carry"
the disease agent in the way mosquitos do (within the body of the insect)
with regard to the diseases they help transmit. The files move blood
between horses externally on their mouth parts. Normally flies will clean
their mouth parts when they have finished feeding. A fly that
accomplishes this before flying off cannot transfer EIA. Only when a
fly is interrupted in its feeding, and lights on and bites another horse
before it has an opportunity to clean its mouth (which it would do at the
earliest opportunity) can the virus be transferred in sufficient quantity
to be significant. Even then, it usually takes several such bites to
transfer enough EIA virus to infect the other horse. This means that the
horses have to be in close proximity to one another for the extended
period of time necessary for the transfer to occur.

4. The test for EIA, the Coggins Test, tests for the presence of
antibodies that develop in a horse as a reaction to exposure to the EIA
virus. It does not test for the virus or the disease.

5. EIA is commonly known as "swamp fever" by reason of the fact that the
disease is associated low-lying, wet (i.e., swampy) conditions. And
horses need to be standing in relatively close proximity to one another
for transmission to occur. The relatively high pine forests of the
Kisatchie are not conducive to the conditions necessary for the
transmission of EIA. Also there are relatively few owned horses in the
area, and those that are there are very unlikely to be in close proximity
to any of the wild horses.

________________________________________________


A LOT OF PUBLIC PRESSURE WILL HAVE TO BE APPLIED in order to protect the
hundreds of wild horses that range on the Ft. Polk controlled areas in
the Kisatchie National Forest.

Public action is need both at the federal and state levels. So help is
needed from people from all over America, not just Louisianians. But the
help of Louisianians will be especially helpful in addressing this issue
at the state level.

To offer your help: Please contact Pinckney Wood at <p.a.wood at juno.com>.

________________________________________________






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