Where’s our powerful senator on wild horses?

To the editor:

Driving home today, I saw an elective Nevada license plate with a white horse rearing up and the words "Wild and Free" spelled out beneath.

What a crock.

The Bureau of Land Management's treatment of our wild, free and federally protected horses is disgusting. It is beyond understanding how anyone could Taser horses, whip them in the face, kick them in the head, run them to death with helicopters and corral them without sufficient food or medical care (Dec. 10 Review-Journal).

All this abuse is documented. BLM says it is not inhumane.

Our taxpayer money (you remember money, don't you?) is funding the BLM roundups. Someone is making money off of this -- and it's not you or me or the horses.

Maybe it's those getting subsidies to graze their cattle on federal lands who complain of wild horses eating into their profits (pun intended). Maybe it's the economically challenged BLM that decided it's better to spend taxpayer dollars to capture and feed (or not) wild horses than let them live and eat free of charge on hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land.

We Nevadans have a very senior and powerful man as one of our U.S. senators. He's Harry Reid, the great Nevadan, the elder statesman, a real man of the West. If Senate Majority Leader Reid is truly the man he portrays himself to be, he will step up and put a stop to BLM's shameful abuse of our wild horses and waste of our tax dollars. If Sen. Reid does not do what is right here, he is just another old geezer whose time has come.

Elections are right around the corner, and I'm a registered voter.

JILL E. THACH

LAS VEGAS