IN THE WORDS OF CLEVELAND AMORY

Cleveland Amory has been a champion of animals all his life. He is the founder of the Fund for Animals and the Black Beauty Ranch for abused animals in East Texas. Black Beauty Ranch was first populated by burros from the Grand Canyon that were slated to be slaughtered. Next came the goats from San Clemente Island that the US Navy planned on shooting. The story of this ranch is chronicled in Mr. Amory's book, Ranch of Dreams.

BURROS

The Grand Canyon National Park Service based their decision to shoot the burros on a report from a wildlife biologist who would be paid for running the shooting. The burros were damaging the fragile ecosystem of the Canyon -- the same Canyon that hosted thousands of humans, cars, buses, pack mules, zodiaks and other floating contraptions, every year!

Mr. Amory's rescue was a success despite the Park Service doing everything in its power to stop him.

• They set a quota of 30 burros to be rescued within a month, or the Park Service would end the rescue.
• They set a starting day to coincide with the hottest time of year in the Canyon (120 degrees on the Canyon floor).
• They promised the rescuers could use the wide tourist trail to get to the bottom of the Canyon. At the last minute, they broke their promise and ordered the rescuers to use a trail that was dangerous, narrow, and in places almost non-existent and straight down.
• After two years of broken promises and backstabbing by the Park Service, 577 burros were rescued.

The Park Service must be the descendents of those early Americans who screwed the Indians so badly! Lest you think the bad guys are confined to the Grand Canyon, the Park Service in Death Valley tried to kill off all their burros too!

GOATS

Mr. Amory's second war was with the US Navy over their plans to kill off their own mascot, the goat. These rare Spanish Andalusian goats were residents of San Clemente Island, off the coast of California. Despite the fact that the Navy used this island as a shelling target, the goats lived quite comfortably there. The Navy decided to open the island to hunters to eradicate them because the goats were "eating endangered species"! Of course the only endangered species on the island were birds and lizards, and the Navy was doing an excellent job of making them extinct with their bombing.

Mr. Amory announced, with great tact:

"I now know why the Navy botched the rescue of hostages in Iran. It was because they evidently thought they were going over to shoot them -- they didn't know they would have to RESCUE them."

Right on, Cleveland!!

It took then Secretary Caspar Weinberger to overrule his admirals and allow the goats to live. After 6 years of war with the Navy in court and on the island, more than four thousand goats were rescued.

HORSES

Mustangs! The hated enemy of cattle and sheep ranchers.

Throughout history, ranchers have used every means possible to exterminate wild horses -- poison their watering holes, blinding lead stallions by shooting out their eyes, running them to death over cliffs, and SEWING THEIR NOSTRILS TOGETHER AND RETURNING THEM TO THE WILD to make the capture of an entire herd easier.

Between 1828 and 1830, California ranchers killed approximately 40,00 horses that were eating the pasture the ranchers wanted for their cattle and sheep.*

No better were the missionaries, who, IN THE NAME OF GOD, corralled horses and starved them to death, and drove them (two herds of 7,000 horses each) into the ocean until they drowned.*

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Transcontinental Railway encouraged its passengers to shoot bison and wild horses within range of their trains -- as a break from the tedium of cross-country travel.*

Mustangs are now under the "protection" of the Bureau of Land Management, an arm of the government that is run by the cattle and sheep ranchers, who still torture, abuse, kill, and hate the Mustangs

Mr. Amory states, "While the Park Services have been, generally speaking, cowardly and cruel, the Bureau of Land Management has been crooked and cruel."

• The BLM spent $250 million to round up 166,000 horses.
• 90% of the horses go to slaughter each year.
• BLM backdates documents to allow employees to adopt horses and sell them to slaughter.
• BLM pays friends and supporters to operate their holding corrals. One such crony received $25,000 a day from BLM to manage a corral of a small number of well-cared-for animals on public display, and a large number of crippled and maimed horses, the result of their roundups.
• BLM gave title to a horse that the adopter told the BLM inspector was mean and she was afraid of.

The BLM takes multimillions of your dollars to perpetuate their cruel roundups, and makes more money off selling these horses to slaughter.

AND IN TEXAS.......

Texas, a state associated with cowboys and horses, has an inexcusably large number of starvation cases. In the past, most Texans thought that animals were good for just three things -- to make money off of, to eat and to shoot. Lately, attitudes are changing and the people of Texas are caring about the welfare of animals other than themselves. There are still major horse slaughter plants there.

*Taken from Zen and the Art of Horse Maintenance, by M. Staples.

Zorro's Sword