Both Mr. Sholly and Mr. Hill testified that the killing was necessitated because they wanted to reintroduce Big Horn Sheep to the park and that they had been told that wouldn't be possible with the burros in place. Mr. Sholly also claims they never went into the park to deliberately hunt for burros, but they were trying to impact on the population by taking targets of opportunity.
The most damming piece of testimony came from State Park Director, Walter D. Dabney. After relaying that he told Mr. Hill and Mr. Sholly they should kill any and all burros on site, he mentions that no other efforts have been made to control the populations in the park since he started. In other words, they haven't attempted to capture or relocate the herd by any of the means normally followed with protected animals.
I'm not really sure how always carrying a gun and shooting any burro you see on site differs from hunting burros. I'm not a Director of State Parks in Texas, so I wouldn't know about such distinctions. All I know is that the burro is a protected animal in the wild and is not to be killed or have its habitat displaced by any other animal. Yet in Texas, the people who are running the parks system are guilty of both crimes.
The transcript of the inquiry I received came complete with the investigating officer's findings and recommendations. The only fault he could find with the indiscriminate killing of a protected species was that the people doing the killing hadn't bothered to notify the park's employees in advance that they would be shooting burros in the park. If they had known in advance that the shootings were taking place, they wouldn't have been surprised to find the rotting burro carcasses beside the road, nor worried that anything untoward was going on.
He recommended that in the future, all park employees be better informed about the park’s wildlife management programs and that proper arrangements should be made to deal with the disposal of the carcasses. Nowhere in his findings or in his recommendations does he mention that burros are a protected animal in the United States or that perhaps they should investigate alternative means of wildlife management instead of killing them.
It took a 25-year fight by concerned citizens and wildlife conservationists to get the American Congress to pass The Wild-Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971. Thirty-six years later, officers and directors of Public Parks in Texas are flagrantly disregarding the two major provisions of the act. Not only are they depriving the animal of habitat desperately needed to maintain the numbers of wild burros in America, they are also killing them in order to facilitate their supplanting.
Article comments
1 - sierra
i think that we should keep a better look out for them if their in danger of going into to exstinction if we keep a closer look out for them then they should be fine and not in danger