How To Write A Letter to the Editor (LTE)
Below are Letter to the Editor (LTE) samples sent in by a fellow wild horse advocates and three written for us by Linda Lee Wallace that you can use as a template or copy and paste as your own. LTEs are key to helping make the public aware of the plight of our wild horses and burros. Anyone can submit an LTE to their local paper(s) and it is very easy to do.
Below the samples are contacts for many major news stations and newspapers, and some sample ideas you can use when writing your LTE or sending a message/letter to the major stations and papers. I will be adding additional sample ideas from time to time, so please check this page again. You can submit an LTE to your paper more than once, so put it on your calendar to send one in every one to three months.
Other ideas include writing about your own experience seeing wild horses and sending it to a magazine to publish.
Just remember to always stay professional, mature, and calm in your writings to papers, magazines, and news stations. If you want to be published, you must submit a well-written piece. (No all CAPS or exclamation points!!!) See more examples of wild horse articles here.
Below the samples are contacts for many major news stations and newspapers, and some sample ideas you can use when writing your LTE or sending a message/letter to the major stations and papers. I will be adding additional sample ideas from time to time, so please check this page again. You can submit an LTE to your paper more than once, so put it on your calendar to send one in every one to three months.
Other ideas include writing about your own experience seeing wild horses and sending it to a magazine to publish.
Just remember to always stay professional, mature, and calm in your writings to papers, magazines, and news stations. If you want to be published, you must submit a well-written piece. (No all CAPS or exclamation points!!!) See more examples of wild horse articles here.
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A Letter to the Editor submitted to a newspaper in WY by Mary Hone:
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Another sample Letter to the Editor, written by Linda Wallace, you can use to submit to your own local papers:
Refuting the Big Lie – Wild Horses Are Not Overpopulated The truth is, American wild horse and burro numbers are precariously low, at the level when the 1971 Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was passed by Congress to save them from extinction and preserve them as "living symbols of the West." Wild equids now roam only half the original land set aside for them in 1971. After 20,193 horses and burros were inhumanely rounded up via helicopters in 2022, there are now just 62,191 remaining on nearly 27 million acres. BLM's goal is 26,785 animals. Compare this to 1.5 million private livestock grazing on public lands. Recent wild horse roundups were increased exponentially due to "unprecedented drought conditions," yet the BLM has not issued the same emergency reduction for livestock. The truth: Wild horses are being scapegoated for damage livestock are causing on western rangelands. Inside Climate News July 2022, “The primary cause of desertification in the arid lands of the West...has been livestock grazing and continues to be so,” said J. Boone Kauffman, professor of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation at Oregon State University. Note: Less than 2% of America's beef consumption originates from cattle grazing on public lands. |
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Another sample Letter to the Editor, written by Linda Wallace, you can use to submit to your own local papers:
Wild Horses and Your Tax Dollars The Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 tasked the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) with preserving these animals. Their management process is to remove them from herd areas stated by law “to be managed principally for wild horses.” Warehousing wild horses costs American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually and is completely inhumane and unnecessary. It costs nothing to leave wild horses on the range. Their erroneously touted “overpopulated” herds can be managed on-range humanely and at low cost, if necessary. (The “appropriate management levels” set by BLM are not scientifically based, again, going against the law's mandate.) BLM's own data for FY 2022: • 20,193 horses were permanently removed from their ranges • 7,793 animals were placed into “private care” (many ending up in slaughter pipelines) • 12,400 were left to be warehoused at taxpayers' expense • $138.462 million was spent rounding up / warehousing wild horses and burros Important facts: • Public lands' corporate “ranchers” pay $1.35 per cow/calf pair; woefully inadequate compared with costs to remove and “store” wild horses, (which are legally mandated to be there) • Less than 2% of cattle grazed on public lands feeds the US population. • Multiple scientific reports state non-native cattle are the cause of public land degradation, not wild horses |
Another sample Letter to the Editor, written by Linda Wallace, you can use to submit to your own local papers:
Wild Horses – Native to North America Wild horses evolved on the North American continent nearly 4 million years ago, but the thinking has long been that they disappeared, with other large fauna, at the end of the last ice age. Recent science shows wild horses were in North America, in conjunction with Native Americans, nearly a century before the Spanish “reintroduced” them. DNA data from fossils found in Yukon and Mexico show horses may still have been around well into the Holocene era. With this “extinction gap” closing, we may discover wild horses continuously inhabited this continent in some numbers. But regardless of whether they were always here or re-introduced, American wild horses should be considered native, since their characteristics and behaviors reflect their evolution here, and they are a keystone species, critical to their ecosystems. Benefits wild horses provide to their environments: • Digestive systems that allow them to deposit or reseed valuable native plants • Being “light on the land” by roaming miles when they graze, therefore not trampling one place to dust before moving on • Having hooves that are shaped to distribute their weight more evenly and easily on the land • Rotating quickly in and out of waterholes, not excessively trampling riperian areas Cattle, a non-native species originating from cooler, wetter Europe, do poorly in the arid West and heavily degrade the land, research shows. |