Contact your local newspapers, local tv stations, major news networks, and major newspapers

Below is an Letter to the Editor (LTE) sent in by a fellow wild horse advocate 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.  If you need help contact me at heather@saveourwildhorses.net

Below the samples are contact 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 three months or so.

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!!!)

A huge thank you to Jennifer Robin for putting together this invaluable list of newspaper contacts for nearly every state in the US: jenniferrobin.gallery/news-media-contact/   Find yours and submit an LTE today!

If you live in an area close to wild horses, reach out to your local news stations to do a pro-wild horse piece.  Be careful and research who you talk to.  Have conversations with the person about wild horses and see if they are interested in helping you get the word out about how our wild horse herds are disappearing from the American west.
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We could also use someone who is a professional article writer to help us write and get articles published in a variety of newspapers and online magazines.  If you can help, and donate your time, please contact heather@saveourwildhorses.net

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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:

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:

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 – 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. 

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We need nationwide coverage too:
I have listed the information for national big news channels and national newspapers below.  You can send letters, postcards, and emails. Please consider following up with a phone call, a note on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.  
The more contacts we make the more of a difference we can make!

CNN: One CNN Center, Atlanta, GA 30303 
Follow up with a phone call to their news tip line: 404-827-1500
Follow up email to: comments@cnn.com
​Follow up at: cnn.com/feedback
Follow on Facebook & Twitter @CNN

MSNBC: 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10112
Follow up phone call: 212-664-6605
Follow up email: msnbctvinfo@nbcuni.com
Follow up Facebook and Twitter @msnbc 
Email Rachel Maddow at: Rachel@msnbc.com

NBC News: 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY  10112 
Follow up phone call to: 212-413-6142 
Follow up email to: NBCNewsMediaRelations@nbcuni.com
Follow up on Facebook at @today and on Twitter at @TODAYshow

ABC News: 47 West 66th St, New York, NY 10023
Follow up at https://abcnews.go.com/contact by emailing Good Morning America, World News Tonight with David Muir, 20/20, and Nightline using their easy email form
Follow up phone call to: 212-456-2828
Follow up email to: news.tips@abc.com
Follow up on Facebook at @ABCnews and Twitter @ABC

CBS News: 51 W 52nd St, New York, NY 10119
Follow up Contact Form: https://www.viacomcbs.com/contact-us
Follow up on Facebook and Twitter @CBS

CBS Evening News: 524 W 57th St, New York, NY  10119
Follow up email: evening@cbsnews.com and weekend@cbsnews.com
Follow up phone call: 212-975-3247

The NY Times: 620 8th Ave, New York, NY  10018
Follow up contact email: ​https://store.nytimes.com/pages/contact-us
Follow up email: tips@nytimes.com
For those of you who can write an op-ed: letters@nytimes.com    (150-175 words)

USA Today: 7950 Jones Branch Dr, McLean, VA  22108
Follow up contact form: https://marketing.usatoday.com/contact-us/
Follow up email to the Editor in Chief: EIC@usatoday.com
and Senior News Manager Cara Richardson: cmrichards@usatoday.com

The Washington Post: 1301 K St NW, Washington DC  20071
Follow up Letter to the Editor: letters@washpost.com   (fewer than 200 words)
Follow up phone call: 202-334-6000

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Messages:
When sending emails, postcards, or letters to newspapers and news stations, use your own wording and/or work from the items below:

• How cruel the wild horse roundups are: talk about how the helicopters chase the horses in high temperatures, how one helicopter pilot ran a mare while she gave birth, how a foal lost its newborn hooves after being run so soon after birth, how they sometimes chase the horses for 2 hours or more.  Talk about the cruelness of separating horse family bands forever.

 

• How the horses are treated during and after the roundups: talk about how horses are injured while being forced into small pens with each other, about the mare who broke her neck trying to escape, the many horses who have broken legs while trying to escape.  Talk about how the horses have lost their freedom and families, how they go from living free to living in small long-term holding pens with no shelter.  Talk about how the foals are separated from their mothers.

 

• How the Bureau of Land Management is abusing taxpayer funds: talk about the Path Forward Plan and how it is a path to extinction for our wild horses created by ranchers and livestock companies.  Talk about how the BLM rounds up the horses, gelds the stallions and treats the mares with birth control, then releases them as a much smaller herd with no genetic viability or way to reproduce.  Talk about how the BLM pays helicopter pilots (who are often cattle ranchers) hundreds of dollars per horse for each wild horse they chase into traps.  Tell the newspapers there is a better way: require the BLM to create and abide by Herd Management Area Plans, a requirement of the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses & Burros Act of 1971.

 

• How the Bureau of Land Management caters to the cattle industry by shutting off water resources to wild horses and burros to save it for cattle: talk about the BLM participating in and allowing cattle ranchers to turn off or divert water from the wild horse managed areas, about how they close gates stopping the wild horses from reaching water sources.  Talk about how the BLM removes the wild horses claiming there isn't enough food for the horses, yet they then allow cattle ranchers to move their cattle on to those same lands.  Talk about how the cattle eat and drink 3 times more food and water than horses do, how land and ecosystems are so damaged by cattle that it can take years and years to recover.  Talk about how the wild horses actually help to reseed the lands and how the wild horses live with wildlife.  

 

• The Oil, Mining, and Cattle industries: talk about how the BLM only rounds up our wild horses to make room for oil, mining, and cattle.  Talk about how much damage those 3 industries do, often irreparable, to our public lands and resources.   Talk about how wild horses should be protected, how the horses could be used as tourism draws for states, and how it is important to care for our wild horses, wildlife, and public lands.  Talk about how you would rather see wildlife and wild horses grazing our public lands, and you don't want to see the pollution and ugliness of oil and mining operations.  Talk about how you want to see our American public lands be protected and cared for before it's too late.