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বৃহস্পতিবার, ১১ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Toyota undaunted by latest massive global recall
TOKYO (AP) ? Toyota says the overnight recall of 7.43 million vehicles over faulty power window switches that can cause fires is a sign the Japanese company has learned from its mistakes.
Executives said Thursday the models affected by the biggest single recall in Toyota Motor Corp.'s history were all made before 2010 ? the year when global quality controls got beefed up.
They said Toyota had gotten quicker and more transparent after the massive recalls in 2010, mostly in the U.S.
One problem was that Toyota had said Wednesday the problem hadn't caused any injuries. But documents filed by U.S. safety regulators showed customers reported 161 fires and nine injuries. There have been no crashes or deaths.
Toyota said Thursday it was an embarrassing but honest error.
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A-Rod's struggles at plate hurting Yankees in ALDS
New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, front, fields a ground ball by Baltimore Orioles' Matt Wieters in front of shortstop Derek Jeter in the second inning of Game 2 of the American League division baseball series on Monday, Oct. 8, 2012, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, front, fields a ground ball by Baltimore Orioles' Matt Wieters in front of shortstop Derek Jeter in the second inning of Game 2 of the American League division baseball series on Monday, Oct. 8, 2012, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
New York Yankees' Curtis Granderson walks off the field after striking out swinging in the eighth inning of Game 2 of the American League division baseball series against the Baltimore Orioles, Monday, Oct. 8, 2012, in Baltimore. Baltimore won 3-2. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi walks off the field after speaking with an umpire in the first inning of Game 2 of the American League division baseball series against the Baltimore Orioles on Monday, Oct. 8, 2012, in Baltimore. Baltimore won 3-2. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Baltimore Orioles' Nate McLouth, from left, J.J. Hardy, Robert Andino and Manny Machado high-five teammates after Game 2 of the American League division baseball series against the New York Yankees on Monday, Oct. 8, 2012, in Baltimore. Baltimore won 3-2. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
NEW YORK (AP) ? For all of his home runs, All-Star accolades and huge salaries, Alex Rodriguez finds himself in a most familiar spot this season.
A-Rod is an October lightning rod.
With every swing and miss, memories of his amazing run during the New York Yankees' championship season in 2009 fade even further. Instead, fans are becoming more and more vocal, calling for manager Joe Girardi to drop him from the No. 3 spot in the lineup.
Rodriguez struck out to end the Yankees' 3-2 loss to the Baltimore Orioles in Game 2 of their division series Monday night, leaving the best-of-five matchup tied at 1.
He's fanned plenty of times ? five in all while going 1 for 9 so far in the series.
"I feel fine at the plate," Rodriguez said after the loss. "I've just got to finish at-bats. I'm getting good swings."
He'll have the chance to turn things around Wednesday night when the series shifts to the Bronx for Game 3. Hiroki Kuroda (16-11) starts for New York against Miguel Gonzalez (9-4), a rookie right-hander who has 17 strikeouts in 13 2-3 innings against the Yankees in two starts.
After their train experienced an electrical outage after the loss Monday and turned a usual 2-hour, 15-minute trip to New York into a 5-hour journey, manager Joe Girardi was reluctant to address the Yankees' more pressing power problem Tuesday.
"I think that we're going to do whatever it takes to win this three-game series. Nothing that we do will be something that is just a knee-jerk reaction," Girardi said. "The great thing about this is I have a great group of guys that's very unselfish, and they really want to win. And that's what we're going to do, what we think is best to win."
Always protective of his players, Girardi might be choosing to coddle Rodriguez after watching Joe Torre cause a stir in 2006 by dropping the 14-time All-Star to eighth in the Yankees order against the Detroit Tigers in the first round.
"Sometimes it's just not as easy as just writing a name or taking a guy out, a pitcher out. You have to think about the emotional part," Girardi said. "You always have to think about that as a manager."
A big fan of the numbers, all collated in his ever-present binder, Girardi need not look too deep to see that the 37-year-old Rodriguez is not the same player that has amassed 647 homers, fewer than only Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds.
The third baseman hit only 18 home runs and had a .430 slugging percentage while driving in just 57 runs in 122 games this season, exclusively batting third or fourth for the team that scored the second most runs in the majors with 804.
Rodriguez went a startling 67 at-bats in September without an extra-base hit shortly after returning from a broken left hand. Robinson Cano, who had an RBI double Monday, had nine straight multihit games to finish the season, hitting .615 over that stretch, and many fans want to see him hit in the No. 3 slot.
Granted, Rodriguez is not the only player that's nearly Oh-for-October. Baltimore's Adam Jones is 1 for 8, Washington's Bryce Harper is 1 for 10 and Detroit's Prince Fielder is 1 for 8, but the Tigers are up 2-0.
But none of those stars have as much history as the three-time MVP, either. The highest-paid player in baseball with a contract that can exceed $300 million and has five years remaining, A-list girlfriends, a gossip page fixture.
Ending the Yankees' last two trips to the playoffs with whiffs doesn't help ? Game 6 in 2010 ALCS with a caught looking and a swinging strike three against the Tigers last year in the first round. He also hasn't homered in the postseason since hitting six in 2009, but he's fanned 17 times.
Overall, Rodriguez is a career .271 hitter in the postseason with 13 homers and 41 RBIs since making his first playoff appearance in 1995 with Seattle. He is a career .300 hitter in the regular season with 1,950 RBIs.
But Girardi insisted he likes what he sees from Rodriguez. He hit a sharp liner that Baltimore second baseman Robert Andino stopped with a dive and singled before striking out twice as the Yankees tried to rally.
"He squared up two balls," Girardi said. "You look at the ball he hit in the first inning, he squared it up. And then he had the other hard single. Right now I don't have any plans to make any changes."
Rodriguez isn't the only one struggling for the Yankees against the Orioles solid pitching staff. New York went 2 for 8 with runners in scoring position and stranded 10 in Monday's loss.
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Samsung Galaxy S III mini pops up, we go hands-on (video)
When word first started trickling out that Samsung planned to make a mini version of the Galaxy S III, it had the air of plausibility -- we've heard from many a person about the too-large size of that phone for their hands. Then, a press invitation confirmed that "something small" was in the works, and finally mobile chief JK Shin confirmed that a smartphone of that name would be announced today in Frankfurt, Germany.
Now Samsung's spilled all the beans, and revealed the new Galaxy S III mini, a slightly paler version of its bigger brother in specs as well as screen size. Our own short time with the phone certainly revealed that its pushing all the same "inspired by nature" buttons of the original Galaxy S III (and the Galaxy Note II), with the same exact rounded pebble shape and layout. The German marketing rep we spoke to said that the company's research found that users wanted the same phone design as the 4.8-inch Galaxy S III, but in a smaller form factor -- to more easily fit smaller hands and pockets. Samsung said those folks don't necessarily need or want the most powerful phone they can get their hands on and are content to have mid-level specs -- so the mini carries a 1GHz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM, a 4-inch, WVGA AMOLED screen and 32GB max of memory.
It remains to be seen if those specs will dilute the Galaxy S brand, but in any event, we found the phone certainly doesn't cramp our regular-sized hands like its older brother can (let alone the Note II), and the comfortable shape of the original works even better in a mini size. The button placement is identical to the larger handset, and the phone will come out of the box with nearly identical Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean functionality -- with the added Samsung Touchwiz twist, of course. That includes new niceties like the multi-screen option, and a brief play with the phone shows the same butter factor, even with the lesser dual-core processor. So might this mini-me Galaxy S III model sway you over to the Samsung Galaxy family if you disdain the giant screen of its predecessor? Check out the gallery below to see how the size compares with the rest of the family, and a hands-on video and interview with German Samsung rep Mario Winter, both after the break.
Continue reading Samsung Galaxy S III mini pops up, we go hands-on (video)
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মঙ্গলবার, ২ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Having Problems Attracting A True love ? BTI Relationships Tracker
Discovering true love? Is it even possible, in a world where there are not any glass house slippers, no fairy godmothers, with no knights in shimmering armor? After a few failed tries to find, and keep, the man you always dreamt about, you might begin to believe that everything is just a fairytale, and there?s no point to keep looking. Or even worse, you may start to think that it is your fault, in addition to to change everything with regards to you if you want to meet the right folk. It?s not your fault. You can?t change who you are.
But you also can?t manage fate, therefore the best thing you can do is focus on yourself, in the tiny details you can improve, on the way you can stand out when you finally stumble upon your soulmate.
Nearly all women who?ve had difficulties finding love ask whether they should lower their own standards. It?s a tricky question, as well as there?s no answer to fit everybody. Maybe your requirements are indeed silly, as the well-known Zsa Zsa Gabor once place it, ?I want a man who?s type and understanding. Is the fact that too much in order to ask of a millionaire? ?. It?s worth taking a take a step back to analyze the problem; consider the men about your, your co-workers, friends, individuals you have within your lists on social networking platforms, and so forth: do you see yourself online dating any of all of them? If the solution is a definite no, you might wish to reconsider your requirements, you?re probably in the phase in your life once you modeled your values based on unrealistic anticipation. But don?t get worried too much: once you find the right man, the criteria will suddenly modify by themselves, before you can even realize it?s happening.
There?s a saying professional athletes know well: wins bring more wins. If love takes a time to appear in your life, use this period to pay attention to other factors, on your career, hobbies, or perhaps friends. As soon as you gain balance ? not only from the financial, but also from the social point of view ? you might discover that a great number of tend to be naturally attracted to an individual. At the same time, growing your list of passions will help you find new friends, as well as extend your list of options. And also, speaking of options, it?s worth considering things that you haven?t done before, for example accepting blind schedules set up from your friends or relatives, or joining an online dating site. You hear tons of horror stories about arranged dates, however the reality is this approach has proved effective over time, as others often have a better perspective showing how two people aligned. (Remember the particular fairy godmother? Provide her an opportunity, even though she does not have wings, as well as took are the old lady who works as a receptionist within your workplace. )
Enjoy is not a competition. You don?t have to verify anything to anybody, not even to yourself. It?s by no means too late to locate your soulmate, and there?s no reason to quit. After a dry spell, it may be difficult to find the right balance, in between seeming too desperate to a partnership, and appearing as well jaded and fed up, without a actual interest for anybody. Here?s a little very effective trick: prior to going on the date, and even before going to a party where you will find new friends, view a sitcom or even a comedy (not an enchanting comedy, simply something downright foolish, that will make an individual laugh). It will take the stress off your shoulder blades, you?ll arrive with a smile on your own face ? plus a smile will be worth greater than a designer dress and diamond earrings.
Therefore here?s the bottom line: true love is actual, as millions who have found it could testify. You simply need to be looking forward to it ? as well as don?t expect it to show on a white horse, it might be more likely in the mini-van.
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Source: http://btitracker.org/having-problems-attracting-a-soul-mate/
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Background TV exposure may harm children's development
Background TV ? the kind young children don?t watch but experience because the television is on ? is linked to problems with play, parent-child relationships, and cognitive performance. A new study in the journal ?Pediatrics? suggests that kids are exposed to 4 hours of background television a day.
Background TV threat: How much screen time is allowed in your home? Turning off versus turning down the television, according to a new study, may be more important than you thought. LG Electronic and Doug Wilson showcase interior design that blends style and technology on January 29, 2008 in Rahway, NJ, which integrates an LG LCD HDTV, home theater audio system and LCD monitors.
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EnlargeWe know, we know. You?ve heard all about the dangers of ?screen time? for your children, and have seen all those statistics about how much television the average American toddler watches any given day.
Skip to next paragraph Stephanie HanesCorrespondent
Stephanie Hanes is the lead writer for Modern Parenthood and a longtime Monitor correspondent. She lives in Andover, Mass. with her husband, Christopher, her daughter, Madeline Thuli, a South Africa Labrador retriever, Karoo, and an imperialist cat named Kipling.
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(Hint: in 2006, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children 6 months to 6 years watch television for an average of about an hour a day, although more recent studies have come up with much higher numbers.)
RELATED: Are you a 'Helicopter Parent?' take our QUIZ!
But have you thought about what happens when Junior isn?t watching, but the television is still on?
Recent studies have identified links between this sort of background television exposure and everything from lower sustained attention during playtime, lower quality parent-child interactions and reduced performance on cognitive tasks, write researchers in an article published today online in the journal ?Pediatrics.?
And as it turns out, these researchers found, there?s a lot of background television in the homes of young children.
?The amount of exposure for the average child is startling,? writes authors Matthew Lapierre, Jessica Taylor Piotrowski ,and Deborah Linebarger.
The average US child was exposed to 232.2 minutes of background television on a typical day, according to the study ? that?s just under 4 hours.? For some demographics that number went up even further, with children from the poorest families exposed to nearly 6 hours of background TV on a typical day, African American children exposed to more background TV (5.5 hours) than white children, and children living in single-parent homes exposed to more background television (just over 5 hours) than those kids in multi-parent homes (3.5 hours).
Also, the younger the child, the greater the background television exposure.
Researchers found that children under 24 months were exposed to 5.5 hours of background television a day, while children between 6 and 8 years old are exposed to about 2.75.? They speculated that this might be because parents at home with infants are, well, bored. And that perhaps a parent watching television figures that her baby isn?t absorbing whatever is on the screen.
Still, this finding about very young children ?is particularly startling when considering how much attention is paid to reducing direct exposure for children in this age group,? the researchers write.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under two not watch any televised content; the authors of this new study theorize that anti-screen efforts might do better to focus on indirect television exposure rather than on keeping kids from actually watching programs.
These numbers come from a national telephone survey of 1,454 parents or caregivers with one child between the ages of 8 months and 8 years. Parents used a 24-hour-time diary to report on the child?s exposure to background television.?
Although the researchers recommend quite a bit of follow-up research, they do have a couple of clear recommendations: One, don?t let your kid have a television in his or her room. That?s one of the biggest indicators both of television viewing and background television exposure.?
And two: when you?re not watching, turn off the tube.?
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সোমবার, ১ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Wild horses sold by US going to slaughterhouses?
Susan Montoya Bryan / AP file
Wild horses scour the ground for strands of hay during an adoption event put on by the Bureau of Land Management in Albuquerque, N.M., in 2009.
By Dave Philipps / ProPublica
The Bureau of Land Management faced a crisis this spring.?
The agency protects and manages herds of wild horses that still roam the American West, rounding up thousands of them each year to keep populations stable.
But by March, government pens and pastures were nearly full. Efforts to find new storage space had fallen flat. So had most attempts to persuade members of the public to adopt horses. Without a way to relieve the pressure, the agency faced a gridlock that would invite lawsuits and potentially cause long-term damage to the range.?
So the BLM did something it has done increasingly over the last few years. It turned to a little-known Colorado livestock hauler named Tom Davis who was willing to buy hundreds of horses at a time, sight unseen, for $10 a head.?
The BLM has sold Davis at least 1,700 wild horses and burros since 2009, agency records show [1] -- 70 percent of the animals purchased through its sale program.
Like all buyers, Davis signs contracts promising that animals bought from the program will not be slaughtered and insists he finds them good homes.
But Davis is a longtime advocate of horse slaughter. By his own account, he has ducked Colorado law to move animals across state lines and will not say where they end up. He continues to buy wild horses for slaughter from Indian reservations, which are not protected by the same laws. And since 2010, he has been seeking investors for a slaughterhouse of his own.
"Hell, some of the finest meat you will ever eat is a fat yearling colt," he said. "What is wrong with taking all those BLM horses they got all fat and shiny and setting up a kill plant?"
Animal welfare advocates fear that horses bought by Davis are being sent to the killing floor.?
?The BLM says it protects wild horses,? said Laura Leigh, founder of the Nevada-based advocacy group Wild Horse Education, ?but when they are selling to a guy like this you have to wonder.?
BLM officials say they carefully screen buyers and are adamant that no wild horses ever go to slaughter.
?We don?t feel compelled to sell to anybody we don?t feel good about,? agency spokesman Tom Gorey said. ?We want the horses to be protected.?
Sally Spencer, who runs the wild horse sales program [2], said the agency has had no indication of problems with Davis and it would be unfair for the BLM to look more closely at him based on the volume of his purchases.
"It is no good to just stir up rumors,? she said. ?We have never heard of him not being able to find homes. So people are innocent until proven guilty in the United States."
Congress reverses a move that previously prevented the slaughter of horses for exportation of the meat. Paul Crawley reports.
Some BLM employees say privately that wild horse program officials may not want to look too closely at Davis. The agency has more wild horses than it knows what to do with, they say, and Davis has become a relief valve for a federal program plagued by conflict and cost over-runs.?
"They are under a lot of pressure in Washington to make numbers,? said a BLM corral manager who did not want his name used because he feared retribution from the agency?s national office. ?Maybe that is what this is about. They probably don't want to look too careful at this guy."
******
Wild horses embody the mythic West: Painted Indian war ponies and the cavalry mounts that chased them, pony express runners and the tough partners of cowboys.
At the turn of the 20th Century, they numbered in the millions, but most were rounded up, slaughtered, and used for pet food or fertilizer, until by 1970, there were only 17,000 left.
In 1971, Congress stepped in to save the remaining herds, passing a law [3] that declared wild horses ?living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West? and made it a crime for anyone to harass or kill wild horses on most federal land. The law tasked the departments of Interior and Agriculture with protecting the animals still roaming the range.
Dave Philipps / ProPublica
Tom Davis at his corrals in La Jara, Colo.
In a sense, the Bureau of Land Management -- the part of the Interior Department assigned to oversee the wild horse program -- succeeded in this a bit too well. Protected horses naturally began to reproduce and by 1983 there were an estimated 65,000 horses and burros on the range, competing for resources with cattle and native wildlife.
In the name of maintaining a sustainable balance, the BLM began removing horses from the wild. It now rounds up about 9,400 horses a year, which has kept the wild population at around 35,000.
The captured horses are put up for adoption. Almost anyone can have one for as little as $125 as long as they sign a contract promising not to sell it to slaughter.
Adoptions kept pace with round ups until investigations in the late 1980s and 1990s showed that many adopters, including several BLM employees, had turned a quick profit by selling the horses to slaughterhouses. To discourage such re-sales, the BLM began holding the title of sale for a year. Today the agency says it visits almost every adopter for a ?compliance check? within six months to make sure horses are well cared for.
The restrictions protected horses, but discouraged adoptions, a trend compounded more recently by a bad economy and soaring hay prices.
Today, only one in three captured horses finds a home. The rest go into a warren of tax payer-funded corrals, feed lots and pastures collectively known as ?the holding system.? Since horses often live 20 years after being captured, the holding population has grown steadily for decades from 1,600 in 1989 to more than 47,000. There are now more wild horses living in captivity than in the wild.
For decades, government auditors [4] and wild horse welfare advocates have warned that the policy of capturing and storing horses is unsustainable and have pushed for the BLM to use fertility controls, introduce predators or expand wild horse territories, but the agency has made little progress toward these goals. In the first half of this year, for example, it treated fewer than half as many wild horses with a birth control drug than was planned.?
"I think they are caught in an old way of doing things,? said John Turner, an endocrinologist at University of Toledo who specializes in wild horse fertility control. ?Once they round up the horses, I don't think they like to treat and release. They would rather remove them."
Driven by the cost of caring for unwanted wild horses, the annual price tag of the program has ballooned from $16 million in 1989 to $76 million today.
Cost pressures prompted Congress to pass a last-minute rider to a 2004 law directing the BLM to sell thousands of old or unadoptable wild horses for $10 a head without restrictions -- even for slaughter -- but the agency has not done so, fearing public outrage.?
Instead, since then, the BLM has been selling horses, but requiring buyers to sign contracts [5] saying they will? ?not knowingly sell or transfer ownership of any listed wild horse and or burro to any person or organization with an intention to resell, trade, or give away the animal for processing into commercial products." Violating the agreement is a felony, but there are no compliance checks similar to those done when horses are adopted.
Even when priced at less than a few bales of hay, these horses had little appeal: Sales dropped [6] from 1,468 in 2005 to 351 in 2008.
To explore other options for reducing the number of horses in holding, top BLM officials gathered for weekly closed-door meetings from July to October 2008. According to meeting minutes obtained by the Conquistador Equine Rescue & Advocacy Program, they considered selling thousands of animals for slaughter and even large-scale euthanasia, but concluded such actions would enrage animal-welfare activists to the point they might "threaten the safety of our facilities and our employees."
No clear plan emerged.
As the wild horse program?s situation grew increasingly dire, a new option came knocking: Tom Davis.
******
Davis, 64, a plain-spoken man with a sun-beaten brow, makes his living hauling livestock, but says reselling wild horses now accounts for a substantial part of his income.
By his own account, he has worked around horses all his life -- on racetracks, on ranches, and even rounding up wild horses for slaughter before the 1971 law put a stop to the practice.
For most of that time, he has lived in the tiny town of La Jara, in Colorado?s mountain-ringed San Luis Valley, just down the road from Ken Salazar, the former U.S. Senator who now heads the Department of the Interior.
?When my dad was alive we farmed their land,? Davis said of the Salazar family. ?I like them. I do business with them. I do quite a bit of trucking for Ken.?
(Salazar did not respond to repeated interview requests for this story.)
On a warm morning in May, Davis gave a rambling two-hour interview on the 13-acre spread of corrals and truck lots where he lives.
Leaning against the fence of a muddy corral where a half dozen horses nibbled hay, wearing dusty overalls, Davis gave a simple reason for becoming the BLM?s main buyer.
"I love wild horses to death,? he said. ?It's like an addiction. For some it's drugs, for me it's horses."
According to BLM records, Davis first contacted the program in January 2008. Documents obtained from the agency show he filled out the application [7] to become a buyer over the phone, aided by Spencer, the BLM?s sales director, who wrote in his answers to questions on the form. (A BLM spokesman said in an email that agency employees often did this in the program?s early days, but no longer do.)
Under a question concerning Davis? intended use of the animals, Spencer wrote ?use for movies.? He later told other BLM employees he sold the horses to Mexican movie companies to use on film shoots.
Under a question about what type of horses Davis preferred, the application noted he would take males or females, so long as they were big.
At the bottom of the application, Spencer wrote that she and Davis had ?Discussed goal of providing a good home and making sure none of the horses end up at slaughter plants.? A few weeks later, the BLM sent Davis 36 wild horses from its Ca?on City, Colo., holding corral.
That was the only load the BLM sent Davis in 2008, records show. But in 2009 -- a few months after the meetings about the holding crisis and two weeks after Salazar became head of the Interior Department -- the agency started sending him truckload after truckload, from all over the West. Soon he was by far their biggest customer.
Davis bought 560 horses in 2009, another 332 animals in 2010, 599 more in 2011, and 239 in the first four months of 2012, agency records show. While most BLM buyers purchase one or two horses at a time, Davis averages 35 per purchase and has bought up to 240 at a time.
The animals came from the mountains of California and Wyoming, the mesas of Colorado and Utah, and the deserts of Nevada and Oregon. Many had lived for decades in the wild: Mature band stallions and resilient mares of every color descended from the first American horses.
Davis has paid the BLM a total of $17,630 for the animals, far less than BLM has expended to provide them ? the agency estimates it costs $1,000 to roundup a wild horse and records show it has paid as much as $5,000 per truckload to ship them to Davis. Similar horses that are not acquired from the BLM and can legally be sold for slaughter fetch $300,000 to $600,000 on the open market, according to sales prices from regional livestock auctions.
Some BLM corral managers said in interviews they felt uneasy shipping so many horses to a single buyer, and one they knew so little about, but said such decisions weren?t up to them.
"That all happens in Washington," one said, echoing the comments of many. "We are just peons. We do what we are told."
Davis said BLM employees occasionally asked where his horses ended up, but said he tells them it?s ?none of your damn business.?
"They never question me too hard. It makes 'em look good if they're movin' these horses, see?" he said. "Every horse I take from them saves them a lot of money. I?m doing them a favor. I?m doing the American people a favor."
******
So what happened to the wild horses Davis purchased from the BLM?
The agency can?t say for sure. It does not hold onto the titles of wild horses acquired through its sale program as it does with horses that are adopted. Officials also have no process for following up to make sure buyers use animals as they claim they will in applications.
In the interview at the ranch, Davis said he had found most of the mustangs ?good homes? on properties mostly in the southeastern states.? Asked if he would provide records of these sales, he responded, ?Ain?t no way in hell.?
Other people who find homes for rescue horses in the region say they rely heavily on advertising and web sites to connect with buyers. Davis does not appear to do so.
?I?ve never heard of him,? said David Hesse, who runs Mustang and Wild Horse Rescue of Georgia [8]. ?If he said he is finding homes for that many old, untamed mustangs, I?m skeptical. The market is deader than dead. I have trouble finding homes for even the ones that are saddle-broken. Wild ones? No way.?
On some sales applications, Davis has said he sells horses to graze on land used for oil and gas drilling in Texas, but oil industry experts contacted for this story said they had never heard of such a practice.
According to brand inspection documents [9] required by Colorado when livestock is sold or shipped more than 75 miles, Davis and his wife say they have sent 765 animals with BLM wild horse brands to a sparsely populated stretch of arid brush country along the Mexico border in Kinney County, Texas. (The records do not give specific addresses where animals were sent, but identify small towns, such as Spofford, as their destination.)
It?s impossible to confirm that the horses actually arrived there or to know where they might have gone next, however, because Texas is one of the few Western states that do not require brand inspections when horses are moved or sold.
Just south of Kinney County is Eagle Pass, a border town that isthe only crossing for horses going to slaughter in Mexico for hundreds of miles.
There have been no horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. since 2007, when Congress barred funding for U.S. Department of Agriculture horse meat inspectors. Since then horse slaughter has been outsourced. A 2011 report by the General Accountability Office [10] found the export of horses for slaughter to Mexico shot up 660 percent after the ban.
In Eagle Pass, as at other crossings, slaughter horses are checked by USDA veterinarians. A? USDA spokeswoman refused to make veterinarians available for interviews, but confirmed that vets sometimes see wild horses bearing the BLM brand in slaughter export pens.
Brand documents leave almost 1,000 of Davis?s wild horses unaccounted for. That means they should still be within 75 miles of his residence -- if he has complied with state law.
Asked if this was the case, Davis first said the horses were still on 160 acres of land he leases from the state of Colorado. Then he said some had been shipped out of state without brand inspections, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 18 months in jail and a $1,000 fine.
"Since when is anything in this country done legal?" Davis said in a phone interview.
******
Had BLM officials inquired further about Davis, they might have found reason to question his plans for wild horses.
Davis is a vocal proponent of slaughtering wild horses in the holding system, which he considers a waste of resources. During the interview at his home, he said he would purchase far more horses if the BLM allowed him to resell them to so-called ?kill buyers.?
?They are selling me mere hundreds now,? he said. ?If they sold me 50,000, I guarantee I could do something with them. I would go to Canada. I would go to Mexico.?
Davis has close friends who export horses for slaughter, including Dennis Chavez, whose family runs one of largest export businesses in the southwest. In 1984, when Davis authored ?Be Tough or be Gone [11],? a self-published book about a horseback ride he took from Mexico to Alaska, he dedicated it to Chavez?s father, Sonny Chavez.
Also, despite the obstacles that impede U.S. horse slaughterhouses, Davis said he has been trying to drum up investors to open a slaughter plant in Colorado.
He said he had approached pet food companies to buy the meat and asked Ken Salazar?s brother, John Salazar, who is the head of the Colorado Department of Agriculture, to help him get a grant to finance the business. John Salazar declined to help Davis, and so far the slaughterhouse venture has not gone forward.
?How can the BLM say with a straight face they are protecting wild horses when they deal with this guy?? said Leigh, of Wild Horse Education.
Animal welfare advocates have raised concerns about Davis? purchases, but they say federal officials paid little attention.
In late 2010, the BLM rounded up 255 horses in the Adobe Town wild horse area [12] in Wyoming. A local loose knit group of advocates had been photographing the herd for years. After the round-up, group members called BLM officials, looking to adopt a few of the animals, particularly an old stallion they had named Grey Beard [13].
They were told that the horses had been claimed by an anonymous buyer who planned to resell them to large landowners looking for agricultural tax exemptions. The advocates tried to learn more about the buyer, but Spencer refused to give his name, citing privacy policies.
According to interviews and agency emails, group members told Spencer that anyone buying that many horses at once had to be a kill buyer.
Sandra Longley, one of the advocates, said in an email to another advocate that Spencer had assured her that the buyer in question had a long relationship with the BLM and was ?above reproach.?
A BLM spokesman said Spencer did not recall the conversation.
According to BLM records, most of the horses were sold to Davis.
Warnings from advocates about Davis do not appear to have prompted the BLM to reconsider selling to him.In fact, internal agency email shows that officials actively turned to Davis to absorb freshly rounded-up horses so they wouldn?t end up in the overloaded holding system.
In January, the manager of the agency?s corral in Burns, Ore., emailed superiors in Washington, D.C., to ask what to do with 29 mares, almost all of which were pregnant. Spencer replied that Davis would take them.
In March, a corral manager emailed Spencer to say he had 92 ?nice horses? just rounded up in High Rock, Calif., and to ask if Davis could take some of the geldings.
A day later Spencer replied, ?Davis told me that if the geldings are in good shape he will be able to place them into good homes.?
?How many would Mr. Davis want to buy?? the corral manager asked Spencer. ?And are there any specifics that he is looking for??
?He said he?d be interested in all of them, no specifics,? Spencer replied. ?
Spencer said in an interview she is under no pressure to approve buyers with questionable backgrounds and feels confident that ?we do not sell to people we feel are going to do bad things to the horses.?
When asked about Davis, she said he had been thoroughly checked out and she had confidence in him. More generally, she said that if there were problems with a buyer, she would know.
?People watch where our horses go and the brands are very distinctive,? she said. ?If things were going on, we would get a call.?
Davis? most recent purchase was in April, when he bought 106 animals. Since then, the agency may have opened an inquiry into what he has done with horses bought from the BLM.? In June, an agency investigator contacted this reporter seeking information about him. This month, however, the BLM assistant special investigator in Santa Fe (the contact supplied by the agency on this matter) said he was "unable to confirm or deny" that the BLM is investigating Davis.
Animal welfare advocates say the agency?s reliance on Davis is just another indication of how the wild horse program and its overburdened holding system have been mismanaged.
?He is just a symptom of the train wreck that is the Wild Horse and Burro program,? said Ginger Kathrens, director of the horse advocacy group The Cloud Foundation, based in Colorado Springs. ?They just warehouse more and more horses and create their own crisis. Then, after they run the program into the ground, they have to find ways out of it. It is a whole unnatural ridiculous system run amok. And who pays the ultimate price? Wild horses.?
This report, "All the Missing Horses," first appeared at ProPublica.org.
To contact Dave Philipps about this story, email him at horse@propublica.org.
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