Family and friends mourn the loss but celebrate the amazing life of Shirley Anne Larkin Tassencourt, who passed away on March 4, 2021 at Talbot Hospice in Easton, Md. She was 94 years old.
Shirley was born on Dec. 5, 1926 in Chungking, China. At that time, her parents, Professor George R. and Anne (Stacy) Larkin were in the process of leaving China after serving for six years as academic, faith-based missionaries at West China Union University in Chengdu, Szechuan, China. They were sponsored by Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and joined other educators who were part of an international group assigned to the University in Chengdu. The Larkin family also included Shirleyâs brother, Bert Larkin, who was three years old when they departed China.
By SUZANNE ROY
Outgoing Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and his illegally serving Bureau of Land Management (BLM) director William Perry Pendley will go down in history as the worst stewards of our nationâs public lands. The past four years have seen an unrelenting assault on the environment as Bernhardt and Pendley sought to overturn key environmental laws and deregulate activities of the oil, gas, mining and livestock industries on the public resources they exploit.
Americaâs wild horses and burros were not spared. Pendley famously called wild horses an âexistential threatâ to public lands, an absurd claim that laid the groundwork for his plan to round up 90,000 wild horses and burros over the next five years. The plan would decimate wild herds and cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion in its initial phase alone.
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Volunteers with the American Wild Horse Campaign dart wild horses of the Virginia Range near Reno, Nevada, to administer a fertility control vaccine to reduce pregnancies among the mares. The program started in 2019 and so far has treated more than 1,300 horses with 3,000-plus doses the largest such effort in the world.
American Wild Horse Campaign
SALT LAKE CITY A successful, intense program in Nevada involving wild horses could help refine the science of fertility control in additional wild horse populations as well other species like elephants in Africa.
I applaud U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland for taking a stand to protect wild horses and supporting efforts in the U.S. House to humanely manage wild horse populations on the range where they belong. She recently took a stand against the Bureau of Land Managementâs plan to conduct brutal surgical sterilization procedures, and she is urging the BLM to utilize a reasonable portion of its budget to implement humane fertility control, the PZP vaccine. PZP is a viable solution and costs only a fraction of what the agency spends on removing and warehousing horses.
The Bureau of Land Management must end its failed strategy of removing horses. Terrified horses â including young foals â are chased by helicopters and often killed or severely injured. Just this month, a horse suffered a broken neck during a roundup in Utah. Removing and warehousing horses in corrals leads to an increase in population growth and is projected to cost over a billion dollars if the agency continues on this pat