Hello and Happy Thursday to everyone!

We had our meeting with the new Theodore Roosevelt National Park interim Superintendent Daniels.  She will be at Theodore Roosevelt National Park for not more than 120 days.  She did say that we may have another interim superintendent before the park finds a permanent replacement.

We welcomed her to TRNP and reiterated that we are looking forward to working with her.

We gave her a copy of the petition that all of you have signed.  We requested that the collars be removed, especially since we know from the March 2024 report that the park has already analyzed the movement of the horses.  Blake McCann was also present at the meeting.  He started explaining that these collars were different, they send reports every 2 hours, etc. 

I said the bottom line is that this is just another experiment being done on these horses and we are tired of our horses being experimented on.  I also stated that in light of the last almost 3 years and the public trust that has been lost, this would be an easy way for the park to start to repair those relationships. 

No answers can be determined today.  Superintendent Daniels will talk to her supervisors about this concern and keep the dialog open with us.

Blake did state that the battery life of the collars does not affect the remote release – so if the batteries die out in 2-3 years, it will not affect the collars being able to be removed remotely. 

I also asked Blake for clarification – since they used GonaCon so aggressively this year, I would assume that there will not be ANY administration of GonaCon in 2025.  He said that was not true.  There are some horses that were too young so they may give them GonaCon.  When I asked why we can’t leave the horses alone, he replied, “We are trying to halt reproduction for now.”

That led to a somewhat heated discussion about the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the validity of the 1978 management plan and what constitutes a Categorical Exclusion under the laws of NEPA.  In the end we stated that we would leave that discussion to our lawyers.  Blake added they would leave it to theirs.

I also had copies of our Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) from 2022 and stated that Nancy Finley told me 2-3 times that she would get those documents for me.  Still nothing.  Superintendent Daniels said that she will look into that.

I also handed her a copy of our FOIA request from November 8^th.  I checked with our lawyers before the meeting to see if they heard anything and they confirmed they had not.  Superintendent Daniels said she would look into that as well. 

While we were in our meeting, our lawyers forwarded us an email acknowledgment that our FOIA request was received. 

Superintendent Daniels said she would continue communicating with us.  She will let me know what she finds out about the collars and the FOIA requests. 

We will be sending the updated petition to Senator Hoeven’s office, Deputy Director Frank Lands and also Governor Burgum’s office. 

We will keep you posted.

Thank you for your continued support. 

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