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DENVER––Wild
horses rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management and sold to slaughter hit the
headlines on January 4––again. This time Associated Press reporter
Martha Mendoza, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, chased the perennial allegations of
BLM malfeasance by tracing paper trails, something animal advocates have not
done on any comparable scale. |
Photograph courtesy of
the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program |
"Using freeze-brand numbers
and computer records," Mendoza reported, "the AP traced more than 57
former BLM horses sold to slaughterhouses since September. Eighty percent were
less than 10 years old and 25% were less than five years old." Further,
Mendoza alleged, "The AP matched computer records of horse adoptions with a
computerized list of federal employees and found that more than 200 current BLM
employees have adopted more than 600 wild horses and burros."
Mendoza
got some eye-popping quotes, too. "Asked about the AP's findings," she
wrote, "Tom Pogacnik, director of the BLM's $16-million-a-year Wild Horse
and Burro Program, conceded that about 90% of the horses rounded up go to
slaughter."
In addition, Mendoza found, "Using the BLM's
computerized records maintained in Denver and obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act, the AP found that 32,774 of all adopted horses and burros––20%––remain
untitled. Legally, they are still federal property."
The Mendoza
expose unraveled somewhat under scrutiny. The 57 wild horses sold to slaughter
in approximately four months was not a greater number than go to slaughter from
many individual riding stables, racetracks, and ranches. That 90% of the BLM
horses eventually go to slaughter, as Pogacnik purportedly indicated, would just
reflect the fate of most horses from any source who go to auction.
"While
it is common for old or lame horses to go to slaughter," Mendoza
acknowledged, "nearly all former BLM horses sent to slaughter are young and
healthy."
Yet dozens of horse rescue groups from coast to coast stay
busy buying and adopting out other young, healthy horses they find at slaughter
auctions. The fact is, horse overpopulation seems to be as much a reality as pet
overpopulation, and although many people are willing to adopt a horse for a
while, most quickly find themselves unable to keep up with the ongoing costs and
demand on time. Wild horses, precisely because they are wild, require particular
effort to turn into good riding steeds. Since federal budget cuts killed most of
the prison-based projects that formerly either "gentled" or "broke"
wild horses to saddle, the horses available for adoption have been more
problematic, less suitable for the average rider. They can't compete with
abundant ready-to-ride horses from domestic oversupply, even at the BLM adoption
price of $125, 11% of the average cost to the government of rounding up,
vaccinating, freezebranding, and adopting out a wild horse.
Adopters "can get lame or old horses for as little as $25, or even
for free," Mendoza wrote, referring to the fee-waiver program the BLM uses
to rid itself of horses nobody wants. "After holding the horses for a year,
the adopters are free to sell them for slaughter, typically receiving $700 per
animal. The government spends $1,100. The adopter can make $575 or more."
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No gift horses
Pogacnik pointed out
in response to Mendoza that, "The cost of caring for an animal for a year
runs between $500 and $1,000 or higher, depending on the part of the country,
making it economically impractical for people to immediately profit after title
is issued. Despite these safeguards, some wild horses that are titled and no
longer under federal protection wind up in slaughterhouses," Pogacnik
acknowledged. "However, none of the animals cited in the article were
federally protected. These animals were privately owned." |
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Photograph courtesy of
the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program |
Tanna Chattin, New Mexico state
BLM office external affairs chief, added a few more personal words. "I had
to compete in the adoption lottery like all other citizens," she wrote of
acquiring her mare Duchess last September. "On the day of the lottery I
paid the government $125. My horse trailer, while it is great for my other
horses, does not meet the BLM standards for a wild horse. I paid $100 to a
professional hauler to get my little mare to Santa Fe. I also spend $200 at the
adoption site for professional horse handlers to begin the gentling. Prior to
adoption, I needed a veterinary certificate, stipulating that I had an adequate
place for her, and afterward an inspector visited the stable unannounced.
Duchess costs me $200 a month to board. When I get title, I will have an
investment in her, not counting veterinary care, of $2,285. Yet Mendoza claims I
can receive $700 for her at the slaughterhouse as a greedy BLM employee and make
a profit."
The record of horse adoptions by BLM employees that
Mendoza found divides out to three horses per adopter. Some BLM staff, unlike
Chattin and the majority, may take large numbers––but that may not
mean what it seems.
Mendoza cited two BLM employees who adopted multiple
horses, some of whom were later sold for slaughter. Michael Woods, of Baker
City, Oregon, adopted four horses, beginning in 1992, and sold them all. A mare
whom Woods said had hurt her leg went to slaughter in 1996.
The other example Mendoza cited was Victor McDarment, who manages the BLM
corrals at Rock Springs, Wyoming, and leads roundups and adoption events
throughout the region. "According to BLM data base records," Mendoza
stipulated, "McDarment has adopted 16 horses. His estranged wife adopted
nine. His children adopted at least six. His co-workers in the corrals and their
families adopted 54 more."
Some of McDarment's horses, Mendoza
found, "ended up with Dennis Gifford, a Lovell, Wyoming rancher and rodeo
contractor who was barred from BLM horse adoptions because he was rounding up
wild mustangs illegally and adding them to his private herds. According to court
records, he has also been convicted of selling livestock without state brand
inspections." Gifford told Mendoza, "he's sure some of McDarment's
horses were slaughtered."
ANIMAL PEOPLE happened to call
Robin Duxbury of Project Equus on other business two years ago just as she came
in the door from watching a McDarment roundup, and took extensive notes on her
appalled observations of alleged brutality. She had forgotten the conversation
when ANIMAL PEOPLE called her again in researching this article, and
ANIMAL PEOPLE did not remind her, but when we asked if she knew
McDarment, she described all the same incidents in almost the same terms.
Acknowledging
that McDarment may be a rough customer, Chattin nonetheless told ANIMAL
PEOPLE that in her view, Mendoza treated him unfairly.
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| "For over a year,"
Chattin said, "I encouraged Mendoza to really look at the wild horse
program. We told her about some of the problems up front, trying to find
resolutions rather than blame. I personally believe Victor McDarment took a
cultural hit. Many of us know Victor, and as an American Indian like myself, he
has a large extended family who have been involved with horses probably over a
lifetime. Mendoza didn't make clear that Victor's BLM involvement with horses
was over a 20-year period. Within that period, he adopted 25 horses, of whom he
still has 16. After receiving title, he sold one as a saddle horse, gave one to
a brother-in-law, traded four for pasture land, and three died. His girlfriend
adopted horses before he knew her. His adult children may have adopted horses on
their own. They do not live in Wyoming. |
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Photograph courtesy of
Redwings Horse Sanctuary |
"I'm sure Mendoza could
write a scathing article about me next year," Chattin added, "because
of my advocacy in promoting horse adoptions among my many, many relatives and
tribal members."
A wild horse story
In
theory, BLM horse adopters might get rich quick selling horses for meat if they
could get lots of horses by fee-waiver, evade titling, and/or have access to "free"
pasture, either on their own land or public land through a sweetheart deal like
the one the Julia Butler Hansen refuge (see page one) gives to a nearby cattle
farmer. But the failure of the BLM to title 20% of the wild horses it places may
chiefly reflect personnel loss through budget cuts. The 32,774 untitled
adoptions that Mendoza discovered involved "more than 18,000 different
people," she wrote, indicating that the overwhelming majority do not take
horses in commercial volume. A paperwork backlog would be the logical
interpretation of a memo of March 27, 1995, in which according to Mendoza, BLM
law enforcement agent John Brenna said BLM official Lili Thomas made "a
tacit admission of back-dating documents."
Brenna was among a group
of BLM law enforcement agents who stood silent at a September 19, 1995 press
conference in Albuquerque, called by representatives of eight organizations who
banded together to make a joint statement as the American Wild Horse and Burro
Alliance.
"Evidence will be provided" about "funneling
horses through an internal pipeline for disposal at slaughtering plants,
creating large monetary profits for select individuals," the Alliance
claimed in summoning media. The whole BLM wild horse program, they claimed, was
based on "manipulation of field data for the purpose of drastically
reducing wild horse and burro populations."
The BLM law enforcement
agents appeared as mute props, purportedly gagged by a grand jury in Del Rio,
Texas, that apparently never actually heard witnesses. Reporters were told that
the agents had been transferred hither and yon in the interim due to BLM
retaliation for exposing fraud. Copies were distributed of a letter sent to
American Wild Horse and Burro Alliance spokeperson Karen Sussman by recently
retired BLM official Reed Smith, which seemed to support allegations of a
cover-up.
For a few days the Wild Horse and Burro Alliance enjoyed the
spotlight. But then that story fell apart much as Mendoza's did. As ANIMAL
PEOPLE reported in November 1995 and follow-ups, the grand jury probe arose
from a December 1994 incident in which Brent Heberlein, manager of the Beltex
horse slaughtering plant at Fort Worth, Texas, called the BLM to report the
receipt of eight suspect wild horses––not exactly an attempt to cover
up a supposed major source of animals.
The law enforcement agents who
attended the Albuquerque press conference, like hundreds of other Interior
Department staff at the same time, were being transferred all over as part of
the Clinton administration's scheme for downsizing federal bureaucracy. With
steep budget and staff cuts mandated, staff were being moved to fill vacancies,
wherever they were, rather than lay people off. ANIMAL PEOPLE
located and interviewed most of the agents, but none could supply any
specifics about alleged abuses within the BLM wild horse program that hadn't
already been published by American Wild Horse Coalition member groups'
newsletters in 1987-1990, after first surfacing in mass media.
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Reed Smith had worked in the oil
and gas leasing program, not with wild horses. His four-page letter, which
mentioned wild horses only in the first paragraph, looked like a rewrite of an
alleged expose of the oil and gas program that he'd originally issued in October
1994. |
Photograph courtesy of
Redwings Horse Sanctuary |
A Reed Smith who seemed to fit
his description had blown a lot of whistles that didn't sound true, as a failed
writer living on a government disability pension, as a book store owner who
claimed without substantiation that his apparent prosecution for allegedly
selling pornography had something to do with the landmark 1961 Tropic of
Cancer case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, as a tax evader and advocate
of tax revolt, and as author/publisher of tabloid denials that the Nazis gassed
Jews at Auschwitz.Smith eventually denied being that person. BLM sources,
however, not only agreed that Smith probably was that person, but also offered
that he'd been in trouble for purportedly poaching moose in Alaska on government
time.
The Department of Justice on July 5, 1996 dropped the Del Rio probe,
which centered on 36 horses adopted in 1993 by Texas rancher James Donald
Galloway, who was a former BLM staffer, and eight of his friends. In July 1993,
19 of the horses were seized from a ranch in Terrell County, Texas, by
magisterial order, after an informant reported overhearing Galloway and an
associate discussing a scheme to sell them for slaughter after they gained title
to the horses by keeping them for the requisite year. Galloway surrendered
another eight horses in March 1994. One horse died, and the remainder were the
group Heberlein intercepted at Beltex. Galloway had adopted as many as 9,000 of
the 165,000 wild horses rounded up by the BLM since 1971, but the Justice
Department found that the case against him was based on hearsay.
Horsefeathers & such
ANIMAL PEOPLE was not surprised when by the third
paragraph of Mendoza's January 28 follow-up, she––like the American
Wild Horse and Burro Alliance––was reduced to quoting Reed Smith.
Doug McInnis of The New York Times also published an expose of the
BLM wild horse program on January 28, after amplifying the 1995 Reed Smith
allegations in two 1996 articles. But according to McInnis' sources, the BLM
problem is not so much a matter of falsification as it is of deliberately not
paying attention. "Faced with the need to remove 10,000 horses a year from
public lands," McInnis quoted what he termed an internal 1996 Justice
Department memorandum, "BLM has an unstated policy of not looking too
closely at proposed adoptions." BLM staff "freely admit that everyone
'knows' as a general proposition that most of the horses adopted go out to
slaughter eventually," the memo added, but "the agency tries to avoid
figuring out that this will happen in any given adoption."
But Bill
Sharp, former BLM manager of adoptions in the Southwest sector, perhaps most
accurately fingered the crux. "They've always had too many horses," he
told McInnis. "We were under pressure all the time to move more horses.
That's the name of the game. If you look at the history of the program, it's
been a wreck ever since it started."
The BLM took over the business of removing wild horses from public land
from grazing leaseholders as result of a long campaign by the late Velma
Johnson, a Nevada secretary, who began fighting mustang roundups more than 40
years ago. Her struggle inspired The Misfits (1961), the last film of
both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. The 1971 Wild and Free Roaming Horse and
Burro Act was dubbed the "Wild Horse Annie Act" in Johnson's honor.
But if anything ever really changed wild horse management, it isn't
apparent. Thirty million cattle and sheep graze western range, compared with an
officially estimated 32,000 wild horses––about as many as lived in
Nevada alone in 1990. The Nevada herd is now down to 23,000, and is to be
thinned to 19,000 by the end of this year. Yet as in Johnson's day, ranchers
begrudge every blade of grass and drink of water the horses take from land
leased for grazing at about $2.00 per "animal unit month," 25% or less
of estimated fair market value.
The situation is the same in Owyhee County, Idaho. "The government is
supposed to manage the forage and recreation to protect wild horses,"
retired Navy officer turned private wild horse tamer Earl Maggard recently told
McInnis. "But when ranchers start screaming and hollering that there's too
many horses out there, the BLM holds a roundup. I've opposed every reduction
they've ever made."
The BLM recently proposed to cut the grazing pressure in the Owyhee
mountains by a third, after finding 80% of the federal grasslands to be in "fair
to poor" condition. The cut won't take effect until 1998, at earliest.
Meanwhile, the Owyhee wild horse herd of about 200 takes the heat.
"Of
the nine states that wild horses and burros roam," Robin Duxbury of
Denver-based Project Equus told ANIMAL PEOPLE, "Colorado's horses
probably fare better than most. The Colorado wild horse population is relatively
small. BLM management of these horses is at a minimum, but is certainly not
without controversy. The Colorado Wild Horse and Burro Coalition and Friends of
the Mustangs do a pretty good job of staying in the faces of the BLM when
roundups take place. The Coalition, in particular, challenges every roundup, and
always has volunteers on site who do counts which ensure that none are rerouted
to the killers.
"Despite this effort, it's far from foolproof," Duxbury
explained. "Wild horses from Colorado do wind up on European dinner plates,"
the major destination of North American horsemeat. "I attend most of the
horse auctions on the eastern slope during the spring and summer months, and I
see the BLM freeze brand on at least one horse per auction. These poor horses
were impulse buys for people who are not knowledgable about horses in general,
and pretty much clueless about wild horses. They get their wake-up call a few
weeks after the adoption. They realize, 'My God, we have a wild animal!' Some
are smart enough to admit their mistake and return their horses to the BLM. This
is one way in which some horses are routed to the killers. The BLM doesn't want
the returns, because they have few resources to provide for them and cannot
return them to the wild." A BLM sanctuary in Oklahoma already has 1,100
geldings on it, whose prospects of re-adoption are slim and whose budget is
jeopardized annually by cuts. "Some returns are sent to Canon City for
training in Colorado's Wild Horse Inmate Program," Duxbury added. "Other
adopters simply wait a year to receive full ownership and then hit the first
auction."
The wildness of wild horses is not to be underestimated. "Without
fail," Duxbury said, "every time I've seen a wild horse prodded down
the chute into the auction arena, the horse has gone berserk. They throw
themselves against the steel bars of the arena, try to jump the fence, fall
down, run head-on into walls, and injure themselves. No one is going to bid on a
horse like that, except the killers.
"It's not enough to say the BLM adoption program has outlived its
usefulness," Duxbury emphasized. "It never has served the best
interests of wild horses, and never will. It was doomed to fail from the
beginning."
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| The Wild Horse Annie Act was
founded on the erroneous premise that wild horses can be successfully
domesticated and placed in caring stables for recreational riding, at
sufficiently low cost to compete with other sources of riding horses, in
adequate volume to satisfy ranchers at a time when the horses had no natural
predators over most of their range. While 25 years of attempted adoptions have
demonstrated that slaughter is the only practicable high-volume destination for
the horses, horse predators are back. Grizzly bears have not repopulated their
former range, but pumas have, and wolves are beginning to. "Predators work,"
Duxbury observes. "A good example is in the Montgomery Pass, on the
California/Nevada border. According to Linda Coates-Markle of the BLM office in
Billings, Montana, the Montgomery Pass horses are controlled solely by pumas."
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Unpopular
solutions
However, Duxbury doubts that nature alone could
solve the wild horse dilemma, even if ranchers and bioxenophobic conservation
groups such as the Nature Conservancy, National Audubon Society, and Natural
Resources Defense Council could be persuaded to drop mass roundups––which
the conservationists as well as the ranchers want to increase. Contending that
equines are an "introduced species," though they evolved in North
America, conservationists, not ranchers, in recent years convinced the Forest
Service, National Park Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to extirprate
wild horses and burros from their holdings. The BLM tolerated wild burros in the
Mojave desert, for instance; only since the the land was deeded to the Park
Service at the creation of the Mojave National Preserve has Wild Burro Rescue
had to remove two dozen burros a year so that the burro herd won't be shot.
"In July of 1994," Duxbury recounts, "the starving wild
horses at the White Sands Missile Range were big news, and the International
Society for the Protection of Mustangs and Burros," the same group that
orchestrated the American Wild Horse and Burro Alliance, "was at the
forefront of the media. I recall vividly the conversation I had with that
group's spokesperson, Karen Sussman. Before calling Sussman, I consulted with
Jaime Jackson. I hold his opinions about wild horses in high regard because he
spent several years living with and studying these animals in the wild, getting
dirty, tolerating extreme weather, going hungry and thirsty at times, and
risking altercations with nervous stallions and aggressive mares. Jaime's
solution," letting nature handle it, "was so simple that I couldn't
wait to share it. How naive of me! What it boiled down to was, Sussman wanted to
save the horses. She prevailed, and had some good fundraising fodder. But now I
have heard that an adoption nightmare has been the result," as the ISPMB
apparently promised to place more horses than it actually could.
"Last July," Duxbury explained, "Jaime was contacted by a
Susan Wagoner, who sought his help in finding suitable homes for the wild horses
who are still being removed from White Sands. She wanted to give them 'wild and
free-roaming' homes, not in the wild but in a domestic equivalent. Appreciating
paradox, Jamie suggested placing about 50 horses in a thousand-acre tract of the
most rugged and probably cheapest land possible, introducing a few pumas if they
weren't already there, and keeping out veterinarians, farriests, and anyone else
not dedicated to natural values. Wagoner never called back. Was Jaime right?
Maybe, maybe not. But it seems to me that if the activists had left well enough
alone, they wouldn't be scrambling around for adopters today."
Enzo
Giobbe of the International Generic Horse Association/HorseAid, on the other
hand, thinks his organization could solve the adoption bottleneck if allowed to
bid on managing the whole BLM wild horse program as a private nonprofit
contractor. "We would undertake and underwrite a humane system to keep
the mustang herd population at a manageable level, by gelding yearling stallions
in the field through a team of volunteer licensed veterinarians using a
traveling field hospital," Giobbe said.
"We understand that
management in this manner would leave little to natural selection, but it would
be far better than the current BLM system. We have already offered to take all
the mustangs now in BLM custody and all mustangs taken off the range in the
future, and to place them in adoptive homes. Our only stipulations would be that
the horses would have to be donated to us at no cost, that we would hold full
title to the animals, and that after the animals entered the HorseAid program,
the BLM would not interfere with our placements. However, the BLM would be
allowed to inspect the horses at will. Since we do not allow the sale of any
HorseAid horse, this would ensure their ongoing safety. All horses entered into
the HorseAid program," Giobbe stated, "become and remain property of
HorseAid throughout their lives. This is why we charge no fee to donators of
horses, and no fee to adopters. We monitor all of our horses for life, and the
horses in our program are branded with our registered 'No Kill' brand as an
added safeguard."
It's big talk, but Giobbe and IGA/HorseAid associates appear to have
placed more horses successfully than any other horse rescue organization. "I'm
not sure what the answers are," Duxbury concluded, "but it's pretty
obvious that as long as we have these wise-use wiseguys, and the Nature
Conservancy et al, the wild horse situation is going to get worse before it gets
better. Jay Kirkpatrick may be on the right track in developing fertility
inhibitors. One thing is certain: animal rights activists can no longer use the
weak and worn-out argument of, 'Just leave them alone.' There is going to have
to be some interference," in recognition of political reality and the
prospect that wild horses will just be shot on sight without other intervention
to placate their foes, "but I would like it to be as minimal as possible."
––Merritt Clifton
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