Category: The Force of the Horse

A Nation full of Anger, a Corral Full of Wild Horses and the BLM Hits the Replay Button

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Yesterday, out on the range, roamed a dust covered and weary car full of anger and frustration.

Perhaps it was because its occupants had just climbed to the top of a ridge to watch a green and dangerous contract helicopter pilot chase a band of four wild horses across a mountain top and into a treacherous canyon only to release them. The release was good, but in that four was a very pregnant mare and a foal. Couldn’t the BLM contract pilot have figured out that was animal cruelty in Nevada about 8 miles earlier?

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Wyoming Horse Slaughter Plant a Case of Smoke and Mirrors

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The Wallis slaughter plant has been the subject of dozens of stories and in each it has been completely different. At first it was going to be a mobile slaughter truck that went around to various holding facilities like the Cheyenne Stock Yards (which Sue was “negotiating” to obtain). It was going to kill horses and feed the meat to prisoners and school children. The owners of the stockyards announced it would not be happening.

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Obama Wild Horse Stampede Contractor Rewrites the Truth

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On January 24th our good friend and college Robert Winkler of The Desert Independent published a guest editorial written by the wife of one of the Bureau of Land Management’s chief helicopter wild horse stampede contractors, Sue Cattoor. I read it, I gagged, I moved on and did not comment. There was a moment that I considered posting it, here, and decided against giving this self-ordained queen of wild horse suffering any more publicity to feed her maniacal ego. But after days of eating at my soul; I just can’t let it go as I sincerely owe it to the tens of thousands of wild horses whose lives have been destroyed, both figuratively and literally, to respond to this trashing of the truth and blatant attempt to further mislead and twist the opinion of the American public.

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Doing Our Part – And Being Dismissed

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In the past few years, on government web sites and in newspaper op-eds, a large portion of the failure for the Wild Horse and Burro Program was laid on the overwhelming populations of wild equines on the ranges and in holding, then at the feet of the Public, for lackluster performances in adopting thousands of animals removed in the face of a poor economy. Yet, according to information published by the Bureau of Land Management, the Public has participated, to the best of it’s ability, even in the leanest years, 2007 – 2009.

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This One Stallion

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A tall, charcoal maned gray stallion living in Twin Peaks has, through no intentional actions on his part, accrued a small fan base.

Twin Peak’s “BraveHeart” ~ Photo by Lisa LeBlanc

He is stunning, though years of defending his family and his territory have left his black skin visibly scarred, a common testament to a fiercely protective nature. First observed during a ‘mixer’, a Wild Equine version of speed dating, he pawed the ground, trotting, snorting, kicking up dust in a frank display of masculinity. Middle age and hard living has begun to moderately effect his body, leaving him angular, in contrast to the inherent roundness of a younger, untested stallion. Still, he exudes a powerful appeal in his direct gaze and commanding stance, an assurance that he is more than capable of taking care of what is his. And in his small realm, he is undisputed Lord over all he surveys. In Wild Horse society, little credence is given to perceived perfection; he wooed and won many mares. His mares chose him for his competence as protector and provider, for his experience on the range and likely, for the hardiness & vigor sure to be handed down to his offspring.

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The Drive-By

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Once upon a time, on a small one-acre paddock in rural central Texas, there resided several horses; unfortunately, not in the best of conditions. It was a mean enclosure, boarded with barbed wire and natural cut poles whose bark had been eaten off long ago by the horses held captive within.

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Immodest Proposal

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Swift wrote the Modest Proposal as a political satire. His goal in suggesting that the solution to poverty was eating the children of the poor was to point out that the problems of poverty were a consequence of the political and economic system of his time. In writing the proposal, Swift intentionally utilized agricultural terms to describe the poor of Ireland in order to make a political statement about the current political system that created the poverty than found its victims deplorable. In contrast the pro-horse slaughter activists utilize non-agricultural terms in an attempt to create a positive connotation of horse slaughter. Slaughter becomes the humane processing of horses. If we substitute the word horses for children then the analogy between Swift’s proposal and horse slaughter becomes all too apparent.

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Reprint: Men, Horses, Sex and a Thing Called Love

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Recently I was engaged in an email conversation, with a group of colleagues, on the issue of the extensive cruelty exhibited by Federal agencies and our government, overall. The discussion was centered on the unimaginable suffering that our native wild horses are subjected to at the hands of the Obama administration’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) headed up by Bob Abbey under the direction of 5th generation rancher, Ken Salazar the Secretary of the Department of Interior (DOI). As the conversation progressed it became apparent that the bulk of the mindless cruelty, shown to our federally protected mustangs, is administered by and distributed through men. Hence, the question arose,

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