Horse and burro protection occupies a very special place in the big idea known as “animal welfare.” Wild horses embody the Western spirit that has animated our national conversation about protecting animals and open spaces. Horses and burros form some of the strongest bonds with humans found anywhere in the animal kingdom.
It seems like poetic justice — or at least good karma — that novelist and wild-horse advocate Terri Farley ended up living in Nevada.
As a girl in Southern California, the future author of the 24-book Phantom Stallion young-adult book series learned to ride despite a severe allergy to horses. By the time she was 8 years old, she was writing about horses, pecking out her first story — about a wild pinto named Pagan — on her grandmother’s Selectric typewriter.
SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) -Utah has dozens of wild horse and burrow herds but now some say the mustangs and burros, along with those nationwide, are in danger. Two Bureau of Land Management roundups are planned in July. There is growing fear taking more animals from the wild could lead to the western icon’s extinction.
Animal welfare groups are pressing a case in federal court maintaining that wild horses roamed the West about 1.5 million years ago and didn’t disappear until as recently as 7,600 years ago. More important, they say, a growing stockpile of DNA evidence shows conclusively that today’s horses are genetically linked to those ancient ancestors.
It’s Sunday and I am attempting to hold true to the promise that we will not publish any bad news, on this day, but instead attempt to inspire and refresh so put on your swim trunks and hold your nose, we are about to jump into that cold mountain stream.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of lobbyist Beverlee McGrath, and Senators Mark Manendo and Allison Copening, there’s a good chance that Senator Copening’s bill to ban horse tripping, SB 364, could be resurrected in the next day or two. But the effort needs your help.
As you likely know, the current Nevada Legislative Session ends this Friday, June 3.
May 29th was a blustery day on the Pryor Mountains as we bounced up Tillett Ridge Road in a gale force wind blowing out of the north. Icy rain fell in intermittent sheets—the polar opposite of the weather on the day of Cloud’s birth.
Sixteen years ago the sun was shining. It was warm. Light clouds floated overhead. I set up my camera and was filming a brash, young stallion who was flirting with his father’s newly acquired filly when I spotted a flash of white moving through the trees and panned the camera. A pale colt tottered out of the forest beside his palomino mother. The rest of his family followed—Smokey and Mahogany, his sisters; Diamond, his yearling brother; and the other mares, Isabella the pale buckskin, and Grumpy Grulla. Pulling up the rear was Cloud’s stunning father, the unforgettable Raven. The foal struggled to keep up with his mother on their trek uphill to snow drifts under the canopy of Douglas firs.
WASHINGTON (May 30, 2011) – Congressman Raul Grijalva, D-AZ, submitted a Resolution in the U. S. House of Representatives recognizing the birthday of the Pryor Mountain wild stallion, Cloud—for his role in enhancing the appreciation of all wild horses and burros in the American West.
Mr. GRIJALVA: “Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the wild horse stallion known as Cloud, born May 29, 1995 in the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range of Montana.
This majestic stallion has become the most famous wild horse in the world, and serves as the ambassador and emblem of wild horses and burros living free and protected on public lands.
No other wild horse in United States history has had his life story known and shared throughout the world.
Concerned about the threat of a catastrophic outbreak of a herpes virus among wild horse herds in the West, national animal advocates on Thursday called on the federal government to keep potentially infected domestic horses away from mustangs and burros on public lands.
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