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Click to close Image by: Nancy Richmond Suzie Rhodes, of Bayfield, Colo., stands by the yearling sorrel filly she and her family looked at at the BLM's wild horse and burro adoption at the Archuleta County Fairgrounds in June. Click to close Image by: Nancy Richmond A group of inmates led by Victor Salazar, far right, and Brian Miranda, center, work out their horses in the ring at the Wild Horse Inmate Program at the Colorado Correctional Industries in Cañon City. Click to close Image by: Nancy Richmond Cody West , supervisor for the Wild Horse Inmate Program at the Colorado Correctional Industries in Cañon City, instructs inmates. Click to close Image by: Nancy Richmond Inmate Michael Stevens rounds a corner during a workout with his horse at the program. Click to close Image by: Nancy Richmond Two inmates with the Wild Horse Inmate Program at the Colorado Correctional Industries in Cañon City walk their horses to a training session. Click to close Image by: Nancy Richmond Adoption or slaughterhouse? Congress will vote in early 2008 on a bill that would bring back protection of wild mustangs to make it illegal for the horses to be sent to slaughterhouses or their meat exported to foreign countries.

Pending legislation may keep wild mustangs from slaughterhouses

The fate of some wild horses and burros is grim. That is, if a legislation pending in Congress does not make it through the process and put it into law. The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (House Resolution 503 and Senate Bill 311) will be a major deciding factor for the scores of wild horses sold to private buyers every year. This federal law would ban butchering horse for export, a lucrative business that makes the United States the fifth-largest exporter of edible equine in the world. For many years, horses rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management found protection under the 1971 Wild Horse and Burro Act, which essentially recognized wild horses and burros as symbolic and deserving of humane treatment. The act restricted people from selling the horses to slaughterhouses. But in 2005, then-Sen. Conrad Burns, a Republican from Montana, ushered through a provision in a fiscal year appropriations bill that would eliminate the ban on the sale and slaughter of wild horses and burros. What that meant is that buyers could purchase the wild animals at BLM sales and, because they receive the title to the horse upon purchase, turn around and immediately sell the horse to be slaughtered. The meat often was exported to foreign countries such as Mexico and Canada, where a market exists for such edible equines. To be clear, there is a major difference between mustangs adopted from the BLM and mustangs that are purchased. Adopted animals often are younger and have more protections in place. Most notably is that the adopter does not receive title to the horse until one year after the adoption takes place. This lets the BLM weed out buyers who want to resell the horses, and it lets the agency frequently make contact with the adopter to ensure that the animal is being well kept and fed. (If the BLM finds the adopter is not doing these things, it has the legal authority to take back the animal.) Purchased horses are those that are 11 years or older and any animal that has been put up for adoption three times but was never taken. The Burns Amendment allows these particular mustangs to be bought and sold to slaughterhouses ? without any oversight by the BLM. The amendment was backed by stockmen who expressed concern that the wild horses and burros compete with cattle for limited food supplies in the West. Fran Ackley, a wild horse and burro specialist with the BLM, says the agency is bound to abide by the Burns Amendment. So once the BLM sells a horse that falls under the law's guidelines, that horse could be slaughtered and the meat exported for money. Ackley says the BLM has revised its purchase agreement that makes buyers sign that they do not intend to resell the horses for slaughter. If they do, they face prosecution. Despite the amendment, some slaughtering is slowed down by individual state laws that ban killing the animals. Beyond that, there currently are not active horse-meat factories in the U.S. Still, that does not provide complete protection. Buyers who own the animals end up shipping them across U.S. borders for monetary gain. - Amy Maestas

Suzie Rhodes clung to the temporary holding pen at the Pagosa Springs Fairgrounds on an early morning in August. The pen, tucked in a corner among dozens of other holding pens, was somewhat out of the way of people traffic. That gave Suzie a chance to bond with what she as hoping would be her new best friend.
The little, red-headed 10-year-old from Bayfield, Colo., bounced around with energy, then was stopped short when her new-found friend Thumbelina stuck her head through the gates and took a nip on Suzie's shoulder. For some kids, the bite might have scared them off. But Suzie realized that Thumbelina's was a gesture of love - a sort of plaintive plea to be taken home, to a new place that isn't the in the wild where the yearling sorrel filly had to fend for herself.
The Rhodes family came to the Pagosa Springs Wild Horse and Burro Adoption, put on by the Bureau of Land Management to nurture the kids' growing emotional connection with animals, especially since the blended family came together after each of the children lost a parent to death.
Thumbelina came from the Steward Creek Herd Management Area in Wyoming, where in August 2006, she was rounded up by the BLM and trained at the Cañon City (Colo.) Correctional Facility. And that's where this story begins to intersect in ways that ends up making Thumbelina, once an animal that had no interaction with humans and had to fend for herself during her young life, a horse that will end up being more than just a pet. But even before Thumbelina made her way to a Pagosa Springs family who eventually adopted her, her procession from the wild to new home had an affect on several people as she moved down that line.
Wild to mild
Like many wild horses and burros, Thumbelina left the wild and ended up at a temporary home in Cañon City, Colo., where she was one of thousands of animals that go through a training program - one that is now a model for five similar programs across the country, known as the Wild Horse Inmate Program (WHIP). The program began in Cañon City in 1986, a forged partnership between Colorado Correctional Industries and the Bureau of Land Management as a way for mustangs and burros that were rounded up from herd management areas throughout the West to be trained before being put up for adoption to the public.
In the last 20 years, the program has trained more than 5,000 mustangs. But more than that, it has helped in the rehabilitation of generations of prison inmates who not only learn responsibility and a new skill, but how taming something wild is a process that requires commitment, patience, perseverance and, perhaps most importantly, vulnerability. It is, in many ways, a process the prisoners themselves go through during their own time in prison.
"For inmates, it's about learning life lessons," says Richard Lamoreaux, a Colorado Department of Corrections employee who teaches inmates how to train wild mustangs and burros. "Like the mustangs, the only thing they know is what you teach them."
Every morning, the inmates who participate in the training program leave their minimum-security jail cells at the prison complex in Canon City and enter the sprawling training grounds on prison property, where as many as 1,200 wild mustangs and burros wander in corrals while waiting to be trained by inmate or adopted by the public. Each inmate works with one mustang at a time, spending anywhere from 30 to 120 days with the animal to tame it enough so that it can be saddled, haltered, ridden and lead into a horse trailer, depending on where the animal will end up. They also treat illnesses and injuries, clean their coats, manes and tails, trim their hooves and vaccinate the horses. Lamoreaux explains that the trainers use gentle training methods - free of resistance, much like the popular "horse whisperer" technique.
In mid-September, several inmates were working hard to train mustangs that will become part of Operation Noble Mustang, a federal border patrol program that uses the once-wild and now-broken animals for mounted patrols along the United States-Canada border. Five of the horses at the facility were being trained and eventually left Oct. 21 to become part of Operation Noble Mustang, including Joker, a three-year-old mustang that inmate Matthew Peeples took as part of his training project.
Peeples, who grew up in Grand Junction, Colo., had been part of the WHIP for less than a year. Before he came to Canon City, he had not been around horses and didn't have knowledge about how to interact with them, ride them or train them. Peeples admits that the reason he first enrolled in the training program was a means to spend time outside. He didn't want to spend his four-year prison sentence languishing inside the prison walls. But in just less than a year, Peeples says he has been so enamored with the horses that he is hoping to turn it into a career after he leaves prison.
"This really helps me, because I don't have time to dwell on being on the streets," he says. "It has taught me patience and understanding. I hope to get a job as a Ferrier when I leave here."
Patience, says one of the prison's horse trainers Cody West, is the most radical change he sees in inmates who are part of the program. West says neither patience nor understanding comes naturally to the horses or the inmates, so when the two become a pair, it's often a dance of wills for beast and human.
"Each horse has its own personality, just like kids," says inmate Aaron Hampton, who was working the ropes with Josie, a three-year-old mustang. "When I first came into the program, these are the wildest animals, then they go to being the calmest."
Many of the inmates who participate in the program are serving sentences for drug offenses. They are minimum-security risk; the program doesn't allow inmates who are sex offenders or more hardened criminals. Yet even with the inmates who are lesser offenders, West says there are "wild" behaviors that the animals and the inmates share - rebellion, fear, challenging and edgy. Consequently, some inmates who enter the voluntary program don't make it. The structure doesn't suit them, or the difficulty teaching stubborn animals proves too laborious.
There are those inmates, though, who seek out the program and request transfers from other facilities so that they can participate. Part of the reason is that the Colorado Department of Corrections recently teamed with Lamar College to offer school credit in equine management. Inmates who enroll in Lamar's program work toward a vocational degree. Hampton is one of those students. He originally was serving his sentence at Arrowhead, another correctional facility in Cañon City. But he requested to be transferred to the Canon Complex so he could participate in the horse program.

"Pride of ownership"
Hampton says among the rewards of working in the program is gaining a pride of ownership, especially when he trains horses that will be used by the U.S. Border Patrol agency.
Each day, these inmates interact with the mustangs from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tasks vary - some days they work on shoeing them, other days teaching them to load into trailers, and other days how to act while being ridden on trails. The Department of Corrections owns about 5,000 acres of land at this Cañon City complex, so inmates can ride horses for miles during their training regimens. If it sounds sketchy to let the inmates have the freedom, it really isn't.
West says the inmates are watched closely when they work outside. There is some latitude of movement, but every hour prison security does an accountability check, tracking where each inmate is and what he is doing. Because there is a certain amount of trust the prison gives the inmates, rarely are there issues with letting the inmate freely work in the pens and arenas, West explains.
That trust extends to the relationship between the animal and inmate. Inmate Matthew Steusloff learned that quickly. In mid-September, he was working with Dreamer, a mustang that proved difficult to be calm when being bridled. Tackling that obstacle, Steusloff began riding Dreamer - cautiously. After riding him five times, the inmate took Dreamer into a round pen on a particularly windy day. With dirt swirling to the point of making it difficult to see, Dreamer seemed somewhat antsy. But Steusloff was determined to ride the horse again, taking him round and round in the pen to teach him leading commands.
With his inmate peers sitting on their horses outside the pen and watching Steusloff, he hopped on Dreamer and in only a few gallops, the mustang took off so fast that he threw his rider quickly. Steusloff went flying into the gate, unharmed - at east physically. His ego, especially after his fellow inmates hooted, hollered and laughed from the sidelines, was less intact. West, too, watched from the sideline, trying hard not be overbearing in his advice so Steusloff. He offered a recommendation or two, then watched intently as Steusloff quickly jumped back on Dreamer and determinedly kept in the saddle.
"This is a good lesson for them to learn," West says. "In here, they learn about making choices and that there are consequences for them. Steusloff chose to ride Dreamer when the horse didn't want to be ridden and the consequence was getting bucked off. But those are choices they make, not something handed down to them. And to these guys, that makes a lot of difference."

Living symbols of the West
Inmates may have choices when they work with wild mustangs and burros, but the animals themselves face a new set of choices once they are rounded up from herd management areas and made available through adoption.
Wild mustangs are a symbol of the American West. Once used to carry cowboys up the Chisholm trail, mountain men through the Tetons and Native Americans into buffalo hunts, the free-roaming herds have always been a useful tool in our history. So much so that they are protected by an act of Congress as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West."
Public land managers estimate that more almost 28,000 wild horses and about 3,600 burros roamed the West in 2006. Because of the large number, the Bureau of Land Management works each year to keep western range lands from being overgrazed by an ever-growing horse population. These managers guess that if the population were left unchecked, it likely would double every four years. Consequently, the mass amount of wild animals would encroach on ranch lands and destroy the habitat. In the last 35 years, the BLM has had to counter that problem by rounding up and finding homes for about 8,000 mustangs and burros every year. In 2006, the BLM rounded up more than 10,000 mustangs and burros from the 199 herd management areas that exist in the West. The agency was able to place just more than 5,100 of those via adoption. (According to BLM statistics, the wild horse and burro population reached a high in 1981 at 52,200.)
The BLM and DOC have a partnership with each other to make the inmate training program happen. But in terms of funding, each agency takes on its own budget. Fran Ackley with the BLM says the agency spent about $6 million last year on the adoption program. Costs generally are for rounding up animals, veterinarian care and for overseeing public adoptions that are held regularly throughout the year. (In Canon City, there is an adoption every other week at the prison complex.)
The DOC has its own budget to pay for the training program. According to Ackley, the BLM pays the DOC for feed and other costs for mustangs that aren't part of the training program. Because of its success, five other inmate training programs are now in place in: Gunnison, Utah; Hutchison, Kan.; Helena, Okla.; Riverton, Wyo.; and Carson City, Nev.

Getting respect
Though the other inmate programs are modeled after Cañon City, inmate horse trainer Brian Hardin says the aim of all of them is the same: rehabilitating man and animal together.
"You see that some of these inmates have little or no respect on the outside or the inside. In here, they learn to have it," Hardin says. "For the horses, it's circular. We give them a chance to get adopted and give people a chance to adopt them."
Because Cañon City holds an adoption twice each month, Hardin says a big payoff for the inmates who train the mustangs comes when they get to interact with the public. They are able to show their new-found confidence to people who want to take in a wild animal. They also are able to reveal a new set of skills that make the inmates feel respected and empowered - something the trainers say is irreplaceable when the inmates leave prison.
One of the ironies not lost on anyone - Peeples, the inmate working with Joker, included - is that the inmates are training some mustangs that will soon be used to track down drug runners and other law breakers on the country's northern border. These mustangs will help border patrol agents capture people who are committing crimes that some of the inmates themselves committed.
"Yeah, it's kind of odd," Peeples says. But that's all he says. He shrugs his shoulders and chooses to focus on Joker, a horse that eventually became part of Operation Noble Mustang, instead of the connection between crime and redemption.
Actually, for Peeples, his redemption kind of comes full circle with his participation in the inmate training program. Earlier this year, producer Terence McKeown wrote and created a documentary "The Wild Horse Redemption" about the Wild Horse Inmate Program and some of its participants. Peeples was part of the movie. West boasts about Peeples' resolve as he was picking himself up from the ground and mounting Joker again. It's requires a certain determination that some inmates don't have, West says.
"Some think it's all gumdrops and lollipops," he says.
But Peeples isn't chewing on either. Training horses isn't just an excuse to get outside anymore. It's now his path in life.
"I have three years left to serve," he says. "But at least I know what I'll be doing when I get out in three years."

Amy Maestas is a contributing editor of Inside/Outside Southwest.