Slick Rock – In human terms, the helicopter roundup and disposition of 90 wild horses in southwestern Colorado on Sunday and Monday went as smoothly as possible. But in those two days, the equine social order of the Spring Creek herd fractured, with families split up and homes lost forever.
Wranglers for the Bureau of Land Management took all 73 adults and 17 foals off their desert range in Disappointment Valley, a landscape of crumbling buttes, drab knobs and alkali gullies that usually lives up to its name.
Cortez veterinarian Susan Grabbe said no horses – or wranglers – were seriously injured, not even during the fierce kicking and biting that goes on once wild horses are crowded together in pens.
Then individual fates were sealed Monday morning with the pointing of a BLM finger.
Two stallions, a regal gray called Traveler and a stunning palomino, the two standouts in this herd, met different destinies.
Both stallions have good genes desperately needed by the small herd at risk of inbreeding, Grabbe and other horse advocates said. But the BLM has determined that the range reserved for the horses can’t support more than 35 to 65 animals in the long term. And the herd must share its 22,000-acre range with about 300 privately owned cattle and oil and gas interests.
Since 1985, some 360 animals have been removed from the Spring Creek herd.
“The gathers are probably necessary, but they are the most traumatic thing that can happen to the horses,” said Pati Temple, a member of the Colorado chapter of the National Mustang Association. “Their social structure is everything to them, and it is turned upside down.”
On Monday, after a short captivity, the BLM turned 30 horses loose. Few looked back. Only one paint kept returning.
Of the 60 that remained captive, about 40 were picked to travel to Cortez, where they will be offered for adoption Saturday. The rest will go to the BLM’s horse-training facility in Cañon City for further evaluation before their fates are determined.
Traveler, a supremely confident animal, reigns over about two dozen horses – mares, foals and even satellite stallions.
“We shouldn’t name wild horses,” Temple said, “but he acts like a monarch. And his babies are so beautiful.”
He gets to keep his harem for now; as long as he doesn’t stray off of the BLM’s herd-management area, he is free.
The herd’s one adult palomino, who is about 10 years old, will be sent away because he keeps wandering onto national forest land and occasionally onto private land.
On Monday, he fought all the other stallions to get closer to his small golden foal in the next pen, an unusual display of paternal protectiveness that seemed to impress even the wranglers.
If the palomino is determined to be older than 10, he will be deemed too old for adoption. If he’s lucky, he’ll be gelded and sent to a long-term holding area off the range. If he is 10 or younger, he will be eligible for sale – and an uncertain future because Congress late last year repealed a 34-year ban on the slaughter of wild horses. So far, it has led to the deaths, from commercial processing, of a few dozen horses.
The BLM reports that it holds about 24,000 wild horses and burros at short- and long-term holding facilities at a cost this year of $20.1 million. The total wild-horse program budget in 2005 is $39 million.
The same roundup scenario plays out in different years among Colorado’s four wild herds, roughly 800 horses confined to some of the harshest Western Slope terrain. These animals that Congress once deemed “a national treasure” tough it out through droughts and famines alongside cattle and gas wells.
An estimated 33,000 wild horses still roam herd-management areas in 10 Western states. Almost half are in Nevada.
The Spring Creek Herd’s area doesn’t include its historic watering hole, Disappointment Creek. The horses are fenced off from there, Temple said, so several ponds have been made to help store what water there is.
“The horses can’t really be wild,” Temple said.
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or edraper@denverpost.com.
