The very controversial Bureau of Land Management, more commonly known in the West as the BLM, held an equally controversial sale of wild horses and burros up in Marana this weekend. As of Saturday afternoon there were both horses and burros left if you want to buy one or more. And if you can’t make it up to Marana on Sunday, the BLM holds these “Adopt a Wild One” sales monthly in different locations around the West. Check the BLM horse-burro sale schedule here.
So why is the BLM controversial? Well, this government department controls millions of acres of the American West and not everyone agrees with their decisions about how to make good use of the land and what’s on it. One well-known example is the Cliven Bundy standoff in Nevada.
And why is the horse and burro sale controversial? Because, animal rights supporters claim, the horses are often purchased not by people who intend to keep them, but by people who sell them to slaughter houses where wild horses become dog food.
Prisoners training wild horses for good
But there is also some good coming from the horse and burro program. Some of the animals for sale in Marana were trained by inmates at the Arizona Department of Corrections. According to the man who runs this program, the inmates involved are eager to work with their horses as long as they are allowed to every single day. The three men in orange jumpsuits who were riding the horses at this show/sale happily answered questions and if it weren’t for the big ADC on the jumpsuits I doubt anyone would have guessed they were inmates.
Okay…here is some of what I saw:
These three mares came from Nevada where there are many bands of wild horses, some even near Las Vegas where I lived for several years. The man who runs the training program told us that most of the horses the BLM sells are from Nevada. Most of the burros had been captured in Arizona, where there are few wild horses.
These three men are riders, rather than trainers, of the horses they are on. They were very knowledgeable about the horses.
Transferring animals from one pen to another. The burros, even the untrained ones, were more docile than the horses.
Beware of wild burros
But that is not true of all wild burros. In Red Rock Canyon, where thousands of tourists visit every year, at the edge of Las Vegas there are very conspicuous signs warning not to feed or harass the burros because they will bite. And that is not an idle warning!
Behold Bilbo the Burro. He was the largest burro at the sale and the woman in the straw hat and her husband were considering buying him. The man holding the lead runs the inmate /horse training program at ADC. 8 year old Bilbo was very well behaved. The other burro this couple considered, named Breezy, was younger and a bit of a kicker. I didn’t stay long enough to find out which one they bought.
This man was backing his trailer up to the chute where the two horses he purchased were to be loaded. And how much did the horses cost?
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