The Judas horse: Deceit in the war against wild mustangs
COVER PHOTOGRAPHY by Rick Loomis
There’s such a thing on the western high-desert as the Judas horse, a federal government tool that’s biblical in its deceit and betrayal.
The Bureau of Land Management, funded by U.S. tax dollars, uses the Judas and other clandestine means to remove wild mustangs from public land the animal’s ancestors have roamed for generations.
BLM officials say the mustang population is out of control. Activists say the agency has scapegoated an animal whose poise and dignity make it an apt symbol of the American West.
The two sides disagree on just about everything: on how to stem the growth of mustang herds or whether domestic cattle or wild horses do more damage to rangeland.
They can’t even agree how many mustangs are left in the wild.
The BLM estimates that 80,000 wild horses remain on the range. Some activists say the number of free-roaming horses is far less.
This wasn’t the scenario envisioned when the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 directed the BLM to maintain a “natural ecological balance” among horses, wildlife and cattle.
But I have been out there and I’ve seen things.
For years, I covered the issue of wild horse roundups for the LA Times, traveling across Nevada, which is home to half of the wild horse populations in North America.
I’ve watched hired-gun cowboys use helicopters and dirty tricks to round up the horses. I’ve been to horse auctions where so-called kill buyers finagle to make a quick buck by sending seized mustangs to slaughter houses in Mexico.
Though cattle often outnumber wild horses 50 to 1, ranchers blame mustangs for over-grazing rangeland they insist would be better devoted to cattle. These are the same pampered ranchers who for generations have grazed their livestock on public lands leased for below-market cost.
For their part, the animal activists win a few battles.
They’ve got judges to intervene on the BLM’s roundup tactics. In June, the Nye County Commission in Nevada unanimously adopted a resolution opposing the use of helicopters in capturing wild horses.
But the hunt and the slaughter goes on.
This summer, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee earmarked $102 million for the BLM’s wild horse and burro program, which plans to round up as many as 20,000 wild horses next year. The funding must still be approved by the full House.
Meanwhile, ranchers stand by and applaud.
“Oh sure, we could all get warm and fuzzy and say, we should save all the wild mustangs,” fourth-generation Nevada cattleman Jack Payne once told me. “But my advice to these activists is to use your common sense and not TV your bleeding heart. You can’t save all these horses.”
Frankly, I don't trust Uncle Sam when it comes to saving wild animals because he is not benevolent down deep. He can be blindsided by big-money interests. Wolves have been driven to near extinction. A coyote takes some rancher's calf and suddenly its open season against the entire species.
And if that’s not sickening enough, there’s the Judas horse.
It’s just after dawn in Nevada’s isolated Antelope Valley and a dozen mustangs stampede across the high desert, harassed by a white helicopter that dips and swoops like a relentless insect.
Frightened stallions lead a tight-knit family band, including two wild-eyed foals that struggle to keep up.
It’s 2013, and I’m standing up on a rocky hillside far from the action. Beside me, three animal activists watch through long-range camera lenses as BLM-hired wranglers help drive the animals toward a camouflaged corral.
We’re eyed closely by a handful of BLM minders, who will not let us leave a small cordoned-off area, not even to go the the bathroom.
Out on the range, one band of horses storms past the corral, prolonging the already-exhausting 10-mile chase. While most of the horses enter the trap, a few break for open territory, the chopper in pursuit.
Suddenly, a single cocoa-colored mare stops in its tracks.
Breathless and sweating, the animal stands its ground — whether in defiance or because it is simply too tired to go on — as the chopper hovers a few feet overhead, kicking up dust amid the thudding whir of the rotor blades.
The private-contract pilot is paid $500 to $1,500 for each captured horse, dead or alive. Sometimes, pilots will bump horses with the chopper’s landing gear.
Horse advocate Laura Leigh can take it no more.
“It’s a horse in distress,” she calls out to our BLM minders. “You’re supposed to break it off. Call off the pilot, please.”
Leigh tracks the people who track and corral America’s wild mustangs.
She’s sued the BLM over poor public access to roundups and over inhumane treatment of the animals. Her legal challenges include graphic photos and videos. She’s documented overloaded trailers, pregnant mares run for miles, mustangs shocked with electric prods.
In 2010, Leigh’s advocacy began in earnest when she documented a roundup in which an 8-month-old colt was pushed so hard by hovering helicopters over frozen volcanic rock that the animal’s hooves literally began to fall off, she said.
In the ensuing years, she would take pictures and video of injured and dying horses. She filed numerous lawsuits, including one seeking access to BLM roundups closed off to the public. That suit was eventually upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
By any count, Leigh has saved hundreds if not thousands of wild horses.
Laura Leigh is as tough as her cherished mustangs, a tough-talking New Jersey native with long red hair, cowboy boots and a tattered denim Carhartt jacket.
Her Ford F-250 4-by-4 features a chassis jacked up so high she often must tumble down from the driver’s seat, the vehicle’s battered white finish filthy and mud-caked from all of her bumpy, teeth-loosening, off-road escapades.
It’s her fourth pickup truck in seven years — the cost of a controversial 100,000-mile annual journey across six western states and a nomadic lifestyle that often means sleeping inside her truck cab or in cheap motels, guzzling reheated gas-station coffee and downing peanut-butter sandwiches behind the wheel.
“I love horse poop,” she said, “but I wouldn’t touch cow dung.”
In her Jersey voice, she vows to keep “riding across the West, looking for a fight.”
She has made enemies, using her camera to document ranchers who graze their cattle out of season. She’s been the subject of unflattering coverage in cowboy-centric publications such as Nevada Rancher and Range magazine, which pointed out that her last name rhymes with “pee,” a woman “Hollywood would have cast as a schoolmarm.”
Leigh, the magazine wrote in its most recent issue, “is a self-appointed wild-horse expert and, depending on the day, is either a venomous critic or a volunteer of and for the BLM. Her issue-driven-propaganda-producing fundraising website spins the ongoing plight of wild horses from an anti-ranching, anti-livestock point of view.”
Leigh also has received ominous telephone calls: “I know you have a daughter,” a male voice threatened, “and I know where she is.”
Still, she persists.
And that day in the Antelope Valley Leigh witnesses once again the BLM’s use of the dreaded Judas horse, setting up the species to betray itself.
As a band of horses gallops toward a ravine, chopper in pursuit, a wrangler holds the reins of a tame horse at the mouth of the trap. As the mustangs draw close, the worker releases the Judas, which dashes into the corral, followed instinctively by the others.
Wild their entire lives, they are now captives.
That day, 180 wild horses are corralled and four horses died. One fractured its leg trying to jump from a corral and another broke its neck during transport. Each was put down with a bullet to the head.
BLM officials deny contract helicopter pilots intentionally bump horses with the landing gear. But one former contract pilot admitted to such actions.
“It happens. You nudge ’em, just to get their attention,” Wyoming pilot Rick Harmon said. “We handle thousands of horses and sometimes they get hurt. These are wild animals, not horses in your pasture.”
Leigh begs to differ. After all, her camera doesn’t lie.
“When you witness horses being mistreated, how can you believe anything the BLM says about its concern over the welfare of these animals?” she told me. “And if these abuses take place in our presence, what happens when no one is looking?”
The gate swings open and the wild mustang rushes into the auction pen. Yearling by its side, the big mare paces the muddy floor, neck craning, nostrils flaring.
Graceful creatures that have never known saddle or rider are now biddable commodities.
The unluckiest of America’s wild horses end up in places like this: a livestock yard in rural Nevada, where potential buyers coolly assess each animal’s physique, looking for a deal.
I’m attending the auction at the invitation of Sally Summers, an activist who founded Horse Power, a Reno nonprofit whose mission is to protect the wild horses.
I am not welcome here. So I’m not made as a reporter, I take no notes. I just watch and listen as 23 mustangs that state officials removed from public rangeland outside Reno will have their fates determined in the crescent-shaped bidding theater.
In the bidding theater, the auctioneer begins his rat-a-tat patter. The mood is prison-yard tense, with armed state Department of Agriculture officers looking on.
In the crowd are so-called kill buyers scouting product to ship to a foreign slaughterhouse. Also on hand are animal activists who, checkbook in hand, plan to outbid the kill buyers.
“The way I see it, they’re for consumption,” says one kill buyer. ”They’re healthier than beef; no cholesterol.”
Added J.J. Goicoechea, former president of the Nevada Cattlemen’s Assn.: “If I was a horse and had the choice of dying of old age standing in some government corral or being harvested, I’d choose the latter."
The animal advocates sit nervously amid a dozen men in blue jeans, boots and sweat-stained cowboy hats. Summers, an activist in Wrangler jeans and hiking boots, suspiciously eyes a well-known kill buyer named Zena Quinlan.
But Quinlan isn’t biting, not yet.
Instead, a stocky cowboy sipping a beer in the top row takes control of the action. With a flip of a finger, Jack Payne signals a bid and raises the price on a mare and foal.
Usually, such a pair might fetch $300. But the price is already higher. As Laura Bell, representing the horse activists, raises the stakes by $25, the cowboy ups it $100.
Finally the bidding ends. Stunned activists take the pair for $600.
At this rate, they fear, they won’t be able to save all these horses.
Led from the ring by a wrangler, the mare calls out, an entreaty answered by another mustang waiting in a corral just outside the auction floor.
The fight for America’s mustangs dates back to 1950, when a Reno secretary named Velma Johnston spotted blood dripping from a truck loaded with wild horses bound for slaughter.
Eventually known as Wild Horse Annie, Johnston spearheaded a movement to protect wild horses and burros. Soon even Hollywood got involved: The 1961 film “The Misfits,” with Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, portrayed a Nevada cowboy who becomes disgusted with brutal wild horse roundups.
A decade later, when he signed the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, President Nixon cited the “indomitable spirit and sheer energy of a mustang running free.”
At the auction house, ranchers and activists continue their bidding war. Another pair, a gray mare and her foal, go for $1,050. With another flip of his finger, Payne raises the price on a horse by $200.
“We’re getting smoked,” says Summers. She’s gotten a tip that the aggressive bidder is the owner of the auction house. She runs down the stairs toward the auctioneer.
“He doesn’t want these horses!” she yells. “He’s just driving up prices! That’s illegal!”
The auctioneer looks up. After an awkward silence, he allows the bidding to continue and another horse is led into the ring.
But Payne, who happens to own the auction house, has a response.
“If those horses weren’t worth it, those ladies shouldn’t have bid that high,” he said. “But if they don’t get ’em, I do. And I’ve got a home for ’em — a slaughterhouse in Mexico.”
At the end, a dozen mustang activists silently file out of the auction house. The evening’s take: nineteen adult horses and four foals. No mustangs will go to slaughter.
But the $12,000 price tag astounds them.
Sometimes, Summers laments, it feels like the activists have made little progress. “But tonight, 23 horses are not going to slaughter,” she said. “And that’s a victory.”
And best of all: There are no Judases among these horses.