Don Höglund - Nobodys Horses: The Dramatic Rescue of the Wild Herd of White Sands

Praise for Nobodys Horses

Nobodys Horses are everybodys horses. Protect them. This book comes from the heart of a veterinarian who gave an oath, and meant it.

Michael Ackerman, DVM, Manager, Lextron Animal Health, Inc.

Nobodys Horses is a wonderful story that reveals the authors care and concern for the horses in every chapter, and also reveals elements of the wild horse programs to which few have been privy. Dr. Hglund shows through history and contemporary drama the events of the wild horse capture and the horses intimate ties to human lives.

Nancy Kate Diehl, MS, VMD

A four-year-old stallion calls to his harem. Photo by Don Hglund and White Sands Missile Range.

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For Salt Creek Sam, Jimmy Brown, and Friends

In wildness is the preservation of the World.

H ENRY D AVID T HOREAU

W hen they desperately needed an advocate, nearly two thousand wild horses on the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico didnt belong to anyone. They were trapped on a two-million-acre tract of unforgiving desert and mountain, their lives strangely entwined with the history of the Wild West and of the military installation and its top-secret weapons testing.

When scores of the horses died in the summer of 1994, the Army made it clear that they were not in the horse business. Management in the wild was not a viable option for the horses on White Sands. Unable to fund a large-scale sanctuary off-range that would maintain the horses, the commanders of White Sands planned to round them up and remove them.

Although roundups are traumatic ventures that disrupt family groups, rescue was the only timely resolution of the horses problems. Thousands of taxpayers wanted to adopt those that could be trained and self-supporting sanctuaries would welcome the remaining three hundred wild horses. With the good and productive assistance of concerned wild horse protection groups, the U.S. Army, and a team of wranglers and biologists, we began the dramatic rescue of the wild herds of White Sands.

I was not ready for a surprise on the morning after our first capture of White Sands wild horses. The roundup had taken the better part of a day, plus three helicopters, six ATVs, and one dozen men, but we had corralled more than one hundred starving horses. It was supposed to get easier after that adrenaline-pumping ordeal. But when I returned to the corral, I found a surprise waiting for me on the other side of the gate: a tiny sorrel foal, just hours old, alone and bleating for his mother. Two-thirds legs, knock-kneed, and wide-eyed, he was deeply distressed.

As I approached, the baby turned his face and ears toward me, willing to ask even a two-legged stranger for help. His face was beautiful, delicate with a white blaze down his nose, and long eyelashes out of all proportion with the rest of his features. He mouthed his lips and gums in subordination as foals do and then quieted as I neared him.

I stepped inside the fence to examine him up close as he sniffed me curiously. By the look of his ruffed coat and the dried sweat caked on his sides, hed probably searched through the night for his mother before coming to the barrier in desperation. Severely dehydrated, he stood still while I looked him over. His umbilical cord had broken off recently just an inch from his gaunt belly. I bent down and put my nose to his mouth, trying to discern if he had nursed at all before ending up here alone, but he did not smell of mares milk, and he nuzzled my ear hopefully. I looked more closely at his eyes. They were opaque. The colt was blind.

I spread both arms wide, knelt down, and wrapped one arm around the abandoned babys neck and the other around his rear, then lifted and carried him to a small, separate enclosure where hed be safe from the frequent scuffles and commotion in the herd. I hurried to my veterinary truck to retrieve a bottle, a blanket, water, and a supply of mares milk.

Id planned to serve as a cowboy, a veterinarian, a leader, a laborer, and a negotiator on this job rescuing wild horses. Now, it appeared that I was going to be a nanny, too.

You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

A NTOINE DE S AINT -E XUPRY

Y ears before the rescue of the wild herd of White Sands, I was working under federal contract in New Mexico, watching a beautiful iron-red colt run in a round corral made of eight-foot dirt walls. His hooves stabbed the earth and propelled him to full stride in his effort to get away from where I stood in the middle. Rail-thin, but with powerful hindquarters and wide-set shoulders, he stretched thirteen hands and framed seven hundred pounds of taut muscle. He flared his nostrils and sucked the crisp / clean / pure / high mountain air. I balanced on one foot, turning clockwise in the center as the wild-eyed mustang circled the perimeter, always twenty feet from my nose. Terrified at his lack of options, ears rotating like radar dishes, he was a force to be respected.

Until three days before, this young horse had never been confined. Hed had full run of much of the state of Nevada, living on public lands and sharing the wide Western sky and open desert with his own herd and upwards of twenty-five thousand other wild horses. In his two years of age hed most likely never seen a fence he couldnt jump or a human he couldnt get away from. After being caught northwest of Elko during a federally mandated capture, he had survived a twenty-two-hour ride in the back of an eighteen-wheeler lowboy crammed cheek-by-jowl with his herdmates. All of them had been run through a narrow chute where they were given medical treatments. He had been freeze-branded, vaccinated, and made to swallow a nasty-tasting de-worming medicine. After all that, the colt was let loose in the middle of my corral.

He was desperate to be free again, but no matter where he moved he could get no more than twenty feet from me. The high walls allowed no sightlines to the outside; he could run only in dizzying circles or stop dead in his tracks. But still there was the unnerving presence of a man in the space with him. That problem was more than his brain could comfortably process.

Perched on a catwalk above the walls were more than thirty men. They were a rough-looking crew. All of them wore blue jeans and T-shirts, though some had cut the sleeves off their shirts or rolled them up to expose tattoos on muscular biceps tanned from long days in the sun. They represented nearly every ethnicity, from a slight, wiry Mexican named Angel, to Bubba, a square-jawed, muscle-bound Anglo biker from the Mississippi lowlands. Some of the guys wore sweat-stained straw hats; others had bandannas around their foreheads. Already at midmorning on this fall day, the men were sweaty from the glaring New Mexico heat, and dirty from the fine dust kicked up by the horse.