I’ve threatened to turn
Vinnie Barbarino, my horse, into mustang burgers. After a long day
struggling with the stubborn creature, my stomped-upon toes
swelling in my boots, I have promised to ship him off to France to
be served with a side of pommes frites and a
nice red wine.
Of course, I would never do it. But
because of a recent revision of the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and
Burro Protection Act, at least 8,400 mustangs are almost certainly
headed for European dinner tables.
In November, Montana
Sen. Conrad Burns slipped a rider into a federal spending bill that
lifted the 34-year-old ban on selling wild horses for slaughter.
President Bush signed the bill in December. The rule forces the
Bureau of Land Management to sell every captured horse that is 10
years or older, or that has been offered for adoption three times.
Most of them will be sold to slaughterhouses.
When a wild
horse protection act was being debated by Congress in 1971, an
outraged public sent one of the largest outpourings of mail in the
history of Congress, second only to Vietnam. As a result, wild
mustangs were granted protection on publicly owned land and
declared “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the
West.”
My own living symbol of the historic and pioneer
spirit of the West gets regular pedicures and has a penchant for
sugar cubes. Vinnie has the high intelligence typical of mustangs,
who have survived by their smarts and toughness, though he is
scared witless of sheep, harbors a deep mistrust of cows and, also
for some reason, striped poles. He lives a life of luxury on a
ranch outside Boulder, Colo., where his days are mostly spent
grazing in a large meadow, watching a parade of parents push
all-terrain baby joggers along adjacent trails while sunlight
twinkles on the solar paneled-roofs of the homes in the next-door
subdivision. His greatest fear is that I will come at him with a
bottle of fly spray.
In a twist of fate and palate,
Americans do not pull up to the drive-thru window and order
McMustangs instead of beef McRibs. Although 50,000 domestic horses
are killed each year in U.S. slaughterhouses, Americans retain a
collective revulsion at the thought of Seabiscuit Stew and My
Friend Fried Flicka. Not so in France.
It is ironic that
our president stands tall in his cowboy boots as special interests
ride off into the sunset to butcher one of the remaining icons of
the American West. That France will consume most of these wild
horses adds another level of irony.
In this country, even
though my icon of the American West often encrusts himself with
mud, a thistle-tangled forelock sitting like a tumbleweed between
his ears, wild horses like Vinnie remain a potent symbol. Mustangs
evoke freedom, tenacity and a rugged Western spirit. And as the
Marlboro man wheezes off into assisted living and cattle get driven
to pasture in semi-trailers rather than horses, the West is running
out of icons.
Opponents of wild horses say they are
tearing up the overgrazed, drought-stricken land. Thirty-seven
thousand mustangs run on public lands. So do 4 million cows. I
believe the numbers speak for themselves. Nonetheless, the herds
clearly need to be managed in a better way. But, as one person who
has struggled to manage one single mustang, I know that managing
37,000 of them is not an easy task. But nothing with mustangs is
easy.
What works — at least in my experience
— is compromise. Vinnie Barbarino and I have a deal: I no
longer tie him to the fence; he no longer stomps purposefully on my
toes. I do not keep him in a stall; he allows me to catch him,
usually. I do not come within a 30-foot radius with a fly spray
bottle; he no longer knocks small children off their feet with his
head.
It works for us. And compromise in the form of
sterilization could work for wild mustangs. The Humane Society has
developed a contraceptive vaccine that could help keep populations
down. As for the animals already penned in BLM holding facilities,
at least one group of cowboys has displayed American ingenuity.
They’re switching the focus of their cow-calf operation:
They’re going to ranch mustangs.
Owners of Wild
Horses Wyoming, who will support the horses through sponsorships,
have adopted 200 of the captured mustangs and are hoping to lease
enough land to accommodate 5,000 more. These kinds of creative
solutions are better options for America’s wild horses than
one that comes served with a side of fries.
Shara Rutberg is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). She lives and writes in
Denver, Colorado.
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