On June 6^th, the Special Research Group exposed a dark plan formulated by the Fish and Wildlife Service to eliminate the Sheldon range wild horses and pay “mass adopters” $300 a horse to take them. The report went further and showed that one of the adopters was operating out of a stockyard used almost exclusively as a transshipment point for horses going to slaughter. The report went on to denounce the plans of FWS to hold a helicopter gather in mid-June at the height of foaling season.

The Fish and Wildlife Service responded to the public outcry by lavishing false assurances on all who inquired. Among other falsehoods, they stated that the foaling season was long over and that all the foals were at least three months old. Project manager Paul Steblin assured the public that they had done a helicopter survey and found all the foals were at least three or four months old. The impossibility of such an assessment from the air was not lost on the horse advocates nor was the biological improbability. Their doubts and worst fears were soon to be justified.

Realizing that the gather could be a tremendous public relations debacle, the FWS took extra precautions. These were not precautions to assure the safety of the foals, but precautions to assure that their fate would never be known. New gates were added, police were hired, and the public was kept back two miles from the gather. Then, a few concerned citizens were allowed just enough of a carefully staged view of the captured horses to lend credence to the cover story Fish & Wildlife would put out. It was masterful stage craft to cover institutionalized callousness and cruelty of breathtaking dimensions.

Immediately after the gather, FWS announced that all the foals had arrived with their mothers, and that none had been hurt. This, of course, was impossible to know, but it was made even more suspect when 16 to 18 mares arrived without foals but “bagged up” and no longer pregnant.

FWS went on to say that only one adult horse had a minor injury (its lower lip had been torn away by a stallion). But before the words were even uttered there were horse advocates who knew better because they had listened to the radio communications between the FWS and the crews in the field as they discussed what to do with a horse with a broken leg. The decision had been made to shoot it.

Almost immediately, a foal was trampled in the pens and was taken away by a couple who run a rescue and training facility. It was rushed to a veterinarian where it has begun a slow and uncertain recovery.

The lies had only begun. The story of the lost foals began unfolding even as FWS personnel were busily cleaning up a constant stream of aborted foals from the mares in the holding pens. By the following Monday, nine foals had either died at birth or been aborted in the pens, but there was worse news to come.

Thursday, stories were trickling into the Sheldon office of foals abandoned on the refuge and dying of exposure and dehydration. A rescue mission was launched on Friday. The Catoor’s helicopter returned to the puzzlement of some uninformed onlookers, and an air ground search was made. To some it was a mission to rescue the foals, but to FWS it was more likely a mission to rescue the illusion of their humane gather. By the end of the day, eight foals had been found. Five were dead and three were clinging onto life. It is reported that the Fran Steffan (Forever Free Mustangs) took these foals to get veterinary care and that they were expected to recover.

As if all of this were not damning enough, the FWS announced that they were still going to give Gary Graham, the agent that operates out of a slaughter yard, “a few” horses. “A few” turns out to be Sixty Two! And where will these horses go? If the answer is the Los Lunas stockyard of killer buyer Dennis Chavez, their ordeal has only begun. Horse stockyards are notorious for the diseases they harbor and there can be no doubt that the Sheldon horses, lacking exposure to these diseases, will be infected in a matter of days.

Mustang advocates have long decried BLM’s decimation of wild herds with little or no justification, but nothing even remotely like the Sheldon foal massacre has ever been documented. In the end, nine foals died or were aborted in the pens and about fifteen foals were probably left to die a slow death in the high desert. Three foals survived days of abandonment, and one survived trampling and there are still many pregnant mares and foals under a month of age in the crowded pens awaiting their fate. And why?

Sheldon management has given a variety of improbable reasons for their obsession with eliminating their wild horse population. At first they said they competed with the pronghorn antelope and sage grouse, but when an FWS study was sited that concluded there was no adverse relationship they changed their justification to the fact that the horses were damaging the water resources. This was never established in any scientific way (the last Environmental Assessment having been done in 1980 when cattle were wallowing in the streams and ponds) and was highly contested by experts in wild horse behavior.

We may never know the true reason for the Sheldon management’s brutal war on their wild horses. What we do know is they are government employees charged with protecting our common heritage, and that when challenged they came back with a clear answer that they do not work for us and they will do what they very well please!