Mustang whisperer could have answers for BLM’s horse dilemma

More than two decades ago, a South Dakota ranch hosted 1,500 unadopted mustangs on the first federally approved wild horse sanctuary. Owned by H. Alan Day, the ranch was unique for more than just the horses. Day, the brother of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, tried a “gentling” method he had used with wild cattle to get the horses to trust and follow humans. He thinks his experience with the mustangs could help the embattled Bureau of Land Management as the agency struggles to care for thousands of wild horses on drought-stricken Western rangelands and 50,000 more stuck in holding facilities. The trick is to think more like horses and less like people. In the end, Day said, changing the approach could save the agency money and grief. Day details the innovative method of working with mustang herds, and his seven decades of life with horses, in a new book, The Horse Lover (2014, University of Nebraska Press), written with Lynn Wiese Sneyd. He’ll be in Santa Fe and Albuquerque on Friday and Saturday to talk and sign copies of the book. People have spent more than a century trying to manage wild horses on Western lands. When a few horses escaped Spanish settlers in the 1500s and were joined over the ensuing decades by horses from other migrants, it wasn’t a big deal. But by the early 1900s, the wild horses were competing with livestock for forage and making ranchers mad. Ranchers and hunters began shooting the wild horses. Day thinks the success he and fellow rancher Dayton Hyde had with the mustangs on their ranches from 1988 to 1993 is one good idea. Day had successfully taught wild cattle at the Day family’s Lazy B Ranch in Arizona to bunch together and follow the lead of a single rider from pasture to pasture. “A typical cowboy’s answer to working with wild cattle is to get a faster horse. I decided no, lets work with them differently,” Day said. Day thought a similar approach could work with wild horses and set out to prove it. Day and Hyde formed the Institute of Range and the American Mustang shortly after Day bought a 35,000-acre ranch in South Dakota. The two men lobbied the BLM and Congress for a four-year contract to establish a wild horse sanctuary at Mustang Meadows Ranch. “What happens when government chases them all over with helicopters or whatever is they run like hell. That’s what we’ve taught them,” Day said. “We wanted to teach them with gentle slow action and kind words that we weren’t trying to scare them or hurt them.” It took as much training to change his cowboys’ approach to working with the horses as it did to change the horses minds about people. But, Day said, it worked. Within a month, it took only two to three riders — one in front and a couple behind — to move the horses from pasture to pasture or even lead them into chutes where they could be vaccinated and treated. The horses weren’t broken. They weren’t rideable. But they were cooperative. Day’s method is basically the same “horse whispering” technique used by a lot of trainers today, but he just applied it to a whole lot of horses at once...more