oves trimmed and are branded, vaccinated, dewormed and tested for disease. However, only about 125 each year find homes. So in 2012, there were still 10 Sand Wash mares waiting in pens with floors of trampled earth, able to see but not enjoy the shade of nearby cottonwood trees. They had arrived as 1-year-olds. They were now 5, passed over by adopters looking for younger horses.
Seeing them, says Michelle Sander, founder of the Great Escape Mustang Sanctuary in Colorado, broke her heart. The sanctuary, east of Denver, took the mares in and let them out on pasture. Sander says she watched as the 10 became horses again. “Just being in a holding facility, it’s traumatic. Some of them used to be pretty pushy. Others were really shy, really afraid.”
With contraception, there will be fewer roundups in which horses in a herd are separated from each other, fewer gathers overall long-term, fewer horses in captivity and more opportunities for strategic removal of the youngest horses, who can be trained and stand a good chance of being adopted.
Today the Sand Wash mares graze on 800 fenced acres along with a Sand Wash stallion picked up on a rancher’s land. The sanctuary is a bit like Sand Wash—rabbitbrush, yucca and greasewood—but there’s more to eat: native grasses like buffalo and Indian ricegrass. The pasture has year-round creeks, with willows growing by the waterside. When food gets sparse in winter, animals receive hay.
It’s a fine ending for the 11 horses, reunited in a beautiful place. One of them, trained at the sanctuary, has become an ambassador for the group—confident and friendly. Two others, prepared for riding there, have been adopted, including the stallion, who arrived at Great Escape a miserable shell of a horse and has since had the life return to his eyes. More of the horses will be trained. However, Sander says this isn’t enough. “Our ultimate goal is to keep the horses on the range. … That’s where they belong.”
In an ideal world, Sand Wash roundups will end, and the remaining horses in the basin will be left wild, Sander says. That’s why volunteers from her group are working with the BLM to continue darting the Sand Wash herd with PZP. With the new contraceptive, she says, that dream just might be possible. “PZP has been shown to be the only thing that works,” Sander says.
The Sand Wash landscape is a harder one than the sanctuary’s—all those acres without year-round water, the land that ranchers don’t want. But it’s enough for the horses. And that’s what draws the tourists who come to glimpse the “Old West.” And that’s what feeds the fierce attachment of Sand Wash advocates like Sander: an ache for something that still belongs to these animals alone; the wonder of a band disappearing down a slope or running along a ridge, of horses choosing their own way, independent of people, surviving or not on their own; the sight of a stallion looking back across that great divide between wild horse and human, secure in the fullness of freedom—with alert and calculating eyes, but no fear.