For the law enforcement agents, what at first seemed like a simple bust in Del Rio soon ballooned into an investigation that sprawled across the entire agency, drawing in the Department of Justice, a grand jury, and the interests of top officials in Washington. It shows the creeping corruption roundups have encouraged. People in wild horse circles familiar with the case still refer to it ominously as “Del Rio.”
Very quickly, the law enforcement agents learned that Galloway had been tipped off by his BLM supervisor that investigators were arriving. They also learned that his supervisor had illegally killed horses and falsified documents. Galloway was fired by the BLM, and began cooperating with investigators, insisting that his superiors were aware that horses were going to slaughter. “It doesn’t take a space scientist to realize that if a man adopts 100 head of horses, he’s not going to feed them for the next 30 years,” he later said.10
By the middle of 1993, investigators had uncovered what they said was widespread collusion among BLM employees, kill buyers, and middlemen. An internal memorandum by the agency’s chief of law enforcement that year noted that the BLM was “promoting and organizing group adoptions for the intended purpose of selling the wild horses to slaughter plants,” and that “the scope and complexity of the investigation also increased to include scores of individuals, including allegations against private citizens and middle and upper management of the B.L.M.”
When I first started traveling to see roundups, I thought horse-advocate warnings of a BLM cover-up sounded too much like a classic conspiracy theory to be true. But what happened with Del Rio will have nearly anyone reaching for a tinfoil hat. The corrosive effects of the cover-up reached the highest levels. Much of what is known about it comes from BLM investigators who became whistleblowers against their own agency, and from the reporting of Martha Mendoza, a dogged young Associated Press journalist, based at the time in Albuquerque, who later won a Pulitzer Prize. Here’s what unfolded.
As investigators realized that selling wild horses to slaughter went well beyond one rogue employee, they got in touch with the Department of Justice, which assigned the case to a young assistant US attorney named Alia Ludlum. Late in 1994, Ludlum convened a grand jury in Texas to look into widespread abuses that agents had found in the wild horse program.
But the BLM began trying to sabotage the investigation. In February 1995, BLM administrators ordered the seven law enforcement investigators who had been piecing together the case to stop working on it and not to assist the assistant US attorney. If they did help the attorney, they were told, they would be fired.
The lead investigator, Steve Sederwall, retired in frustration and became an outspoken critic of the bureau’s cover-up, guiding reporters to facts the agency was hoping to bury. “In 23 years as a cop, I’ve never seen anything like the depth of corruption I’ve seen in the BLM,” he later told a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor.11
Meanwhile, the assistant US attorney kept building a case for indictments. She showed the Del Rio grand jury evidence that BLM employees had placed more than five hundred horses with people, telling them they could sell them to slaughter after a year, and they tipped off people once the investigations started so they could get rid of evidence. BLM managers, she said, pressured employees not to talk to investigators and falsified adoption records to hide what had happened. The list of suspects grew steadily. The grand jury foreman believed there was probable cause for arrest, saying, “We want these charges filed.”
An internal Department of Justice memo reported that the BLM had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with wild horse adoptions. Employees, it said, “freely admit that everyone ‘knows’ as a general proposition that most of the horses adopted out go to slaughter eventually, [but] the agency tries to avoid finding out that this will happen in any given adoption.”12
Then Washington got involved and the case began to unravel. Some attorneys in the Department of Justice were old colleagues of a woman who had become chief of staff at the Department of the Interior, which oversees the BLM. The deputy US attorney pushing for prosecutions in Texas began to suspect top-level people in the Departments of the Interior and Justice were having meetings in Washington without her to quietly bury the case. Then the Department of Justice began interfering in her investigation. It sent another attorney to Del Rio, and he began his own investigation, directing the BLM to use only certain investigators.
The original attorney on the case, Alia Ludlum, subpoenaed records for the horses in BLM storage pastures, but the BLM refused to provide them. “Something smells fishy,” she wrote in a memo to her boss in 1995. The memo, along with a thousand other pages of documents from the grand jury, was later obtained by the Associated Press. “I am sure that ‘stuff’ is happening in Washington concerning my case that I surely don’t know and can never hope to know. I just don’t understand how 36 horses could cause such overwhelming governmental distress unless there are lots of problems and we are not supposed to find out what the problems are or to solve the problems. I don’t like what is happening.”13
In May 1996, officials from the Departments of Justice and Interior eventually pressured the attorney in Del Rio to drop the charges. The original suspect, Galloway, his supervisor, all the people who profited from illegally selling wild horses to slaughter, and the BLM employees who orchestrated the cover-up were never charged.
“I believe that my investigation was obstructed all along by persons within the BLM because they did not want to be embarrassed,” the attorney in Del Rio wrote in a memo around that time. “I think there is a terrible problem with the program and with government agents placing themselves above the law.”14
Not everyone was ready to give up. A month after the case was closed, Sederwall, the BLM law enforcement officer who had led the investigation, and five former colleagues sent a nine-page letter to then–US Attorney General Janet Reno, detailing “an ever-growing list of felony criminal violations committed by the Bureau of Land Management.” They detailed how BLM employees were selling wild horses to slaughterhouses and falsifying records to cover their tracks. And, they said, the BLM and the Department of Justice colluded to stop the grand jury investigation, writing that “investigations have come to a grinding halt under the pressure of the B.L.M. and the Department of Interior.”
Major newspapers ran stories on the letter, but officials did nothing. The story went away. Six months later, Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza ran a scathing series of articles about the cover-up, showing that scores of BLM employees had profited from slaughter schemes and that the cover-ups had gone all the way up to the Secretary of the Interior. Congress and the White House did not act. Mendoza asked Tom Pogacnik, the head of the Wild Horse and Burro Program at the time, if the program intended to protect a symbol of the Wild West had evolved into a supply system for horse meat? “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” he responded. “Recognizing that we can’t leave them out there, well, at some point the critters do have to come off the range.”
The anger over the slaughter and the cover-up stoked the rage of a number of activists. In the months that followed, members of the Animal Liberation Front began burning down BLM corrals. Their message was clear: If you try to destroy horses, we will destroy your program.
The public revelations of slaughter in the 1990s had the same effect as public revelations of slaughter in the 1980s: The BLM tightened adoption rules, making it harder to sell horses to slaughter, and vowed once again not to give horses to anyone who intended to sell them to slaughter. The agency also got all the slaughterhouses in the United States to agree to alert the government when wild horses showed up in their lots. But the BLM did not make any serious efforts to change the roundup strategy, which had been the driving factor in sending so many horses to the dog-food factory. The helicopters kept flying.
Instead of changing the policy, managers changed what they did with horses after they caught them. Since the beginning of the program in the
1970s, the BLM had temporarily kept horses in what it called “short-term holding”—a system of feedlots located on the edges of Wild Horse Country where contractors fed tons of hay to newly rounded-up herds until they could be adopted or “adopted.” Facing increased scrutiny over adoptions in the late 1990s, the BLM decided to turn to a second system, called “long-term holding.” The bureau would contract with ranchers in the Midwest to put horses out to pasture. The agency would save money by letting horses graze on grass rather than eat hay in feedlots. The lower cost would at least buy time while the agency figured out a new plan.
It was a temporary measure the agency turned to more than twenty years ago. The BLM has yet to figure out a new plan.
In 2000, there were an estimated forty-eight thousand wild horses roaming the West—far more than the twenty-seven thousand the agency thought the land could sustain. A new administration with fresh confidence decided that through bold action it could solve the wild horse problem once and for all. It called the strategy “Living Legends in Balance with the Land.” But the bold action was just the same plan from fifteen years earlier: Round up enough horses to get the population down to twenty-seven thousand, then sustain at that level through roundups. To get the plan done, the agency said it would just need one thing: a lot more money.
The Bush administration and Congress bought into the plan. The Department of the Interior increased the agency’s budget in 2001 from $20 million to $34.4 million, then kept funding near that level until 2005.
With more money, the BLM started rounding up more horses. Helicopters swept up on average more than eleven thousand per year between 2001 and 2005. The agency almost reached AML. But someone forgot to tell them what happened in the 1980s, and the program soon fell into the same trap. The number of horses in storage skyrocketed: fourteen thousand in 2003, twenty-two thousand in 2005, thirty thousand in 2007.
The BLM had long relied on adoptions to draw down the population in its storage system, but with more stringent slaughter protections, fewer people were buying. Adoptions decreased from an average of seventy-five hundred horses per year in the 1990s to closer to five thousand in the 2000s. The economic crash of 2008 pushed adoptions even lower. In recent years, they have dropped to an average of twenty-five hundred horses.
As the number of horses in storage increased, the agency started calling around to ranchers in the Midwest, looking for more big ranches that could hold impounded horses. The BLM had tried this once before, after the fee-waiver program collapsed in 1988. That year the agency signed an agreement with Dayton Hyde, an Oregon rancher-turned-naturalist with a sun-creased face who had written books about wildlife-friendly ranching. He said he’d take 1,650 horses if the BLM agreed to pay $1 per horse per day for four years as startup money, until his sanctuary could become self-sustaining. Things didn’t go as planned. Hyde kept needing more money, until the agency was paying him much more than the agreed amount. As the four-year deadline approached, the sanctuary was nowhere near self-sufficiency. In 1993, the BLM repossessed almost all the horses. It shipped them to a vast cattle ranch north of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where it created its first “long-term holding facility” on thirteen thousand acres owned by a family of longtime cattle ranchers named Hughes. The BLM planned to keep the horses on the Hughes Ranch until it could come up with a better plan. They are still there.15
I visited the Hughes Ranch in 2016. The owner, Robert Hughes, showed me around the gorgeous undulating grass hills of his mixed-grass prairie home, where more than four thousand horses grazed. He was welcoming and cheerful, and clearly proud of his meticulously cared-for land. As we rumbled up a road through the flinty hills in his pickup, a few hundred mares, tightly packed on the hilltop where they were socializing and swishing away flies on a sunny morning, perked up at our approach, then peeled off in a gallop down into the blond, knee-high grass.
“I just love to see them run,” said Hughes.
The government was paying him around $2 million a year, a fee that included no vet care. He just had to provide food and water to the horses, keep them separated by sex so they don’t breed, and haul away their carcasses to a pit when they finally died. Some horses had been on his ranch more than twenty years. I asked him what he thought of the policy of horses rounded up from the wild. His grin broadened and he put up his hands. “Hey, look, man, I’m a grass farmer. I don’t have a damn thing to do with policy,” he said. “If this deal ended, we’d go back into livestock in a big way.”
As the Hughes pastures filled up, the BLM began contracting for more ranches. There are now more than thirty ranches, mostly in Kansas and Oklahoma, in the long-term holding system. Many of these contractors are already wealthy, and the program is making them more so. One was a former CEO of Koch Industries, another is a banker and oilman with a business degree from Stanford, a third made millions leasing his land to his brother-in-law, the founder of Walmart. One of the newest contractors bought his ranch with the proceeds of a $232 million Powerball ticket. Some are being paid more than $3 million per year.
This unlikely setup has become the story of the modern mustang. Taxpayers shell out millions to remove wild horses from desolate land in the West, then millions more to put them on rich prairie grass in the Midwest. In the process, they make an icon of freedom into a ward of the state. However you feel about wild horses, it’s hard to be happy with what has developed.
In 2004, some in Congress tried to force the BLM to start selling excess horses to slaughter buyers, without success. That year, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana, a former cattle auctioneer, slipped an amendment into an omnibus budget bill that allowed the BLM to sell any horses to slaughter that were older than ten or had been offered unsuccessfully for adoption three times. He saw it as a fiscally responsible move to rid the program of its long-term holding costs. But the BLM never used its new power. Internal documents suggest managers feared that sending healthy horses to slaughter would stoke so much public anger that they would lose their jobs, and maybe face more firebombings.
The surge of roundups in the 2000s came close to achieving AML. In 2008, there were about twenty-eight thousand horses on the range. One more year would put the agency over the finish line. But right at the point when managers thought they would be in the clear, the roundup program started to collapse under its own weight. There were thirty-two thousand horses in the holding system. There was no fee-waiver program, as there was in the 1980s, to sneak horses out the back door to slaughter. Nor was there a “don’t ask, don’t tell” adoption program, as there was in the 1990s. The vast majority of the horses rounded up by the BLM stayed with the BLM, and by 2008 they were eating through two-thirds of the program’s budget.
That year, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing follow-up to its 1990 report. It warned that the cost of holding so many horses was not sustainable. “If not controlled,” it concluded, “off-the-range holding costs will continue to overwhelm the program.” The report urged the BLM to explore ways to limit horses in storage, including euthanasia. In a written statement, the BLM concurred, saying it was considering euthanizing about twenty-three hundred horses and developing other strategies to limit the growth. But ultimately the BLM once again backed away, saying in internal documents that agents feared violence from animal rights groups.16
A new administration took over that year. President Barack Obama named a new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, a Colorado rancher who promised more sensible, scientifically based, sustainable management. It never happened. Under Salazar, the BLM kept gathering and storing. Same with his successor, Sally Jewell, the former CEO of outdoor equipment retailer REI, who took over in 2013. By 2016, the BLM holding system had exploded in size to include sixty private ranches, corrals, and feedlots storing forty-six thousand wild horses at a cost of $49 million a year. So much money was going to ranchers that, after the bill was paid, little was left for anything else.
The scale of what the agency has done in a few decades is a
stounding. For generations, Nevada had the largest population of wild horses. But all of a sudden, the largest population was in the holding system. There is something ironic about turning over thousands and thousands of acres of lush mixed-grass prairie to a bunch of mustangs exiled from their home in the hardscrabble desert of Nevada. Who could imagine during the 1950s, when J. Frank Dobie published his great history of the life and lore of the vanishing mustang, or in the 1960s, when schoolkids mobilized to save the last remaining herds, that fifty thousand wild horses would return as exiles to the same prairies from which they were purged a century earlier?
These are the same golden swales where the painter George Catlin first spotted wild horses on his way up the Arkansas River in 1834. This is where he first heard around the campfire the tale of the White Stallion, which would be told and retold for a century. This is where endless acres of bluestem and Indian grass built the great Horse Nations of the southern plains that held back the American army in running battles that lasted longer than any of the country’s major wars. This is where, after the buffalo were gone, the hide hunters turned their big guns on horses. This is where armies of hired hands strung barbed wire along the land at right angles, fencing the last of the wild horses of the Great Plains into oblivion. Now they are back, refugees in their own land, growing fat and shiny on the good grass. It’s a present no one in the past could have ever foreseen.
Drive the dirt roads of this area of Oklahoma and Kansas and you can easily spot these big ranches. They are mostly in the Flint Hills, where plows never broke the rocky soil and vast swaths of prairie remain. In the golden grass along the fence lines, you can see scores of horses swishing their tails, their heads down, munching on the lush forage. When I went to visit the Hughes Ranch, it was late September, and the grass in places was up to my belt. With me was Dean Bolstad, head of the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program.
Wild Horse Country Page 21