“You don’t really think that stuff is still going on?” I asked.
“Well, those horses are worth a lot of money, and that money is going somewhere,” Leigh continued.
“I don’t buy it,” I said. “No one at the BLM would be stupid enough to let that happen.”
She smiled and said, “There’s an easy way to find out.” Forget the adoption program, she said, and look at something called “sale authority” horses. A sale authority horse is any horse that was either older than ten years or passed over for adoption more than three times. They are essentially government surplus—bargain-basement horses. The BLM quietly created the sale authority program in 2004. Anyone could buy one of these horses for $10 each. And the BLM would deliver them for free.
The BLM assured the public that the sale authority program was not a clandestine slaughter scheme like the fee-waiver program set up in the 1980s, pointing to the fact that it made buyers sign a contract swearing they wouldn’t sell horses to slaughter. Anyone who broke the contract faced federal felony charges. But, unlike the adoption program, where the BLM holds a horse’s title for a year to take away the financial incentives of slaughter buyers, sale authority horse titles transferred at the time of sale. Once people bought a sale authority horse, they could immediately do what they wanted with it.
The BLM doesn’t talk about the sale program, Leigh said, but there are hundreds of horses sold each year. “Maybe someone could request the sales records, see who is buying those horses and what they are doing with them.”
“If it’s so easy,” I asked, “why don’t you do it?”
“I did,” she replied, smiling as she looked at me. “But for some reason the BLM doesn’t want to give them to anyone.”
Two months later, there was a knock on my door and a mailman handed me a certified manila envelope from the BLM. Right after the roundup, I had sent a formal request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the BLM, asking for all wild horse sales records. I’d been a journalist long enough to know that FOIA, which requires the federal government to share documents with the public, doesn’t always get you what you want. Agencies can drag their feet for years. They can obfuscate or omit. They can illegally deny requests, knowing the likelihood of legal challenges is slim. They can censor with abandon. Once I got a sixty-page response from the US Air Force with every line dutifully blacked out. There are other requests I’m still waiting for, years later. But with routine data easily pulled from a spreadsheet, sometimes you get lucky.
I opened the envelope and pulled out page after page of spreadsheets that detailed years of sale authority purchases. I ran my eyes across the column labels at the top: Date of sale, buyer, buyer’s address (this whole column was blacked out), holding facility where horses were purchased, number of horses bought. Then I ran down the rows, knowing within minutes that I’d be able to tell if Leigh’s theory was just another activist fantasy. For a while, the data went like this:
Jessica Rue, one horse, Burns, Oregon
Jolene Pavelka, one horse, Cañon City, Colorado
Cinnamon Guller, one horse, Palomino Valley, Nevada
There were pages like this—bargain shoppers who were unable to visit a BLM holding facility without taking home a mustang. Leigh fit in this category. She had adopted three horses. But then the entries changed.
Tom Davis, 28 horses, Litchfield, California
Tom Davis, 31 horses, Fallon, Nevada
Tom Davis, 174 horses, Teterville, Kansas
All told, a guy named Tom Davis had purchased more than seventeen hundred horses in four years. The median number of horses most people purchased from the sale authority program was two, but Davis always bought at least a truckload at a time, and sometimes up to five truckloads. His purchases made up 70 percent of all sales. He wasn’t just the biggest buyer in the sale authority program—he basically was the sale program.
I figured anyone doing something legitimate with that many horses would be well known to wild horse advocates and easy to find, but Google turned up no trace of a Tom Davis associated with wild horses. None of the big wild horse organizations had heard of him either. Who was this guy? Where was he? And how was I going to find him?
He had a common name and could be in any state—though I suspected I would find him in the West. As I searched for any Tom Davis associated with horses or the BLM, I found two promising suspects. One was an old rancher who had a big property in Oregon’s Wild Horse Country. The other was a horse trainer and rodeo rider with a spread in Texas called the TNT Ranch. But which one was it, and how could I find out without tipping them off that I was snooping?
I called Leigh to talk through the problem. As a horse owner, she came up with a solution in about thirty seconds. In the cattle-rustling and horse-thieving days of the Wild West, most western states passed laws requiring any livestock being moved out of their home county to get a brand inspection first, to make sure the animals weren’t stolen. Those laws are still active today. Every time the BLM shipped out a truckload of horses, it would have had to get them inspected, Leigh said, and the inspection for every truck the BLM sent to Tom Davis would have his address. “It won’t tell you what he’s doing with them, but at least then we’ll know which Tom Davis we are dealing with.”
It was brilliant, because I wasn’t just worried about tipping off Tom Davis. I was also worried about the BLM. The brand inspectors were state employees. I could dig through their files without the feds knowing.
It turned out that neither of the men I had identified was the right Tom Davis. Brand inspection records I requested came back with a delivery address in a tiny town in Colorado called La Jara. I had been through the town a few times. It was near the New Mexico border, in a remote spot called the San Luis Valley.
A search of the address on a satellite image showed a small house surrounded by corrals and holding pens. Two long, silver stock trailers were parked by the barn. It was the home of a sixty-four-year-old man with a cattle trucking business. He had the equipment, he had a knowledge of buyers and markets. This was our guy.
Everything I could find out about Tom Davis suggested he had lived in the San Luis Valley his whole life. It is a high, dry, flat valley rimmed by snow-crested mountains. Hours away from any city, large or small, it has a slow way of life that has resisted change. Many farmers still use traditional practices passed down from Spanish settlers who came generations earlier, during the mustang era. Some in the valley still practice a folk Catholicism that has changed little since medieval times.
Looking at the records, I realized that though Davis had lived in the valley his whole life, his wild horse purchases were from corrals throughout the BLM holding system: Colorado, California, Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming, Kansas, Utah. Everywhere the BLM was selling horses, he was buying. This was a telling detail. It suggested that he hadn’t just worked out a quiet deal with one crooked BLM holding-facility manager or one state director willing to look the other way. He was getting the same deal everywhere. Which meant that whomever he had made the agreement with was in the central office in Washington, DC.
I would have to explore that link. But first I had to try to figure out what he was doing with the horses, without letting him know he was being watched. Here again, brand inspections became key. I had all the documents showing what was shipped to Davis’s house. Next I requested all inspections of horses being shipped away from Davis’s house. They showed that he was shipping horses out within a day or two of receiving them, and he was almost always writing on the inspection forms that they were going to a tiny town on the Texas border called Spofford. Why he picked Spofford, I never found out, but I couldn’t help thinking it was a reference to the past. Right next door was the town that became notorious for the BLM’s 1990s slaughter cover-up: Del Rio.
It didn’t take long to establish that the Spofford story was a lie. The town has fewer than a hundred people. A few phone calls showed none of them knew anything about any big shipments of h
orses coming through on the single paved street.
The United States shut down its last horse slaughterhouses in 2007, after Democrats in Congress defunded the federal inspection program needed to process the meat. Since then, all horses bound for slaughter had been trucked over the border. Tens of thousands a year went to Mexico, where two massive, modern slaughterhouses produced a steady line of shipping containers full of frozen meat bound for Europe. Hides were made into mattress stuffing bound for Norway. Manes were made into hair weaves bound for Asia. I was willing to bet that the wild horses Davis said were bound for Spofford were actually ending up at those plants.
The motivation was clear. A guy could buy BLM horses at $10 a head, delivered free by the BLM to his door. Slaughter buyers were paying anywhere from $200 to $400 per horse in the Southwest. Anyone selling contraband wild horses to an exporter probably had to take a lower price, but even at half the market rate, he would still make a huge profit. I guessed he was shipping them to a border state, selling to a middleman, and then ordering more. The only thing that didn’t fit my theory was how he was getting away with it.
Sure, the BLM wild horse program had repeatedly sold horses over the years to people who quietly found ways to get around regulations and profit from horses going to slaughter. But Tom Davis wasn’t doing it that quietly. When you buy 240 horses, someone will notice. It didn’t seem that he could get away with his racket unless someone at the BLM wanted him to. I hesitated to make that leap, because by doing so I knew I was entering the wild horse advocate world of conspiracy theories. True, as a journalist, I would be in good company. Martha Mendoza, the Associated Press reporter who dug into the Del Rio scandal in the 1990s, and who concluded that “a multimillion-dollar federal program created to save the lives of wild horses is instead channeling them by the thousands to slaughterhouses, where they are chopped into cuts of meat,” not only turned out to be correct but also later won a Pulitzer Prize for other work. And her conspiracy theory was not just that the BLM was covering up the slaughter, but so were the Departments of Justice and Interior.1
Certainly the BLM had been courted by a steady parade of disingenuous suitors over the years, wanting to take wild horses off their hands. But it had usually refused. One of the more flagrant ones was in 2002, when a Montana rancher named Merle Edsall and his business partner, Johannes von Trapp, offered to care for ten thousand mustangs in Mexico, conveniently just out of reach of US law, under a program they called the Sonora Wild Horse Repatriation Project. When wild horse advocates howled that it was a thinly veiled slaughter program, the BLM passed on the offer.
Even though I was hesitant, I started believing in my own conspiracy theory. Something bugged me about Tom Davis’s purchases. The BLM was busting other people for buying sale authority horses, but not Davis. In 2011, two Utah men, Robert Capson and Dennis Kunz, were arrested with a truckload of sixty-four wild horses bound for Texas. According to a federal indictment, they planned to sell the animals to an exporter for slaughter. Capson, an itinerant ranch hand with multiple bankruptcies in his past, owned no land to hold wild horses and no hay to feed them. He had bought the herd from a short-term holding corral near Salt Lake City, saying he planned to sell them as rodeo stock. He had the BLM deliver the truckloads to his friend Kunz, who was in the business of buying horses for slaughter. Within a few days, Kunz was on his way to Mexico with the whole lot.
Unbeknownst to both of them, the BLM was watching. Two hundred miles into the journey, federal agents closed in. They had set up a sting and had invited the local nightly news team, complete with helicopter video crews to document the highway patrol pulling over the truck and saving the mustangs. The two men were arrested and charged with wire fraud and making false statements. Both pled guilty and faced fines of almost $10,000.
This may seem like an honorable law enforcement action, but to me it only made the BLM seem more suspicious. Why was a guy who had bought one truckload of horses being paraded in front of the cameras in handcuffs when another guy who had bought dozens was counting his money at home? It would be one thing if the agency was just too overworked or inept to enforce its own rules. But that was not the case. They were enforcing the rules. They just weren’t enforcing them against Tom Davis.
I talked to Kunz by phone right before he entered his guilty plea in 2012. He was angry, and he felt he had been tricked by the BLM. “The whole thing was a setup,” he said. He had talked to top BLM employees in Utah who had explained the sale system to him months earlier. They told him that once the sale was made, the horses were owned free and clear. Kunz said he felt they were encouraging him to buy horses for slaughter.
“They knew who I was, and what they were trying to tell me,” he said.
He said his partner, Capson, clearly had no way to care for a truckload of horses, but the BLM sold them anyway. “If they didn’t want us to have the horses, then why did they sell them to us?” Kunz asked. “And then they had all the cameras ready to make an arrest and make themselves look good.”
The arrests made headlines and showed that the BLM was protecting wild horses. At the same time, though, they were selling hundreds and hundreds to Tom Davis, no questions asked.
As I thought about this, something kept popping up in the back of my head: Tom Davis’s address. I grew up in Colorado and had visited the San Luis Valley dozens of times over the years, so I knew that Davis lived just down the road from the family ranch of Ken Salazar—a local boy who had grown up running cattle but had gone to college, then law school. He was elected Colorado’s attorney general and then US senator. He campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008, bringing in crucial Hispanic votes in the swing state of Colorado, and was subsequently named Secretary of the Interior.
Salazar had been a steady critic of the Wild Horse and Burro Program since becoming secretary, calling the program, in a letter to the Senate, “not sustainable for the animals, the environment, or the taxpayer.” He said rules for selling wild horses to private parties needed to be “more flexible where appropriate.”2
The advocates hated him for it. He was a rancher, so they immediately saw him as a stooge for livestock interests. And they interpreted his comments as a call to loosen safeguards against slaughter. As a Colorado voter, I had always seen Salazar as a likable and fairly harmless centrist. But as soon as he was in charge of the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, one of his longtime neighbors started buying truckloads of horses for slaughter from the bureau without anyone batting an eye. What was going on? I intended to try to find out.
First I had to find out more about Tom Davis. I didn’t even have proof that the horses he bought were going to slaughter. I called the US Customs and Border Patrol in Texas, where most horses were exported to Mexico. On paper, both the US Department of Agriculture and its Mexican counterpart are supposed to keep records of each slaughter horse exported through Border Patrol corrals—a system set up to catch diseases in food products. But after I called, I learned that in practice the paperwork is often incomplete or not filed at all, so I had no way of tracing Tom Davis’s horses once his trucks pulled away from his property.
The only person who truly knew the extent of what Tom Davis was doing and who was helping him was Tom Davis. Since I had exhausted the options for tracking him behind his back, I decided it was time to go talk to him face-to-face.
I found a pretext for visiting that gave me at least a little cover. In 1984, Tom Davis had self-published a memoir about a six-month ride he took from Texas to Alaska in 1976. The book was called Be Tough or Be Gone: The Adventures of a Modern Day Cowboy. It was a painful read, and long out of print (Sample passage: “I swear this little gal could charm the lard off a hog”), but it gave me an excuse to talk to him. I called him up and introduced myself as a writer and asked if I could talk to him about his adventures. He invited me to come on down.
I pulled up in front of his house about a week later and parked my car pointed out toward the road so, if I needed to, I could get
out fast. It was a three-hour drive to reach his collection of corrals in the San Luis Valley, and the whole way down I’d been playing scenarios in my head of how the interview would go. None of them ended well. He had been making a comfy living off selling horses, and I was about to ruin it. And I’d be calling him a cheat and a liar to boot. I was pretty sure he would throw me off his property. When I arrived, the corrals were still muddy from a heavy rain the previous day, and a half-dozen horses and a burro nibbled at a bale of hay. A battered brown pickup sat next to a small, white ranch house. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I walked around to the back and eventually found Davis by a tractor-trailer, winding up thick yellow straps he had used to deliver a load of hay the previous night.
He was a big man, a bit doughy in his old age, but strong. He had on black overalls that were new but slicked with mud. A thumb-softened notebook was stuffed into the chest pocket. Shaggy brown hair curled from under a sun-faded ball cap with the logo of his trucking company on the crest. His eyes squinted from beneath deep, drooping brows, making him look perpetually skeptical and a little sad. His face, like the rest of him, showed years out in the weather. He looked like a man who had lived hard his whole life.
I shook his enormous bear paw of a hand. He was friendly in an “aw, shucks” way, and he had a slow way of talking that you often find in the San Luis Valley.
I sat on the deck of his trailer, my legs dangling over the mud, and made small talk as he wound up the long, yellow straps. I hoped to steer our conversation toward the wild horses eventually, but not at first.
He had just gotten back from delivering a load of hay to Aspen, he said. He cut costs by taking the load up a winding, precipitous mountain shortcut called Independence Pass. “You’re not supposed to take a trailer over 35 feet on that road but I ran it after midnight when no one was there,” he said with a knowing grin.
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