Wild Horse Country

by David Philipps

  What would happen when the Department of Transportation caught on, I asked.

  “Fuck DOT, and the horses they rode in on,” he said. “They’re a bunch of educated idiots that have no idea what it takes to make a truck run. I don’t have much use for ’em.”

  So began a two-hour rambling conversation well seasoned with swearing and racial slurs, in which, when it came to abiding by the law, Davis lurched between being coy and being jarringly honest. He’d worked with horses his whole life, except for a stint in Vietnam, he said. He’d hauled racehorses in Arizona and worked at a track, he had worked on ranches in Montana. He had even helped round up wild horses in that state right after the federal law took effect in the 1970s, during the claiming period when ranchers could take free-roaming horses as their own.

  “These ranchers was hollering about the wild horses coming in and eating their hay stacks, so they declared there were no wild horses in that area and just shot a bunch of ’em,” he said. “Well, me and another old boy we got us a case of wine and built traps and gathered a bunch of horses and trucked them off. They can’t put you in jail for catching something that don’t exist.”

  He paused, maybe sensing he had said too much.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m a supporter of wild horses, believe me, I love wild horses to death,” he said. “It’s like an addiction. I can’t get enough. For some it’s drugs, for me it’s horses.”

  I asked him how well he knew Ken Salazar.

  He had known him all his life, he said. When he was young, his father had farmed the Salazar land. Since then, he said, he had done “quite a bit of trucking for Ken.”

  “’Course, Ken’s off in Washington, his boy runs the ranch now,” he said.

  Davis said he made his living hauling cattle, but recently he had been buying “lots and lots” of wild horses from the BLM.

  “What do you do with them all?” I asked.

  He paused, then said he kept about two hundred on a nearby pasture that he leased, and used them to breed bucking horses for the rodeo. He added that he had hundreds more that he leased to gas and oil landowners in West Texas, where the grazing kept down the grass for fire protection. He said he leased some to movie production companies in Mexico to use in films. And, he said, he had a thriving business selling horses to wealthy landowners throughout the southeastern United States.

  “Lots of folks want to own a genuine piece of American heritage, a true mustang,” he said. “I get the BLM to give me flashy, photographical horses. Ones that will look good in front of million dollar homes.”

  When I checked later, I couldn’t find any evidence that these stories were true. There were no movie companies and no oil leases. The number of horses he said he was selling rich southerners were vast. If you added all of the nonprofit adoption groups that try to find homes for horses together, they were not moving as many mustangs. Yet no one in the close-knit wild horse advocacy world had ever heard of him.

  Davis told me he’d like to buy more wild horses, but the BLM will only give him so many. “The tree-huggers will give them hell if they sell too many to me,” he said. “The BLM gal in Washington who sells all the horses to me, she is always asking where I’m selling them.”

  “What do you tell her?” I asked.

  “I tell her, ‘None of your damned business,’ that’s what I tell her,” he said. “They never question me too hard. It makes ’em look good if they’re movin’ these horses, see? Every horse I take from them saves them a lot of money. I’m doing them a favor. Hell, I’m doing the American people a favor.”

  The woman who ran sales in Washington later told me on the phone that all buyers are carefully screened, and there was no indication Davis was doing anything wrong. When I pressed her about what a man like Davis could be doing with so many horses, she hung up.

  He shook his head and mentioned the holding system.

  “More than 50,000 just sitting there and I can’t get them,” he said.

  I pressed him to tell me who leased his horses, so I could follow up.

  “No way in hell,” he said. “You could cut me out of this deal, too.”

  I started to worry he was getting suspicious of me. Maybe the BLM had warned him I had requested the records. Maybe he suspected I was talking with wild horse advocates.

  I cast my eyes around, looking for a way to change the subject, and spotted two long, silver trailers by his house—one single-decker for shipping horses, and one double-decker with lower ceilings, known as a “pot,” for shipping cattle. I asked how he shipped his horses.

  “I use that trailer right there,” he said, gesturing to the single-deck trailer.

  “The law says you can’t take them to the kill plants in pots, so they all have to go in singles,” he said. “But that’s a pretty wide-open law. There is no kill plant in the US, so how are you going to haul horses to the kill plant when we ain’t got any?” He raised his eyebrows for effect. “So you can haul them in any fuckin’ thing you want to.”

  So much for him being suspicious.

  “Besides,” he continued, “horses spend their whole lives with their head on the ground eating. It ain’t going to hurt them to be in this double trailer with their head at least level with their back. I mean, what’s eight or ten hours?”

  I mentioned how the BLM had been unable to control the wild horse population, and now had more horses than it knew what to do with.

  “If the BLM and the tree huggers would get off their asses, they could go out there with a rifle and eliminate about three-quarters of their studs and then they would not have so many colts,” he said.

  Prices for slaughter were low now, because horses had to be shipped to Mexico, he said. For two years, he had been trying to start his own slaughter plant. He’d even asked Ken Salazar’s brother, John Salazar, who was head of the Colorado Department of Agriculture, for help: “He said, ‘I’d love to see it, but politically I can’t go near it.’ ” Davis said he hoped the government eventually would lift the ban on slaughter.

  “Why, hell, some of the finest meat you’ll ever eat is a fat yearling colt,” he said. “What’s wrong with taking these BLM horses that they got fat and shiny and setting up a kill plant?”

  I asked flat out if he had ever sold a horse to slaughter.

  He became very gentle and quiet.

  “No,” he said, calmly. “I love horses. I find them good homes.”

  Where were those good homes? I told him I wanted to see the horses.

  He laughed. “I’m not tellin’ nobody nothin’ on where they are going, because once they’re mine, they’re mine. And I make a living off of them.”

  He took a pebble and flung it at a burro that was chewing on one of his fence posts. “I’m doing them a favor by taking the horses to where we are not having to pay to keep them. They are spending a lot of money on that wild horse deal. And I am helping them eliminate some of it. Am I not doing the country a service?”

  I insisted that it sounded to me like he was sending the horses to slaughter, and I asked if he had been lying.

  “No. No. I’m not sending nothing to slaughter,” he said. “But what a waste. Wouldn’t it be better to be processing these sons of bitches into dog food? I talked to the Purina people about it and they said they couldn’t do it. People wouldn’t buy dog food with horse meat because the tree huggers would raise so much hell.”

  He said Ken Salazar had the authority to sell every wild horse in long-term holding to slaughter. “If they give me a hand, I would sell every one they got,” he said. “And what I couldn’t sell I would sell to the kill buyers because they’d be mine.”

  But if you sell a wild horse to slaughter, I said, you’d be prosecuted.

  He said he wasn’t so sure. Every batch of horses he bought, he got a bill of sale. That meant the horses were legally his property. They were no longer protected wild horses, they were private horses, and he could do what he wanted with them.

  “I think there
’s loopholes,” he said. “Lawyers are what runs this country and they put loopholes in laws for other lawyers. I’ve had several DUIs over the years and I’ve learned something: It’s money. If you’re accusing me of something, and I have enough money to hire a good lawyer, I can get out of it like—who’s that nigger ballplayer that killed his wife?”

  In all the time I talked to him, Davis never overtly admitted to selling horses to slaughter, even when I asked flat out and pointed out all the evidence. He remained cordial, and I left an hour later.

  A few months later, I published a story about Tom Davis, funded by the nonprofit investigative news organization ProPublica, called “All the Missing Horses.” I had tried contacting top BLM officials and Ken Salazar multiple times for comment, but neither responded. Salazar must have decided I wasn’t worth the time.

  Within days of the article, the BLM announced it was stopping all horse sales to Davis and opening an investigation. The state of Colorado, too, opened an investigation into breach of brand inspection laws. Davis’s career as a covert kill buyer was over. But it bothered me that I still didn’t know Salazar’s involvement.

  Several weeks after the story came out, I heard Salazar was coming to Colorado Springs, where I lived, to campaign for Barack Obama again. Politics had brought him out from behind the ramparts of the Department of the Interior building in Washington and forced him to mix with the common folk. It was my chance to question him. I rushed out to see him and introduced myself as a local journalist who had some questions about his department. He nodded, smiled, and said he would be happy to do an interview. I started asking him questions about the campaign, then shifted to questions about wild horses, and then specifically to Tom Davis.

  When I mentioned the horse trader, I saw his face suddenly shift, as though realizing that he was now talking to the reporter he had been avoiding for months. I had caught him off guard, on a day when he wanted to talk about anything but wild horses. He then said the interview was over. He smiled and nodded, then walked up to me, got right in my face, inches from my nose, tipped back his white cowboy hat, and hissed through gritted teeth, “You set me up. Don’t you ever. . . . You know what, you do that again . . . I’ll punch you out.”

  I stepped back, a little shocked. I don’t want to make it sound scarier than it was. Salazar was never really a physically imposing man, and by the time he threatened me, he was a grandfather. Over the years, I’ve interviewed smugglers, drug dealers, and murderers. People have threatened to do far worse. More than anything, I was confused. And as I watched him turn and quickly walk off to a waiting black SUV, I was disappointed that the interview ended without my knowing anything about Salazar’s involvement with Tom Davis.

  While I was ready to brush it off, not everyone was. Ginger Kathrens, a wild horse advocate who was in the room and saw the exchange, put out a press release the next day to all the major news outlets. It got picked up by the Associated Press and ran in dozens of papers, including the New York Times.

  Salazar was forced to apologize. In a meeting with me a few weeks later in his grand office in Washington, he smiled, shook my hand, and swore he didn’t even know who Tom Davis was. He was ready for the meeting with an array of new safeguards he had put in place after my reporting. The BLM changed its regulations so that no one could buy truckloads of $10 horses anymore. People could only buy six at a time, he said. Salazar admitted the program faced problems, but he said they were working on it. The most important goal, he said, was to keep doing roundups so the BLM could get down to twenty-seven thousand horses.

  If shutting down Tom Davis’s racket sounds like a satisfying ending, it is not. I didn’t expect convictions for anyone in the BLM or for Salazar, but I did think the hammer would come down on Davis. His paper trail was so long and so blatant that it would be easy to gain a conviction. If not jail time, then at least a fine. It never happened.

  The BLM spent months investigating. Other federal law enforcement agents got involved, too. One afternoon after the inquiry was completed, I received a phone call from a Department of Justice investigator. He confirmed what I had suspected: Davis had shipped all his horses to New Mexico. He sold them to an old friend named Dennis Chavez, who had an exporter’s license. The horses were mixed in with trucks of other horses and shipped through a border crossing near El Paso. They went to the big, European-owned meatpacking plants in Mexico, where they were cut into steaks, frozen, and loaded into shipping containers bound for the other side of the Atlantic. In bistros in Antwerp, diners ended up unwittingly feasting on wild, free-range, organic American mustang.

  Davis was not charged. The feds decided that by selling to an intermediary, he had protected himself from prosecution because he could plausibly say he had no idea the horses were going to slaughter.

  Davis had broken state brand laws hundreds of times by shipping horses out of Colorado without a brand inspection. But the local district attorney in the San Luis Valley decided not to prosecute. Last I knew, Davis was still hauling cattle for a living and buying domestic horses for slaughter when he could find them cheap.

  Investigators never looked into BLM involvement, the connection to Salazar, the complete breakdown in safeguards in Washington. No one that I know of was fired or even admonished. When I talked to the head of the program, Dean Bolstad, in 2016, he said that the whole ordeal was extremely embarrassing for the BLM, but that they honestly had no idea Davis was doing anything wrong.

  What happened with Davis shows the danger of sticking with a policy like roundups. I’ve already outlined many problems. Rounding up horses and storing them is going to cost us more than $1 billion over the next several years. It traumatizes horses and breaks up family bands. It erodes a symbol we as a republic have imbued with some of our most heartfelt ideals. But it also literally sows corruption. It happened in the 1980s. It happened in the 1990s. It happened with Davis. As long as there are horses with value, there will be unscrupulous people trying to get around the rules and pocket the profits, and cornered bureaucrats trying to throw a rug over the whole thing. But it gets worse. The policy gives otherwise law-abiding public employees an incentive to make deals with unscrupulous people or look the other way. The corroding influence of trying to cover up those deals ripples through not just the Department of the Interior but also the Department of Justice, and the rule of law. It has happened more than once. If we let it continue, it will almost certainly happen again.

  CHAPTER 9

  DISAPPOINTMENT VALLEY

  After traveling all over Wild Horse Country, I’d come to believe that just stopping the roundups would lead to disaster on the land. At the same time, continuing roundups would lead to continued corruption and mismanagement in the BLM. I began casting around for another answer, and eventually I found myself crouching in the chalky dirt of an arroyo in far western Colorado, far from any town, in a place called Disappointment Valley, shoulder to shoulder with a woman holding a long rifle.

  For early settlers riding into the area in search of places to plant or graze, Disappointment Valley was just that: disappointing. It is a broken country of mesas and valleys. The rising Rocky Mountains to the east eons ago pushed up layers of old sedimentary stone laid down by a moist coast environment about the time Hyracotherium was wandering through. A soft, bone-colored shale left by the lazy waters of a muddy coast eroded into the basin now called Disappointment Valley. The fine silt crumbles easily. It has formed steep, bare hills and badlands with furrows of earth that pleat the hillsides and fill the air as whirlwinds cut across the land in the midday heat. There is no running water in most of the valley. The soil is too alkaline to farm. Generations of overgrazing by cattle whittled the once-full bunchgrasses down to cheatgrass and greasewood. It is searing and shadeless in the summer, and whipped by icy winds in the winter. It is a forbidding, leftover place. Naturally, this is Wild Horse Country.

  There is a BLM Herd Management Area here called Spring Creek Basin.

  One morning,
on the edge of the basin, I met up with one of the few human residents of the valley, a cheerful, athletic woman named TJ Holmes. There is a small house on the southern edge of the valley where she has lived as the caretaker for years. She has adopted several mustangs but only rides occasionally. She prefers getting around in a dust-covered Jeep, or, just as often, on her own two feet.

  Holmes was tall, with curly red hair unfurling under a sun-bleached visor, and had the wiry build of a mountain-bike racer, which, by the way, she was for years. She had the friendly but skeptical nature of a small-town journalist, which she also was for a time. But she also wore dangling mustang earrings that pranced as she walked, and scuffed hiking boots, white with the chalk of the valley, that showed her current occupation: guardian of Spring Creek Basin’s wild horses.

  “I’m glad you could come see what we do here,” she told me when we met. “I think it could finally end the roundups.”

  She had the guarded excitement of a true believer eager to share a discovery and also aware that it would strike the unacquainted as bizarre. We drove down a long, dirt track into the basin, passing miles of scrubby salt brush and bounding down into dry creek beds—there are no bridges here because there is rarely any water. Finally we parked in a flat spread of land at the bottom of the basin, where brush dotted the plain in all directions. She opened her hatch and removed a long, green gun with a spotting scope clamped to the barrel. She checked that she had her binoculars and plenty of ammunition in her backpack, then she led me quietly down into an arroyo.

  Like many wild horse advocates, Holmes first learned about the animals by watching a helicopter roundup. Early on, her activism focused on trying to stop roundups in Disappointment Valley. But as she spent season after season tracking the horses of the area, watching them breed and forage on the forbidding hills, she began to realize that simply opposing the BLM’s roundups was not a solution. It would lead to overpopulation and disaster. So she searched for another way to control the population—something more selective, more efficient, and, she hoped, more humane.