Pat & Sharon O'Toole

Coco and Chocolate-two days old
Home Ranch
photo by Sharon O'Toole

Faithful readers have seen many references to wild horses on this blog. For better and for worse, wild horses are our neighbors. The horses in the Horse Management Areas (HMA) around us are truly feral horses--their forebears turned loose by homesteaders who abandoned their land and livestock in the 1930's. A few oldtimers can even tell you about distinctive types, such as descendants of draft horses, that populate various areas.

Last spring, we were moving our sheep and their companion animals--horses and dogs--from our ranch at Powder Flat to our summer country. It was raining hard on the last day and we couldn't get the horsetrailer up the muddy hill. We turned the two remaining horses into a fenced pasture on our private land. This pasture had plenty of feed and water for two horses and we figured they'd be fine until we could get them a little later. This privately owned pasture is surrounded by BLM land. Neither the private nor the BLM is part of an HMA, where wild horses are managed by the BLM.

When we returned a few days later, we found that our fence had been torn down. Our horses, Coco and Gus were missing, and we could tell from tracks that they had been "kidnapped" by a wild horse stud. We reported this to the BLM because we knew they were planning a gather in August. This is in spite of the fact that the law says wild horses are to be removed immediately from private land, upon request. I digress. The horses are periodically gathered to make sure that their numbers do not exceed their feed base, with tragic results to both animals and landscape.

We heard of periodic sightings of Coco, a mare, and Gus, a gelding, over the summer. Sure enough, when the wild horse gather took place in August, our horses were captured and returned to us. The most bizarre part of this misadventure was that we got a letter from the BLM telling us they might charge us for pasture and gather costs. This in spite of the fact that the wild horses were out of their management area, and had destroyed a fence onto our private land. We have worked cooperatively with the BLM in the past to help with the horses, so were befuddled, to say the least, to receive this letter. We also have a number of adopted wild horses that are part of our ranching operation.

When Coco and Gus returned to the fold, I was sure that Coco would be pregnant. Sure enough--here is the offspring from her adventure. Chocolate was born outside on a stormy night. We found him the next morning, standing next to his mother, big as life.

Chocolate and his mom
photo by Sharon O'Toole