You see this Band of Horses is kind of laying here sunning
itself. And that's the stallion standing looking at us. And his
name is Big Red.
Horses are sentient beings. They have
feelings, they have emotions. And for somebody to be able to
look into those eyes and shoot these horses, it's, to me,
unimaginable.
I would say there's about 450 horses here. And you know, the
history of the horses goes back to the Spanish conquistadores
and especially Father Kino, Father Kino raised Spanish
Mustangs. And what he would do as he traveled through the
country, he would drop off about 20 head of horses and cattle,
and with the expectation that the band's or the herds would
grow over time, so that when they came back through, they had
cattle and they had horses. And so the horses had been here a
very long time.
I've been a horse, crazy person all my life,
I've loved horses all my life. And when I found out that there
were wild horses in the Sitgreaves National Forest, I just, you
know, wanted to come out here and and see them and enjoy their
beauty.
I know of 40 horses that have been shot and killed. And those
are the ones that have been found. And my passion is is, you
know, trying to find the horses to identify them, and make sure
to find them soon enough that an investigation can be done.
Okay, yeah, well, what we're looking at here is, is one of
the graves where at least one of the horses was buried. And you
can see looking down in there, this is where, you know,
carnivores. Predators dug down in there to get to the
carcasses. I was in military intelligence. So I was gathering
intelligence against foreign adversaries. And so that type of
work taught me how to connect the dots. When I arrive at a
scene of a horse shooting, the first thing I do is I want to
get good photos and video of the horses that have been shot, I
want to try to find out if I can see at that point where they
where they were shot. I certainly want to look around
the scene to see if there's any horses that might still be alive
and injured and suffering. But I also I look for shell casings. I
look for any footprints, I look for vehicle tracks. And to
secure the scene. It's just standing by until law
enforcement arrives to make sure that nobody else comes by and
tampers with the scene or runs over shell casings.
The dislike for these horses is really rooted in a grass war, because
the ranchers are able to graze cattle on our public lands for
$1.35 per cow calf pair per month. And for every horse
that's out here, that's one less cow calf pair that they can
graze on our public lands. And that's money out of their
pockets.
Well, I'm Nelson Shirley. I operate Black Canyon Cattle Company.
This ranch is about 234,000 acres, and it consists of about
150,000 acres of forest service leased land. Right now, because
of the drought of the last five years, we're down to about 680
head of cattle, all from a standpoint of having a viable
ranch economically, you have to keep the land in a healthy
condition. And plants can only regrow if they have enough leaf
mass on top of the ground if they're not grazed off
continuously. The problem with the feral horse population is
it's sitting there on the forest year round. So for example, we're
permitted for 900 head of cattle on that almost 150,000 acres of
forest for five months, whereas these five or 600 horses are
sitting on about 75,000 acres, and they're there year round. So
it's like four times that density, four times the impact of
our cattle effectively.
The acreage is vast here. And there's no evidence of damage
being caused by the horses. There's no evidence of
overpopulation of these horses.
I personally like horses. I don't like the idea of horses
just being randomly shot. I think the problem is that the
some of the advocates of wild horses are not recognizing the
idea that you can't have an expanding uncontrolled
population.
You know, the plan currently calls for leaving 50 to 104
horses on this vast acreage. Well, that's not a genetically
viable herd. And the plan does not take into any consideration
the protection of these horses and especially in light of all
the shootings, you would think that that would be one of their
top priorities is to to come up with a way that they can protect
these horses.
My hope is that at some point somebody will come
forward and provide the tip that's needed for law
enforcement to actually make an arrest. These are brutal crimes
that need to be stopped.