Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

Check out this article from the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel about the wild horses of the Little Book Cliffs. As Marty noted, the reporter didn’t get everything right (one example: no, PZP will not be in “pellet” form in horses’ feed any time soon), but it’s a very positive article about what’s happening on one wild horse range with a strong partnership between BLM and a highly involved advocacy group when the priority is the horses.

Don’t forget to stay up to date about the Little Book Cliffs wild horses by following Billie’s blog!

There are a lot of involved folks with the Friends of the Mustangs, and Billie and Marty are just two of them. I was very encouraged when I saw the first day of the Little Book Cliffs roundup in September 2007, less than a month after ours in Spring Creek Basin. Volunteers there are involved even with the roundup process, and as a result, the horses are treated much more humanely without the whips and plastic bags and yelling and banging and chaos. They do still use a helicopter, but family bands are kept together when they reach the pens – a much smaller setup than ours was, and they move to different areas of the rugged  range so horses don’t have to run across the whole of it – and, because of their documentation, particular horses are able to be singled out, then the others are released after hours, not days. It was a much calmer atmosphere than ours, and I have been encouraged and inspired by them ever since.