Volunteers Pony up Thousands in Donations to Purchase Disputed Alpine Horses at Auction

70 horses on their way to sanctuary in Colorado

A group of wild horses run through a field in Eureka, Nev., on July 7, 2005. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

A wild horse sanctuary in Colorado has agreed to adopt 70 free-roaming Alpine horses rounded up in Arizona and sold by the U.S. Forest Service at two recent online auctions.

Simone Netherlands, president of the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group based in Prescott, Arizona, said volunteers raised $50,000 on short notice to purchase the horses this month.

Netherlands said the nonprofit organization Wild Horse Refuge in Craig, Colorado, agreed to accept up to 100 Alpine horses, but no more.

“It’s absolutely horrible,” Netherlands said of the group’s limited ability to find new homes for the animals.

Wild horses roam free on state and some private land, outside federal disengaged horse management areas on May 31, 2017, outside Milford, Utah. George Frey/Getty Images

“We literally own 70 wild Alpine horses right now,” Netherlands told The Epoch Times. “We can’t handle more.”

‘A Huge Save’

As fast as the Forest Service has been rounding up Alpine horses and selling them online in recent months, Netherlands said volunteers raised thousands in donations to purchase more than 140 horses and make sure they found new homes. One Arizona woman took in nine horses temporarily.

“We’re always surprised when we’re able to pull this off. It’s a huge save,” Netherlands said.

She said volunteers spent around $20,000 to purchase 36 horses at one recent auction and 43 at another. Funds raised will also go to purchase health certificates for the horses and transportation to the sanctuary in Colorado, located about 620 miles away by car.

The 70 horses were separated into groups of mares and stallions and will remain at locations in Heber and Williams, Arizona, then loaded onto trucks and relocated to the refuge, a 22,450-acre sanctuary with more than 29 square miles of uninterrupted land for the horses to run free.

According to the nonprofit’s website, the refuge is a new facility created for rescued wild mustangs from Bureau of Land Management areas located in Colorado.

“The wild horses living on this special property are now protected and have regained the freedom and independence they had prior to government interference.”

Netherlands said the 70 Alpine horses were all from the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests in eastern Arizona, where volunteers found the remains of around 45 horses shot and killed last year.

Wild horse advocate Dyan Albers Lowey stands next to one of at least 15 Alpine wild horses found shot and killed in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests on Oct. 17, 2022. Allan Stein/The Epoch Times

Following the gruesome discovery, an alliance of Alpine horse advocates scrambled to raise money to purchase as many horses as they could from online auctions, thereby preventing their potential sale to slaughterhouses in Mexico.

Netherlands feels the best solution would be to allocate land for the horses within the national forest and implement humane birth control to limit their numbers. The Forest Service has expressed interest in neither proposal, she said.

“We have offered to take horses. We have offered to do fertility control. If they’d sit down in a room with us,” Netherlands said.

Removal of Horses to Continue

In the meantime, the Forest Service said the roundup of horses and online auctions will continue until the herd is gone.

“The [Alpine-Sitgreaves National Forests] has determined that unclaimed, unbranded, unowned horses currently found on the Apache National Forest are ‘unauthorized livestock’ in accordance with Forest Service regulations per 36 CFR 261.2,” the Forest Service said in an email to The Epoch Times.

“These horses are not wild horses, not progeny of wild horses, and have not mixed with wild horses. These horses were not present at the establishment of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. They are unauthorized livestock, the same as sheep, cattle, goats, etc. The feral horses are not the property of the Forest Service, and we do not have the authority to manage unauthorized livestock.”

Helicopter pilot Rick Harmon of KG Livestock rounds up a group of wild horses during a gathering in Eureka, Nev., on July 7, 2005. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The Salt River group, hoping to settle the dispute over herd lineage, hired an expert in horse population genetics to examine tissue samples from the Apache-Sitgreaves horse carcasses found last October.

“So far, I can say that there is evidence of Spanish ancestry” in the horses,” Gus Cothran, a retired professor and consultant in animal genetics at Texas A&M University concluded in a memo to the group.

Cothran further wrote that the Spanish influence seems to be widespread in the herd, suggesting that it could “trace back to the founding of the herd unless there were Spanish horses in the area that could have been the source of the Spanish blood.”

Last Ditch Effort

Netherlands said U.S. Congressman David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) and two other lawmakers plan to write letters to the Forest Service seeking protection for the remainder of the Alpine herd, estimated at about 200 to 250 horses.

“It’s just an endless cycle of needless roundups paid for by the taxpayer. We have no more places [to go],” Netherlands said.