The Round Up: What Happens During a Wild Horse Roundup

This story starts before Trey, because if it doesn’t, it will sound like a story that came out of nowhere. To give justice to the complexity and depth of Trey’s journey and the impact he has had on my life, we have to start at the beginning.

In the year before his roundup, I was working with a national wild horse nonprofit. Their focus was legislative: keep wild horses in the wild. Advocacy is a core piece of action in this space, and I was helping them explain what they did and what made their approach different. One of the ways they tried to be different was simple but powerful. Hire photographers and videographers to go to the wild horse roundups and document what happened.

If you have never been anywhere near a roundup, it is hard to grasp the distance, both physical and emotional. These gatherings are isolated away from where anybody lives, far from any city. You can drive an hour out into barren wildness just to get to the area where everything is set up. Even as an allowed spectator, you’re kept at a distance.  Placed at a vantage point behind hills. Your presence is removed.

With a long telephoto lens you can catch pieces of what’s happening. You can see the horses, the staging, the shape of the trap, and you start to understand what the setup really is, A setup. The trappers assess the terrain ahead of time, identify natural choke points and indentations in the land, and build the traps there. They map out how helicopters will push the herds into those places. Finally, there is a trained horse positioned  to run in front of the herd, leading the wild horses through the trap and deep into the chute, beyond the possibility of getting out.

It is called a Judas horse.

Behind the herd is the helicopter, and some of those helicopters get very low. There is a vibration to those machines, something huge that changes the whole air. Even from a distance you can feel the confusion, the upset, the panic. There are records of horses dying in the process because it is too much for them. There are records where pregnant mares abort mid-run in acts of desperate self-preservation because it is that bad.

I attended one roundup, outside of Winnemucca, and I could not do more than one. I watched what I could from where they kept us and then I focused on the trailers. Stock trailers lined up, the place where the trap eventually funnels. Later, as the trailers pulled away, all I could see were eyes out of the slots, leaving the wild.

It ripped me apart. I remember what it was like going back to the hotel. I was wrecked, because even if you have read about the process and you think you are prepared, watching it in real time is different. You see how they are pursued and processed. They are separated by sex. They are separated from their herds. There are chutes, people, brands, and the feeling of an assembly line built for living beings who do not understand what is happening.

That was my context. I already knew the outlines of what could happen.

It was the fall of my oldest son’s senior year. We were traveling, Washington State and Oregon, looking at colleges. Normal life on the surface. We were driving and I was trying to be present as a parent, trying to hold the weight of that moment, and then my phone buzzed.

A text from my client. They wrote, “Something horrible happened at a roundup in Utah, Cedar Mountain. They chased a baby, and we got it on video.”

I was driving when I saw the message, and I did what you do when you already know you’re about to see something you won’t be able to unsee. I pulled off the road. The video demanded it.

A helicopter had focused on a mother and baby. The baby was Trey. He was so tiny, maybe a month old, just a little body on legs that were not made for this kind of chase. The helicopter was so low and so close. In the video they are running and running and running, and his mother turns back again and again, as if she’s asking the same question over and over.

“Are you with me?”

On the video you see her trying to go back for him, trying to gather him. You see Trey trying to keep up. And, then the helicopter is successful in separating her and it runs her into the chute, into the trap. It then returns to Trey to chase him by himself.

I want you to understand what that looks like. There is no comparison between the body of a foal and the force of a helicopter. The sound alone is its own violence. The vibration of that machine in the air fills the world and tells you there is no safe place.

Trey runs frantically until he cannot. He is physically depleted, and then the video shifts. The next thing you see are two men on horseback, one on each side of him. They have ropes around his neck, one rope on each side, and they are walking him. He is a baby, and he is trying to survive.

They get him to a trailer. He is surrounded by people. He is terrified. He does one last kick out, one last attempt to protect himself, and then he falls. He falls on the ground. And they sit on him. They hog-tie him. Not being on the scene, this may have been needed in order to secure him safely. Regardless, it was heart wrenching to watch.

I was on the side of the road sobbing, calling my client, asking, “Where is this?” and “What is going on?” and “What is going to happen to that horse?” By then the video had already gone viral, and that matters because when something goes viral, everything accelerates. Everybody calls the local office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is the agency charged with managing federal lands and the wild horses on it. People calling are usually passionate, desperate for answers, eager to “save” the horse.

At the other end of the outcry, the BLM does its best to field the calls, the concerns and, often, the anger. When a situation goes viral, they know the phones will light up and the story can become a battleground between advocates upset at the roundup, upset for this foal and BLM professionals doing their best to do what they believe is right for the horses involved.

I knew that I had to call this local office and knew that I’d be one of many. I had never spoken to this particular office before, but I got the information I needed: who ran it, who to talk to, who their PR person was. So I called. I remember trying to steady my voice. I told them I saw the video. I said I understood it had gone viral. I knew what problems that could create. And then I made an offer that I can only describe as coming from my heart because I had not considered it before.

I told them, “I’m willing to come right now. Here’s where I am. I will adopt the baby and his mother, and you will never hear from us again. I won’t take it to the press. I will just give them a home.”

There was a pause, and then the response. They told me, “We’ve gotten a lot of calls about the little guy. Because of that, we believe we’re going to have to auction him off to the highest bidder.” I remember the way my stomach dropped. I was upset for the potential impact to this little foal. But, I also knew that the BLM team was navigating a situation where they had to do their best to be fair and neutral to all the incoming requests.

So I asked the next question. “When is the auction?”

They said they didn’t know yet. I kept calling. I called again and again. I stayed focused on the only thing that mattered – securing Trey. To their credit, the BLM team also kept me informed of changes. It’s worth noting here that BLM professionals receive criticism from all sides. They are responsible for the land that they oversee, they have responsibilities to locals, responsibilities to ranchers with grazing rights, responsibilities to wild horses and the advocates who are committed to our wild horses.

There isn’t a perfect or “right” answer for how to accommodate conflicting views on how to balance these interests. What I can say, firsthand, is that the BLM team that I interacted with seemed committed to doing their jobs in the best way possible. I may have disagreed with decisions and/or disagree with how the system is set up. However, they had to work within the system and, where possible, they tried to help me understand and navigate it.

The story did not end on that roadside. It was the beginning of something that would pull me into a maze of calls, rules, and timelines I did not control. That none of us, myself or BLM, could do anything but navigate the unfolding process. 

“What happens after the video ends? Where does a foal go when he leaves the wild and enters into a manmade, government system? And what does it take to find him, protect him, and bring him back into a ‘home’?”

I did not know the answers yet. But I was committed to finding them.

Next Post: Working With(in) The System: Inside a BLM Holding Facility

Image credit:Still images in this post are sourced from the February 17, 2017 American Wild Horse Conservation (AWHC) Facebook video, “Cedar Mountain Roundup, February 16, 2017,” with video credit to Alfuso Film/Michael Alfuso. American Wild Horse Foundation (AWHF) is an independent organization and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by AWHC or the original videographers.