Round-ups

• Round-ups

Pryor Mountains
Montana, 1994
Courtesy of the Cloud Foundation - pictures by Ginger Kathrens

Click pictures to enlarge.

In September of 1994, BLM rounded up horses from the historic Pryor Mountains Wild Horse Range, home of the stallion featured in the award-winning PBS documentary “Cloud: Wild Stallion of the Rockies.”

Documentary filmmaker Ginger Kathrens witnessed the following:

This colt, seen in the first picture during the round-up, running with his mother and healthy, ended up dying at the holding site. The captured horses were fed straight alfalfa, a rich type of hay inappropriate for horses coming off the range. This caused some horses to get severe diarrhea, like this foal who died and was dumped in the Bighorn County landfill.

This mare had her throat torn open and her hip broken as a result of roping. She had to be shot twice to end her suffering, as the first shot did not hit the mark. She had been “headed and heeled,” a roping practice that consists of roping the front and hind legs and stretching the animal until it goes down. Many horses captured during this round-up were subjected to the practice.

This colt, photographed before the round-up, was about two months old at the time of the round-up. He was driven off a cliff during the chase, broke his back and was shot. Wranglers tried to cover up the death by claiming the foal had run away from his mother. Urged to release the mare from the holding pens, they reluctantly let her back out on the range, ostensibly to go find her foal. They knew full well the colt was dead but let the mare go rather than admit to the shooting. The truth came out only months later.

During the round-up, other foals were separated from their mothers and left on the range to fend for themselves, while some foals were chased into the corrals without their mothers. One mare and foal were driven through a barbed-wire fence and never seen again.

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