For 30 years, thousands of wild horses captured in federal roundups have ended up in corrals at a state prison complex in Cañon City, where they were cared for and trained by inmates through a program that prepared horses for adoption and provided work experience for people returning to life after incarceration.
But the program is ending. Citing escalating costs, the federal Bureau of Land Management has not renewed its contract with the Colorado Department of Corrections for the mustang program. The 2,073 horses at the prison complex will go to holding facilities in Wyoming or Utah, minus about 100 animals that were captured in Colorado.
The Colorado mustangs will go up for adoption, as federal land managers try to find them homes within the state where they have always lived.
Following the end of the program in November, mustangs rounded up in future helicopter or bait-and-trap operations on Colorado rangeland will be hauled to other states.
The closure of the Colorado program comes as the BLM shuts down another wild horse and burro holding center in Ewing, Illinois. American Wild Horse Conservation said both closures were bad news, exposing “deep cracks in the BLM’s broken roundup-and-warehousing system.”
Mustangs trained by Colorado prisoners were more adoptable and far less likely to enter the slaughter pipeline, the organization said.
“There are now more wild horses warehoused in government holding facilities than living free on the range,” said Suzanne Roy, executive director of American Wild Horse Conservation. “That’s a shocking indictment of a system that simply doesn’t work.”
There are more than 53,000 wild horses and 19,000 burros living on public lands across the West, compared with about 61,000 wild horses and 3,100 burros in government holding pens, according to BLM data.
The prison program led to many horses finding “great forever homes,” Friends of the Mustangs president George Brauneis said via email. He said he looked forward to his volunteer group working with state and federal agencies on other wild horse programs that would make “Colorado a model for the nation.” The state has a wild horse task force that has discussed a new horse sanctuary and pushed for new funding for fertility control operations.
About 30 incarcerated people feed, train wild horses
BLM officials said “rising costs” were to blame for the end of the program. Officials at the BLM and the state Department of Corrections had not provided information about the cost of the program by Wednesday morning.
The prison complex was the site of one of the worst public relations disasters in the federal wild horse management program when, in 2022, 145 mustangs died of equine flu. An investigation determined that the horses, accustomed to living in the wild and not in close quarters, were not vaccinated within federal timelines, which are targeted for 30 days after capture. Veterinarians also suspected that the horses’ exposure to wildfire smoke before their capture might have made them more susceptible to flu.
The horse pens at the south central Colorado prison grounds encompass about 120 acres. The Wet Mountains rise in the distance, and the horse facility, deep inside the complex surrounded by razor wire, is not easily visible from the highway.
The pens have held horses from the Sand Wash Basin near the Wyoming border, as well as herds from West Douglas and the Piceance-East Douglas near Meeker. About 30 people incarcerated in the prison work in the pens, feeding, watering and shoeing the horses, and to break and train the horses so they are ready for adoption.
Men incarcerated at the prison who were previously interviewed by The Colorado Sun said they would arrive at the barn each day at 7 a.m. in their green prison jumpsuits, then put on cowboy boots and hats. The job is popular at the prison complex, which also allows inmates to farm.
The horse facility, once with only about 200 mustangs, grew to hold more than 2,000 from Colorado and other states as the BLM ramped up roundup operations. The federal agency has removed more than 2,200 wild horses from Colorado rangeland since 2021, leaving about 1,200 on public lands in the state.
The horses in the holding pens will be transferred to Axtell, Utah, and Wheatland, Wyoming, BLM spokesman Steven Hall said. The goal is to find permanent homes for the 100 Colorado horses “before they would need to be transferred,” he said.
The Colorado Department of Corrections would not give interviews about the end of the program, but in a news release said that it has “provided unique vocational and rehabilitative skills to the incarcerated
population while supporting the BLM’s mission to manage and protect wild horses and burros.”
“We are saddened by the discontinuation of this successful partnership and impactful program,” Andre Stancil, CDOC executive director, said in a news release. “The Colorado Department of Corrections is immensely proud of the legacy of this program and the positive impact it has had on participants, staff, and the community.”
The contract expired at the end of September, but federal and state officials agreed to a 60-day extension in order to allow time to move the horses. The five state employees who were operating the horse prison program, as well as the 30 incarcerated workers, will be assigned to other roles, state officials said.
Officials did not provide details about when the 100 Colorado horses would go up for adoption.
In March, a federal judge in Colorado ruled that the BLM’s horse adoption incentive program violated federal law and likely was leading to the slaughter of horses. The now-discontinued program had paid $1,000 to people who adopted wild horses and burros.
Horse advocacy groups, including the American Wild Horse Conservation, argued that the incentive payment contributed to the likelihood that horses would end up in slaughterhouses, which is illegal. The “easy money” of the payments could lead to abuse of the program, Judge William J. Martínez ruled.