Temptations

Yearning for a Yearling: BLM Wild Horses Tempt New Mexico

By Emily Esterson , 5-19-06

	An adoption in Yuba City, Ariz. shows horses of similar colors to the ones in Albuquerque this weekend.

The four paragraph announcement in the Albuquerque Journal was easy to miss, but for the fact that three different people either cut it out of the paper or sent me a link.

The Bureau of Land Management held a wild horse and burro auction this morning at the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Posse. I am still here, at my computer, checkbook firmly stowed in the desk drawer. For once, when it comes to horses, I practiced self-restraint. I'm proud of myself, because last night all I could think about was that pen full of yearling fillies, sweet-eyed and tiny and dirty and a little ribby.

I even went out last night and measured the height and width of my fence, which, according to BLM adoption rules, has to be five-feet high and 400 feet in diameter. Mine is. I even tried to talk my friend Charles, who's eleven year old daughter Geneva is horse-crazed, into buying one. "Just think," I wrote to him, "How Geneva would benefit from having her own baby mustang." He wrote back: "Now STOP it. I'm weak."

I know the feeling. Had I not had magazine deadlines to meet, and a two-year-old filly of my own, well-bred and highly irritating (horses also go through Terrible Twos: only imagine the stomping feet and temper tantrums of a toddler embodied in 700 pounds of hooves and hide and teeth) and waiting to be started in the next year or so, I might have been very tempted. The BLM horses were surprisingly good looking--there was a dun with zebra-striped legs, a dozen or so blue roans, some red roans, greys, several paints including one with a white face and blue eyes, two pure, very rare albinos, some nearly-blacks, a lot of a nice looking bays, some palominos, sorrels and some whose colors were a bit indescribable. They all had remnants of their winter coats on their bellies, good legs and nice hindquarters.

As we (Charles, Geneva and I) were leaving the auction preview last night, one of the BLM program managers told us about 15 people had filled out adoption applications. There were eighty horses and burros (which, had I had 50 acres I would have bought a few of those, too!). I thought, of course, about the delicate red roan, or the sweet faced little bay, all night. I want to believe that all those horses, snatched from the wilds of Wyoming and New Mexico and even Oklahoma, will find homes with patient families who will turn them into excellent family horses, maybe even high level competitors or trail horses or just well-loved yard ornaments.

I plan to drop by tomorrow morning just to see what's left (the walk up adoptions last through Saturday morning at the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Posse, north of Alameda Ave. on Second Street. Follow the signs). And I will leave my checkbook at home. Maybe.

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