Horses and people go way back.

The large herd that’s living happily near Maybell, for instance, may have descended from horses brought to this continent on Columbus’ second voyage in 1493. He arrived with 17 ships loaded with 1,200 colonizers and their favorite mode of transport: on the hoof. Hernán Cortés and others soon followed, also bringing horses. The landscape was altered forever.

I met their equine descendants on a glorious morning last summer, soon after my wife Claire and I pulled into the dirt parking lot of the Wild Horse Refuge, west of Craig in Moffat County. In the northwest part of our state, the land stretches endlessly, wave after wave of low hills extending off to the horizon – not a stoplight in sight.

After Cindy Wright, founder of the Wild Horse Warriors of Sand Wash Basin, emerged from her office at the refuge and fired up her pickup, we set off onto the high plains. It was as much a chiropractic treatment as transportation, as we bounced across open prairie on rutted dirt roads.

“Now where are the horses today?” Wright wondered aloud, with good reason.

There are about 170 wild horses scattered around the 23,000 acres of the refuge, and they can travel seven miles or more a day, according to Wright. Horses really get around when it comes to reproduction, as well. But we’ll get into that a little bit later.

“Horses are part of our heritage,” Wright said, scanning the chaparral. “Our relationship with them goes deeper than words. They are part of what America is – part of our beginnings here.”

By “here,” Wright means North America. Horses helped explore and settle this land. But neither Columbus and his fellow Homo sapiens, nor the domesticated Equus caballus they carried with them, were the first of either species on this continent. Indigenous people had beaten the Spaniards to North America by 16,000 years.

Those early humans arrived long after the first horses who had been evolving here for 10 to 20 million years. The original North American horses – some the size of small dogs or towering 7 1/2 feet at the shoulder – went extinct around 12,000 years ago, about the same time humans arrived to hunt them.

It may not be a coincidence.

I learned all about it from Sarah King, Ph.D., a research scientist in the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. She is British by birth and took riding lessons every weekend as a child. It led to a fascination with horses, so when she entered university, she studied Przewalski’s horses in Mongolia. They are among the last truly wild horses in the world.

So, what about the 80,000 mavericks currently grazing the American West? Aren’t they wild?

“The differences between a wolf and dog are equivalent to the differences between Przewalski horses and our domesticated horses,” King said. “You can tame a feral dog, and it will live in your house. You could try that with a wolf pup, but it would never behave like a dog.”

Our so-called “wild horses” have more in common with that friendly dog on your hearth than they do with Canis lupus. King pointed out that, for at least 5,000 years, human beings have been selectively breeding horses to optimize their body shape for riders, their musculoskeletal systems to haul loads, their personalities for training and companionability and their breeding cycles for maximum foal production.

And it worked.

In an op-ed for the Journal of Wildlife Management, King and her co-authors put it this way: “Horse domestication is an important component of human history and significant in humans’ emotional attachment to horses. Horses enabled cultures to disperse and advance agriculture, transportation, industry, commerce and warfare.”

Given those historical bonds between horses and humans, it’s no wonder that Cindy Wright – the wild horse warrior in chief – and others have been working so hard to save the not-so-wild horses that populate our not-so-wild West.

That’s where the breeding habits of our formerly domesticated animals come in. “A two- or three-year old mare can produce a foal every year into her 20s,” King said. “They do that very successfully out on the range.”

And that’s the problem with our “wild” horses: Their ancestors had been bred to make lots more horses.

 

Prolific breeding worked well when horses were our primary means of transportation and hauling. But during the Industrial Revolution, other means of transport came online, and horses became an expensive hobby for people who could afford to stable, feed and train them. Soon the rest of us were driving our Mavericks, Colts, Mustangs and Broncos off to the mall, instead of saddling them up and riding toward a limitless horizon.

Countless thousands of horses were released by their owners, or escaped their pens, which led to a population explosion on rangelands in the 11 states that comprise the Great Basin. Colorado is the bullseye in that target. Even if the utility of horses as working animals and companions has passed by, their legend sticks with us. What’s a horse lover to do now, with tens of thousands of animals scouring western land and crowding out native species?

The Wild Horse Refuge is trying to provide an answer. Even though its carrying capacity is only about 300 horses – a mere 1% of America’s wild population – they are at least trying to provide what Wright calls “the ultimate retiremeƒnt home” for the rescue horses that live there.

The refuge has been in operation since January 2023, when the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg purchased the former Ri Ro Mo Ranch. They began adopting horses captured in a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) roundup, and then moved them onto land adjacent to the Sand Wash Basin, already home to herds of wild horses.

Wright was present when the horses moved into their new home. “It’s no different from when horses come together at a water source,” she said. “They posture, they sniff and make acquaintances. It’s the same thing in a crowd of people who have never met each other. Horses react more strongly, but the principle is the same.”

It sounds kind of like a fraternity mixer, albeit one where all the partygoers are orphans and have either been gelded or shot up with contraceptives, through the efforts of the Bureau of Land Management. The message: We don’t need any extra wild horses, thank you. But we’ll take care of these lucky animals for the rest of their lives.

 

Pat Craig is the Daddy Warbucks of animal rescue in Colorado. Big cats, camels, grizzly bears, wolves or ostriches – he welcomes them all at the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg. He has rescued Asiatic bears in Korea, emptied an abandoned zoo in Puerto Rico and removed lions from a facility in a Ukrainian war zone, just to name a few.

Craig first began welcoming threatened creatures to his family farm in Boulder in 1980, then moved to a larger facility in Keenesburg in 1994. As word spread, he gained lots of supporters and volunteers, along with endorsements from Jessica Biel, Edie Falco and other famous animal lovers. All of that reached a new level in 2020, when he worked with the Department of Justice to close the roadside zoo run by “Tiger King” Joe Exotic, of Netflix infamy. Craig now operates four rescue facilities in Colorado and one in Texas.

There’s at least one way the Daddy Warbucks comparison is off, however: Craig was never rich. He held down two jobs just to be able to return home and work through the night to care for his rescue animals. His “staff” was his wife and two kids. He started a newsletter and slowly built a donor base that has paid for the wide-ranging rescue efforts in Colorado and beyond.

Though he’s now known for international animal rescues, Craig was first and foremost a horseman. “I grew up on a farm with horses, cows and chickens,” he said. His lifelong experience with animals eventually led him to focus on rescuing horses.

“We found 10,000 acres in southeast Colorado,” Craig said. “It was remote, and awesome for the animals. We built barns and corrals in Keenesburg and held very successful adoption events.”

But there were always more wild horses to house, so Craig was soon driving along backroads, looking for just the right property to host more rescued horses. Fate intervened when the BLM announced that they were going to begin helicopter roundups of horses in the Sand Wash Basin in Moffat County. The Ri Ro Mo Ranch was just 25 miles east of there, with a similar habitat. It would be a perfect location – “untouched since the beginning of time,” Craig said – to host new bands of horses. With the help of donors, he bought it.

Craig readily acknowledges that the Wild Horse Refuge is not the final answer to the problem, but it is the best he can do now. “I turn down 50% of the rescues I’m asked to make,” he said. “I have to say no, and the animal will be dead. I’ve had to live with that for 40 years.”

But he hopes that others will follow his model, and that together a new generation of rescuers can make a difference – both by sheltering vulnerable animals and urging legislation against over-breeding and wild-pet nurseries.

“Saving one tiger, one horse, is better than saving none,” Craig said. “It may not change the world, but for that one animal it changes everything.”

 

Our pickup truck rolls over a rise in the prairie, and there they are: The wild horses we’ve come to the refuge to see. A dozen beautiful animals are clustered around a water hole maintained by the WHR staff. The horses raise their noble heads to scope us out. Wright greets them like old friends, calling their names with affection: Vega, Michelangelo, Kahlua.

Wright says horses at the refuge score an eight or better on a health scale of 1-10. Nearby horses on BLM land are closer to 4 or 5.

These horses, whether thriving or just surviving, owe their existence to human hands. Brought to this continent 500 years ago, they helped build this nation – and now we must help care for them.

For $777 (“lucky sevens,” Craig said) you can “adopt” an acre at the refuge and visit the horses whenever Wright has an opening in her schedule. Every September, Craig welcomes landholders to the refuge for Founder’s Day.

Meanwhile, King, the research scientist, took a more personal approach. Two years ago, she adopted a mustang from a herd management gather in western Utah. “When the horses were put up for adoption, I put up my hand when they offered my horse, and I got him for $275,” she said.

King, also a dog and horse trainer, has been working with her horse, Cowboy, using positive reinforcement training. “It means I have a good relationship with him,” she said. “We’re training at his speed. I’m not riding him yet. That will take as long as it takes. I’m alright with that.”

 

After our morning at the Wild Horse Refuge, Claire and I said goodbye to Cindy Wright, and followed her directions down highway 318, over to the Sand Wash Basin. We drove a dirt road onto the Seven Mile Ridge and stopped the car.

We were surrounded by wild horses.

It was a peaceful scene, until two stallions decided it wouldn’t be. We were now outside of the preserve, so the nearby mares were probably in heat. The stallions nickered and jostled one another, then rose up with hooves lashing. But the fight ended quickly – plenty of mares to go around.

This is the problem, of course. We human beings brought the horses to this continent and genetically modified them toward abundance. It worked too well. Now, it’s up to us to help them coexist here.

“Horses changed the world,” Wright said. “They’ve given so much. They deserve a chance to stay wild.”