Earlier this year, a collaboration between state and local Tribal officials removed about 2,000 feral horses from the Wind River Reservation to help manage the over-capacity population. At a meeting of the Wyoming Legislature’s Select Committee on Tribal Relations in Fort Washakie in July, Special Council to the Governor Kit Wendtland said the feral horse removal efforts were a “big success,” but some reservation residents disagreed.
Feral horses is a term that refers to wild horses on lands other than those managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.
The removal is part of an effort to bring the feral horse population on the reservation to a more manageable number and maintain rangeland ecosystem health. Officials often gather wild horses throughout the West because they say the animals are stressing the landscape and interfering with other wildlife and livestock.
During public comment at the July meeting, community member Sybil Thunder Hawk said she was troubled by the methods used to gather the horses.
“One of my concerns was how dangerous the gathering was – with an airplane [helicopter] flying low, forcing the horses to run. Breaking their legs, biting each other, fighting each other, and some of the horses would be arriving to their destinations dead,” she said.
Thunder Hawk is a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe and a descendant of the Eastern Shoshone tribe. She said she lives “300 yards” from where the gathering took place and was worried about the high-powered rifles she said were used to get the horses running in areas near occupied rural homes.
“The airplanes would fly really low, to where we could see the drivers,” she said.
Thunder Hawk also cited concerns about tribal Fish & Game employees trespassing on private land and asked that the horses be gathered in a more humane way.
Eastern Shoshone members Austin Hill and Bobbie Shongutsie also provided public comment asking for a better management plan. Shongutsie said that horses are a significant part of the tribe’s culture and that the current management plan is “killing our culture.”
“The Eastern Shoshone people were the first ones to have the Indian relays, so our horses are very powerful. They are part of our prayers,” she said.
Shongutsie, Hill, and Thunder Hawk all criticized the process that led to the current management plan. In 2019, Hill attempted to present an alternative management plan at one of the quarterly Eastern Shoshone General Council meetings. The plan had been written in collaboration with other community members and proposed a wild horse training program for struggling youth and people battling addiction.
Shongutsie explained that the meeting was stopped during Hill’s presentation because there was a lack of quorum, which dictates that 75 people must be present for the Eastern Shoshone General Council meetings to take place.
“In the middle of his presentation for the management plan, we had lost quorum during the quorum count and the General Council had ended,” she said.
Shongutsie said that, since that canceled meeting in 2019, Hill had submitted the issue to be put back on the General Council agenda three times.
Later in the July meeting, Eastern Shoshone Tribal Chairman John St. Clair responded to the public comments and acknowledged that quorum was lost in 2019. But, he said, he thinks both cultural and ecosystem needs could be met given the number of feral horses on the reservation.
“I think there’s enough horses out there to accommodate whatever comes up…the present situation is that there are so many out there that it’s causing a conflict with the system we have set up for ranching,” he said. “We need to move forward and try to reduce the numbers so we can accommodate both.”
If a quorum is present, Shongutsie will present a proposed horse maintenance plan at the next Eastern Shoshone General Council meeting at the Boys and Girls Club in Fort Washakie on September 16th.
