They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Chain saws don't usually take center stage in the rarefied world of equestrian showmanship. But that didn't stop Robin Secrist, 49, from revving his Stihl 026, whirling it with one hand above his head and thrusting it aloft, championship-belt style, as he rode his nonplussed gelding. Secrist's chain saw, promoted from its normal duty "limbing trees" in Alma, Wis., was just one of a menacing array of devices, including a cracking bullwhip and a balloon-shooting revolver, used to showcase the horses' fearlessness and trainability during Extreme Mustang Makeover. The new annual competition held in Ft. Worth, Texas, gives 100 trainers 100 days to break in 100 wild horses, plucked from free-roaming herds in the American West. Over the course of the two-day event, the once feral animals also showed off their softer sides with human-taught manners (no biting, no kicking, no galloping) and celebrity hairdos before being auctioned to the highest bidder. The winner, an Australian wrangler, took home $10,000. Secrist came in 11th. "I think they wanted a more finished horse," he says. "Or maybe they weren't ready for the chain saw."

More than a slice of Americana, the competition is part of a more serious problem: keeping Western range lands from being overgrazed by a horse population that, if left unchecked, doubles every four years, encroaching on ranch lands and overtaxing their natural habitat. By showing off these animals, the government (the Bureau of Land Management organized the event) hopes to increase public interest in owning them. If the Feds fail, they have to thin the herds in more-controversial ways, including captivity in federal corrals and sale "without limitation"—which can mean slaughter, though the BLM tries to screen out "killer buyers" by, among other things, forcing them to sign a pledge of safekeeping.

On the surface, the government seems to have succeeded. The 1,000-seat venue overflowed, the horses impressed and the auctions were lively: top-money mustang Hail Yeah secured a $50,000 bid and his own future as the mascot of Norco (Horsetown, U.S.A.), Calif., while the other horses sold for an average of more than $3,000 each (they typically sell for $125). But like its human equivalents, the Mustang Makeover was about more than a spot of cosmetic retooling and a backslapping good time for people who still wear chaps to work. It was part of a dramatic attempt to manage and solve an intractable long-term problem: how to find a place for the mustang, a symbol of freedom and the frontier way of life, in a world of diminished grazing land, competing land interests and changing cultural sensibilities.

Mustangs trace their roots to the mounts of the Spanish conquistadors who brought them to the New World, where they multiplied rapidly, numbering 2 million by 1900. Over the next century, as Americans moved toward cities, the horses were glorified in the nation's memory. Mustangs supported cowboys in 1950s Marlboro-man cigarette campaigns, lent their name to Ford's muscular coupe in the 1960s and appeared in countless Westerns, not least "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" in 1969.

But the romantic ideal belied a more brutal truth: entrepreneurs were harvesting mustangs and selling their meat for human consumption at home and abroad. Horse meat was considered mainstream enough for a 1951 Time magazine article to offer tips for cooking pot roast of horse and equine fillets. The killing stopped in 1971 after a federal act recognized mustangs as "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West," banned their inhumane treatment and restricted their sale into slaughter. But the problem merely changed shape. The BLM wasn't interested in boosting the mustang population but rather cutting it further. Today, the official count of wild mustangs stands at 28,000—a seemingly manageable size that balances the land-use interests of weekenders, private homeowners, cattle ranchers and horse lovers. But an additional 30,000 horses, rounded up but unsold, are in federal corrals at a cost of $20 million to $50 million a year. With contraceptive shots too complicated and sale for slaughter legal (a 2004 bill gutted protections) but "unacceptable to the public," according to Don Glenn, head of the BLM's horse program, the agency's best hope is to find the animals adopted homes, a policy that's had lackluster success since its inception in 1979. Adoption numbers have been nearly halved over the past decade, falling to just 5,000 animals in 2006 due to a glut of available horses from breeders and a changing of the cultural guard that's depressing the whole industry. "It's a generational thing," says Patti Colbert, 56, executive director of the Mustang Heritage Foundation, which organized the Makeover with the BLM. "Younger folks want Harleys and Nintendo Wii instead of five acres and a horse." Overall, there are more than 100,000 unwanted horses each year, including mustangs, according to the Unwanted Horse Coalition, a Washington-based nonprofit.

This has led to a search for new solutions—or rather a return to old ones: slaughter. Organizations such as the American Association of Equine Practitioners and the American Association of Veterinary Medicine have come out in favor of selling unwanted horses into slaughter on the ground that it's the humane choice for animals that would otherwise be neglected or abandoned. "It's not like 'The Jungle Book' or the Disney Channel, when released animals frolic into the wild and find new families," says Tom Lenz, chair of the AAEP welfare committee. His organization and many other industry groups are aligned against a proposed federal ban on butchering horses for export—a lucrative business that until a year ago accounted for 26 million pounds of horse meat annually and $40 million in sales, enough to make America the world's fifth largest exporter of edible equine. Opponents of the bill say that it wouldn't end slaughter so much as push the unpalatable business into less regulated Mexican abattoirs, where workers stab the horses' spines until the animals are paralyzed and ready for slaughter. Since 2006, when Texas law shuttered two of the country's three remaining horse-meat factories, the number of U.S. horses being shipped south of the border has nearly tripled from 12,000 to about 30,000 to date in 2007, according to the USDA. That number seems set to rise given that the remaining plant, in Illinois, closed in September.