Inmates Help Horses
One year ago, the yard of the Gunnison Correctional Facility would have resembled the yard of just about any other prison across the country.
Today, however, things are quite different. Inmates, dressed in pink shirts and white pants, can be seen busy working with horses. A walk around the facility finds these men brushing and grooming horses and working to train the animals.
Inmates at the Gunnison facility work to gentle wild horses so they can be adopted as part of a program implemented in conjunction with the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Adoption Program. Gentling is a more humane approach to horse breaking.
It has been a long process for this program to become a reality.
Three years ago, Richard Sewing, director of the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, approached the Utah Department of Corrections, proposing a partnership.
Sewing had seen successful inmate horse training programs in Colorado and Wyoming and said a similar program would be beneficial in Utah.
“I’ve seen what it’s done for the inmates,” Sewing said. “You can get to feeling how they appreciate this program, and it does wonders for them.”
Inmates learn a great deal from working with the horses, he said. Each inmate is assigned a horse to gentle and will work with it until it is adopted.
Gentling is a process that takes a lot of time and work.
“[Patience is] a word that you certainly have to appreciate,” Sewing said.
All the hard work that goes into the horses really pays off, though. The inmates said they feel a sense of pride from the work they are doing. When a horse they have worked with gets adopted, they feel particularly satisfied.
The inmates aren’t the only ones who benefit from the program.
According to the BLM Web site, in the United States, about 29,000 wild horses roam BLM-managed rangeland and that number is growing.
Due to a lack of natural predators, the wild horse population doubles every four years. Unfortunately, the environment cannot support this growth, so the agency must remove thousands of animals from the range. The animals removed from the range are then taken to either long-term or short-term holding facilities, such as the one in Gunnison.
Currently, the Gunnison facility holds 550 horses. The animals deemed most trainable are the ones the inmates work with.
Because of the growing number of animals in these facilities, the Bureau of Land Management started a Wild Horse Adoption Program where interested parties with sufficient facilities to care for a horse can take in one of these animals. Adoptions are conducted regularly throughout the state.
Sewing has seen the difference the program at Gunnison makes in helping inmates assimilate back into society.
“You’ve got to try and understand that the animal, whether it is two legged or four legged, they get an education,” Sewing said.
Source: NewsNet