Inmates Learn About Patience as They Tame Wild Mustangs

SUSANVILLE, Calif. —  The men, sitting on the corral fence, passed a tin of Bugler tobacco back and forth, rolling their own cigarettes as they called out words of encouragement to the tall, thin man in the small arena below.

“Easy, homeboy,” one said softly as 27-year-old John Roth tried to calm the glassy-eyed horse flaring its nostrils and twitching its black tail.

The morning wind blew cold, but Roth and the men paid no more attention to it than to the garbled sounds carried from the public address system inside the prison walls not far away.

Roth and the other inmates from the California Correctional Center at Susanville concentrated on the little mustang they called Suzie Q, which only a few weeks before had been running wild in Nevada.

1st Such Program in State

As part of an agreement between state correctional officials and the federal Bureau of Land Management, which by law manages the nation’s wild horses, Roth and 16 other prisoners work to tame mustangs. The program at the medium-security Susanville prison, started seven months ago, is the first of its kind in the state, although similar programs exist in Colorado and New Mexico.

Government officials hope such training will help make its current crop of 8,000 captured horses more “marketable” to the general public. Even though the horses only cost $125 to adopt, a fifth of the animals captured over the last three years have had no takers.

“A person who might adopt a horse would be more likely to if it were easily handled, and less likely if it strikes out and runs away from you,” said Lorin Slegemilch, the BLM assistant district manager in Susanville, in northeastern California.

While the program was conceived to help the horses, prison officials note that it has had unexpected positive effects on the inmates because the men have to learn that success depends more on patience than aggression.

Roth, in prison for assault with a deadly weapon, had been assigned to Suzie Q two weeks before. The former fence installer from Saugus spoke in low tones to calm the mare, and stroked her neck.

She was tiny, the size of a wooden carrousel horse. According to BLM officials, this is not unusual because the mustang tends to be much smaller than a domestic horse. And unlike the slick, romantic Wild West image usually associated with mustangs, Suzie Q is ugly. Instead of a smooth coat, her fur stuck out in tufts, like an old rug. But Roth treated her as if she were beautiful.

The horses are taken from public ranges in 10 Western states out of the government’s belief, contested by wild horse advocates, that there are too many mustangs. Protected by the 1971 federal Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, mustangs now number an estimated 43,286. The BLM says they compete for scarce food and water with other wildlife, as well as with more than 4 million cattle and sheep whose owners pay the government about $1.54 a month per animal for grazing rights on public lands. Plans call for another 10,000 horses to be rounded up this year.

Unless people adopt the captured horses, they spend the rest of their lives in federal holding pens, officials say. Animal protection groups worry that they also face possible slaughter, since BLM has recently asked permission from Congress for the right to sell unwanted horses in bulk to people who could then resell them for meat.

Uncontroversial Aspect

The prison training has emerged, many say, as the one largely uncontroversial aspect of BLM’s wild horse program. In Susanville, federal agents bring the horses to a fenced five-acre section, containing corrals, hitching posts, an arena and small wooden shack, just outside the prison gates. BLM pays the costs of medical care and feed, Slegemilch said, which are the same as if the horses were housed at BLM corrals.

The prison pays the salary of a professional trainer, Tom Chenoweth, 35, to teach both the men and the horses, and has added horse training to its list of daily inmate activities--along with welding, kitchen and clerical jobs.

The men, who have committed crimes ranging from drug trafficking to murder, earn as little as 12 cents an hour, which they can use to buy items, such as tobacco, at the prison store. The horses, after two weeks to a month in Susanville, are trucked to one of a series of BLM public adoption sales, such as one next month in Fresno.

So far, 78 mustangs have gone through the Susanville training program and 59 have been adopted.

“Confidence is the hardest thing to gain in these animals,” said Chenoweth, a plain-spoken man who gives the impression that he would rather be working with the horses than talking about them. He had trained horses and worked as a farrier in Tehachapi before setting up the program last year.

Effort to Build Trust

He assigns each horse to one man, he said, so the horse can develop some trust in a human. “There’s not a mean one out here. They’re all scared,” he said. Of course the men are scared, too, at first, he added, because they tend to come from urban areas and have little experience with horses. So far, he said, no one has been hurt.

Sometimes when Chenoweth talks, it is hard to tell whether he is speaking of horses or men. As a trainer, he believes in establishing dominance, he said, but disapproves of doing so through cowboy-style manhandling.

“I preach patience,” he said.

“You treat them with respect,” he continued in the next breath, but now, it turned out, he was speaking of the inmates. “Physical aggressiveness is the worst thing you can do,” he continued. “If you’re aggressive with an inmate you’ll end up with your hands full. I call them ‘sir,’ I say ‘would you do this,’ and ‘thank you.’ They respond to that.”

‘One Step at a Time’

The training progresses one step at a time, he said, for both man and horse. Before the prisoners handle the mustangs, they learn tasks such as leading, cleaning or saddling on a fat old domestic horse named Leon, which lives permanently at the prison corral. “Everybody has to go through him first,” Chenoweth said.

For the wild horses, the first step is to accept man’s touch, he noted. After a halter is put on their heads, their first lesson ends as soon as they let themselves be petted. The second time, this is repeated, and the lesson again ends as soon as they accept the affection, which is meant to show that man means them no harm. The men are taught to “make the right thing easy,” Chenoweth said, and wait it out instead of using force.

After that, Chenoweth said, “We keep building. . . . We start leading the horse, coaxing the horse to follow. Each day it depends where the horse is at, and each day we go a little further.”

Roth, who had little to do with horses before joining the program four months ago, found that Suzie Q had progressed unusually fast in two weeks, and now had even accepted a saddle.

On this morning, with Chenoweth’s permission, Roth decided to try to ride. When he felt she was quiet, Roth pushed himself into the saddle. But with two jumps and a kick, Suzie Q bucked him back to the ground, and then ran wildly about the arena.

Helps Horses and Inmates

When Roth stood up, though, the mare ran back to him. She stopped in front of him, with her ears forward. He petted her.

BLM and prison officials in Susanville and elsewhere said they have been equally pleased with the effect of the program on both horse and man. The first prison-horse program started at the Colorado State Penitentiary in Canon City in August, 1986, BLM spokesmen said, and all 500 horses that have gone through it have been adopted.

But the improvement in inmate behavior, Warden Benny Johnson in Canon City noted, “was a byproduct none of us expected.” The prison made no attempt to place quieter or gentler prisoners in the program, he said. “We had a lot of inmates who showed aggressiveness, physically, verbally, ‘anti’ personalities. Within two weeks you could see a slight change in them. They became more apt to talk to you, they would take an interest in the horse, an interest in going to work. Our management problems started to drop. . . . It was very interesting.”

In California, too, men are not chosen for personality, officials said. The criterion has been their security risk, since the inmates work outside the walls and guards patrol the area only periodically. Chenoweth carries a two-way radio, in case he needs help, but said he has not had any problems.

“It’s really amazing the patience they display,” said Art Calderon, assistant superintendent at the 3,500-inmate Susanville prison. “Some of these guys have not displayed a lot of patience with themselves, and that’s why they find themselves in institutions.”

Job Offer for Inmate

“Sometimes I feel like hitting one,” admitted inmate Bob Miller, 44, standing next to a gray mare named Smokey, who was following him around without a lead rope. “But you just spend a little bit of time, and they’ll do it for you.”

He was in jail for burglary for the seventh time and had a bad temper, he said. But now he has a job offer to work on a horse ranch in Modesto when he’s released in July, he added, and hoped to “stay out. I’m learning something this time. I never learned a trade.”

“I’ve got her like a puppy dog,” he said, rubbing Smokey’s face. “She’ll be great for a kid.”

This horse would be leaving for an adoption sale next week. Would he miss her, he was asked? Miller thought a moment, then shrugged.

“You get a little attached,” he said, “but they’re going to somewhere better.”