Where horses and inmates ‘gentle’ each other
Medium-security prisoners learn to train wild mustangs, leading to healing, adoption
There’s a term in the horse world known as “gentling.”
It refers to working with a wild horse until it becomes responsive to a trainer’s commands, meaning that it no longer wants to kick you in the face. If handled properly, it even bonds with its trainer.
Gentling happens every day at the Silver State Industries ranch in Carson City, Nev., a 445-hectare property east of the Carson Range in the vast, harsh high desert south of Reno. Up to 2,000 wild horses are corralled there at any time; a good number are trained for adoption.
The ranch is part of the Stewart Conservation Camp, situated adjacent to the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, a medium-security prison that also houses minimumsecurity inmates. Twelve to 15 inmates, most of whom have little or no experience with horses, work under the instruction of a cowboy named Hank Curry. It is the inmates who do the gentling.
John Harris, an inmate who is taking part in the program, grew up on a family farm in northern Iowa, so he wasn’t a stranger to livestock. A mustang is not a barn horse, however. Often they are terrified, skittish and strong-willed from having survived in the wild.
“One time I fought with a horse for two hours to get him to walk three feet to a post,” Harris, 38, said.
“I was worked up, the horse was worked up.”
When he started in the Wild Horse Program at the prison two years ago, “I was a lot more aggressive with my training,” Harris said. “I wanted something done now. That don’t work. You have to take your time.”
He credited Curry for his softer approach: “Hank had to kind of gentle me.”
Curry, 67, no longer sees his job as strictly horse trainer, as he once did. Instead, he said, “I’m a counsellor, a teacher, a horse trainer. You estab- lish pride in the guy and pride in his job, he’s going to be a lot more successful when he gets out of here.”
Everyone involved in the program recognizes the symbolism: the way the horses and the inmates are both penned up and how through the training process they rehabilitate one another.
The men enjoy the sense of free- dom, the fresh air and the camaraderie that develops among them and with the mustangs.
“To take this horse that don’t want nothing to do with you and you get to a point where you can walk up, touch it, pet it, put a halter on it — it’s a pretty good feeling,” Harris said.
The Wild Horse Program at the prison isn’t unique. There are pro- grams like it in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas and Wyoming. It’s one of the ways the Bureau of Land Management is dealing with a population of mustangs and wild burros in the Western states that could be as high as 86,000.
That is more than three times what the bureau deems a sustainable level, said Jenny Lesieutre, who, as the Wild Horse and Burro public affairs specialist for the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada, oversees the program at the ranch.
The inmates’ work culminates every four months with an adoption day for the public. The inmates put on a big rodeo intro, riding around a roofed arena, showing off to the bidders in the bleachers their horses and their equestrian skills. They have an ongoing competition to see whose horse will fetch the most money ($15,000 is the record).