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NEW 2017 NISSAN

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If either is true, the horses would have preceded the national forest’s establishment.

A Texas A&M University veterinary geneticist who has sampled the genes of wild horse herds around the West said few show any traits of Spanish bloodlines. Gus Cothran and colleagues wrote in a chapter of the 2016 academic book “Wild Equines” that out of 175 herds sampled, only five showed genes linking them to conquistadors.

Most horses on the Western ranges are related to common American domestic breeds such as quarter horses and Morgans, the scientists found.

Wayne Ramey is a horseback-riding guide who lives in Heber-Overgaard. He looks the part of an old-time cattle wrangler: jeans and pink Western shirt, blue eyes squinting through crow’s feet, a brown cowboy hat pushed back, a sandy mustache. He grew up in a Laveen farming family and fished in the White Mountains as a youngster. He moved to the forest 20 years ago and, despite his kinship with farmers and ranchers, found the ranchers’ disdain for wild horses troubling.

“They’re a tourist attraction for this forest,” he said. “Everybody that I take riding likes to see these horses. I love these horses.”

Whatever their origins, Ramey said, the mustangs are a gift to everyone who visits the Mogollon Rim.

“It’s like going back in time about 200 years,” he said. Reminds us of our pioneer days.”

Managing out of existence?

More than 10,000 people follow a Facebook page dedicated to the Heber horses. Advocates use it to update supporters on the herd’s legal status — and to post photos of horses roaming and frolicking among the pines.

Hutchison’s May ride in support of the horses drew a handful of the herd’s fans. They rode down rocky trails in search of wild horses, ultimately finding a group passing through camp when they circled back.

Along the way, they saw elk here and there. To the riders, the grass seemed plentiful, more than the animals in the forest could eat.

Hutchison moved to Arizona’s Rim Country in 1989 and at the time enjoyed elk hunting. He remembers rolling his motorcycle across State Route 260, seeing a wild horse and thinking, “What a magnificent animal.”

He became a horse guy, and stopped hunting when he became obsessed with the herd’s survival about five years ago.

He has little trust in the government or its land and animal policies. He scoffs at a federal program that restored Mexican gray wolves to Arizona, in part because he believes they threaten young horses.

He insists the government ships excess wild horses from roundups to Mexico for slaughter and sale to European diners — a charge that would be illegal, and that federal horse managers reject.

Some horses rounded up on the Navajo Reservation likely go south to slaughter, Navajo officials acknowledge, because the tribe sells them without restrictions and is not bound by the same law. The reservation in places is overrun with horses that compete with sheep and may cause desertification.

Federally managed horses trapped in roundups, though, are adopted out, no more than four to a customer, and must remain in the adopter’s care for at least a year. After that, adopters gain title and are free to sell to anyone, including foreign slaughterhouses, though by then the expenses of the year would have made it unprofitable to do so. Those not adopted — the vast majority from a roundup — are sent to government corrals or leased grazing lands on the Great Plains, where they spend the rest of their lives at government expense.

Those that are at least 10 years old or are offered for adoption and rejected three times become available for sale, but buyers are also restricted to four per year unless they get written permission and submit to extra monitoring. The limits are designed to make it unprofitable to sell to international slaughter markets.

Hutchison doesn’t believe it, and he doesn’t believe land managers want any horses on the range.

“They want to manage them out of existence,” he said, sipping Southern Comfort beside his fire the night after his ride among the mustangs.

“As long as I’m sitting in this chair, I’m not going to let that happen.”