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BLM Wild Horse Auction Brings Record-Breaking Sale

The Bureau of Land Management just completed one of its most successful wild horse adoptions to date. The top-selling horse went for a record breaking $4,000.

Part of the allure with the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse herd is its genetic tie to the Spanish Conquistadors.

Jared Bybee is the Wild Horse and Burro specialist with the BLM’s Montana- Dakota state office.

"This component of Colonial Spanish ancestry within the herd," says Bybee. "It's definitely there. It's in the whole fabric of the herd. With all the other heritage and that attracts a lot of people. There's a lot of romance with that."

The mustangs have retained primitive striping on their backs, withers and legs. These features are desired by buyers.

Buyers for this adoption came from as far as California and the east coast. Montana is home to only one herd of wild horses.

It is located in 38,000 acres of the Pryor Mountain Range along the Montana-Wyoming border. Jennifer Barnes is a staff attorney with the advocacy law firm, Friends of Animals. Because this is a unique herd, she says the federal government should leave this herd alone.

"Well, our position is to just leave the wild horse on the land," says Barnes. "The truth is, there is a lot of domestic horses that don't have homes and are treated badly and we don't think that it is a good practice and use of government money to round up additional wild horses and try and find homes for all of them."

Other horse advocates have a more nuanced position. Ginger Kathrens produced a PBS documentary on the wild horse stallion named Cloud from the Pryor Mountain herd.

The documentary raised the national profile on the plight of wild horses across the west. She is also the Executive Director of the Cloud Foundation.

"If we can balance the birth rate with the mortality rate we don't have to have removals that should be a goal agency wide."

She is optimistic future management on the Pryor range will lead to fewer horse removals. The BLM's Jared Bybee says trapping, removal and the sale doesn’t happen every year. And that creates a market condition where some of these horses will continue command high prices.

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