The Absarokee (“children of the Large-Beaked Bird”) tribe of the Plains Indians of North America–misnamed the “Crow” by Europeans traders–reportedly followed a tradition of planting a coup-stick, a slender branch shaped like a shepherd’s staff, and counting coup as an essential part of their culture.
According to Jonathan Lear, author of the book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, a coup stick would be planted in the ground by the leader of an Absarokee war party to establish a boundary beyond which the tribe’s enemies could not cross. Individual warriors would earn honor within the tribe by performing nonviolent acts of daring called “coup strikes” that would be counted and then recounted (retold in stories) after battle as marks of status and to accord placement within the group.
As we move from a culture of honor and pride to a culture of dignity and mutual respect in America, the traditions of battle and revenge give way to new traditions that do not include inflicting injury or taking lives. As metaphor in this context, the tradition of coup sticks and coup counting has relevance.
Let us call the Calico Complex round-up one of the last vestiges of a fading cultural norm; that of America’s attempt to conquer and rule over nature. The metaphoric coup stick is planted at the place where the federal contractors and bureaucrats gather to herd the horses into captivity. Everything is at stake. Do we operate under a rule of law that includes due process, open hearings and a robust exchange of opinion or do we follow some obsolete, unwritten code of the old West that is expedient, harsh and unforgiving?
In the context of the planned helicopter round-ups, the planting of a coup stick says “Beyond this point, no one will pass who does not have the best interests of the wild horses and burros at heart.” Cruel means are then impossible by definition and all who cross that point are transformed by the experience or become irrelevant and lost to history. This is not mere semantics. The Calico Complex round-up is the history of the old American West come to an end.
On the other side are the horses and burros running free and the American West finally become civilized. This is my radical hope.
We Americans love our french fries. Though consumption has fallen in recent years due to concerns about health and obesity, in 2001 we each consumed over 29 pounds of frozen potato products–mostly fast food french fries. We also love our wild horses, even as we turn a blind eye to their threatened extinction, but until recently, I had no idea these things were linked.
While researching the history of America’s mustangs, I learned that the Simplot company, supplier of french fries and “hamburgers” to McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s, and one of the world’s largest producers of frozen vegetables (Birdseye?), was founded on the killing of wild horses.
According to (now deceased) founder J.R. (“Jack”) Simplot, the privately-held, multi-billion-dollar company that he started from “nothin’” and that has as its motto “Bringing Earth’s Resources to Life,” owed its start to wild horses. Maybe the company–now run by Simplot’s youngest son Scott–should think about finding a way to pay the wild horses back.
A “gee whiz” account of the Simplot company history published at fundinguniverse.com includes this tidbit about how Idaho’s “Mr. Spud” got his start in the mega-mogul biz:
Born in 1909, Simplot began his ascension to the top of the business world in Delco, Idaho, a small frontier town that was home to roughly ten families during Simplot’s childhood . . .
Fortune, decisiveness, and a willingness to work would characterize Simplot’s resolute march from grade-school dropout to billionaire, beginning with his first job as a potato sorter for a local firm of potato brokers. During his off-hours, the 15-year-old Simplot moonlighted by shoring up the canals bringing water from the Snake River into irrigation ditches, earning extra money by “riprapping” the canal banks with rocks until he had enough money to rent 40 acres of potato land from his father and purchase several sow hogs. Simplot then constructed hog pens on the banks of a nearby creek, planted potatoes on his rented land, and fattened his hogs by feeding them an unusual hog slop that opened the doors to wealth and provided him with his first break in his fledgling business.
Instead of paying for feed grain as other livestock owners did, Simplot used what was available to him by tracking down the wild horses that still roamed the plains and combining the horse meat with discarded potatoes and a little barley. Once cooked in a huge iron vat, Simplot’s hog slop represented a cheaper alternative to feed grain and, as luck would have it, the horse meat-cull potato-barley mash gave the resourceful Simplot an advantage over other pig farmers after a particularly harsh winter cut short the supply of feed grain. The following spring, when pigs were brought to market, Simplot’s fat hogs stood in sharp contrast to the skinny hogs deprived of their usual amount of feed grain, enabling Simplot to reap the rewards from his unconventional hog slop.
That’s right. When other pig farmers were paying for grain to feed their skinny hogs, J.R. had the bright idea of hunting and killing free wild horses and feeding them to his fat, shiny pigs as hog slop.
Here is his story in his own words:
I’d go out in the desert and shoot a wild horse or two, jerk the hide off of them, and bring them back in and cook them with the potatoes. I fattened those hogs on horse meat and cooked potatoes.
Simplot may also have shot domestic horses, if you believe the account he gave to a writer for Range Magazine in 1998:
It was 1923-the land empty and wide open-and he had seen wild horses out on the Owyhee Desert, “runnin’ by the hundreds. I’d go out and knock a couple over with a rifle and jerk the hides off ‘em with my pickup.” He got arrested for shooting a few with brands on, “but I settled with the guy and we got along.” He got two bucks for the hide and then he’d haul the carcass into town and feed them to his pigs.
We will never know if Mr. Spud ever felt remorse for what he did to the horses, but there may be a clue in an obituary in the Idaho Statesman. The article describes “Simplot’s softer side” that showed during a helicopter trip he took with long-time friend (and former Idaho state Senator) H. Dean Summers:
“When you’re out with Jack, you always eat where he has an establishment, and we landed at one of his ranches where they were rounding up horses,” he said. “We had our hunting clothes on, and the cowboys didn’t know who we were. They brought in a horse with a huge cut on its front shoulder. It was 6 inches long and filled with pus.
“When the foreman said to take the horse out and shoot it, Jack jumped down from a plank of the corral and asked for a veterinary kit. He cleaned out the wound with his bare hands and stitched it up with an old needle. When I asked him why, when he had 500 other horses, he said that horse had as much right to live as anybody.”
Too bad the mustangs that died for hog feed never knew Jack’s softer side.
Do you still want fries with that burger?
The round-ups, harassment, branding, castration and sterilization of wild horses and burros by the people charged with protecting them continues at an accelerated pace. More helicopters haze and drive the horses into capture pens where they are separated from mates and siblings, the stallions cut, the mares injected and put into holding pens where they await human decisions about their fate.
While wild horses run from helicopters, Walmart advertises discounts on overpriced goods for Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. Oprah Winfrey interviews a woman who survived an attack by a primate, and the question of whether or not Sammy Sosa bleached his skin tops search lists. The 2009 CMA Award Show has over 16 million viewers but as of today (11/19/09) only 4,000 people have signed a petition to stop the round-ups (the petition needs 12,000 signatures) to give scientists (not bureaucrats) a chance to look at the long-term impact on these protected animals before they are rounded-up to extinction.
Susan Boyle sings about them. Their image is used to advertise everything from automobiles to housing developments to sports teams. As an icon or image, we cannot get enough of them. But the actual, living, breathing animals are a “problem” needing a “final solution.”
President Obama appears indifferent to the fate of the wild horse and burro bands as repeated pleas to the White House go unanswered.
Obama’s appointee Ken Salazar is in the pocket of interests–including energy, ranching and the “kill ‘em to save ‘em” environmentalists–that want to see the wild horses and burros off of public land. Once the equines are gone, nothing stands between these interests and the land they so desperately want to grab from American taxpayers.
Senator Harry Reid sold out the horses and burros years ago with the Burns Amendment that sneaked in a rider to an appropriation’s bill to give the equine’s so-called “protectors” (the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service) the “tool” they so crave–the go-ahead the send tens of thousands of protected horses and burros to slaughter.
Now “Dirty Harry” Reid is selling out American women’s reproductive rights with another back room deal called the Stupak Amendment. At stake is nothing less than freedom. Freedom for the horses and burros to roam, form family bands and reproduce. Freedom for women to choose whether or not we want to reproduce.
Wake up America. Grab control of your destiny. Before it is too late.
The Equine Welfare Alliance (EWA), a coalition of groups and individuals who are dedicated to ending slaughter of American horses and to protecting wild horses and burros on public lands, has issued a press release calling for an immediate moratorium on wild horse round-ups.
Despite the public outcry against removal of wild horses and burros from public lands and perhaps because of increasing media attention to this injustice, the Bureau of Land Management has accelerated round-ups (what they call “gathers”) of wild horses and burros.
The concern expressed by the EWA and others is that without a moratorium there will be no wild horses and burros left on public land by the time legislation purporting to protect them–such as the R.O.A.M. Act currently before the U.S. Senate, and the Prevention of Equine Cruelty Act reintroduced this year–is passed.
The war against American horses has created some strange alliances. Democrats such as Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, U.S. Senator from Nevada Harry Reid and former U.S. Representative from Texas Charles Stehholm (now lobbyist for foreign horse meat producers) find themselves on the side of the horse killers together with Republicans such as former U.S. Senator from Montana Conrad Burns (now lobbyist for the American Quarter Horse Association) and Wyoming state representative Sue Wallis (working to bring horse slaughter facilities to your neighborhood).
Where is our charismatic, compassionate President Obama on this issue?
Why have the wild horse and burro round-ups and anti-horse rhetoric increased instead of slowing down or stopping since the last presidential election?
It is time for the President to stop the wild horse and burro round-ups, take a stand against horse slaughter and end America’s war against equines.
The thread that unites the lobbyists, bureaucrats, Democrats and Republicans with the killers is a concern that laws protecting horses from slaughter might be extended to protect cows, sheep and pigs from slaughter. The “horse as proxy” and “slippery slope” concerns underlie the hollow justifications raised by horse killers and their apologists to support their arguments that Americans should be in the business of raising and slaughtering horses for export of horse meat to Japan, France and other countries where horsemeat is consumed.
The Animal Law Coalition’s Laura Allen posted a comprehensive article debunking the widely circulated lie that closing slaughter houses led directly to an increase in abandoned horses.
Are horse meat farms and domestic slaughter houses the final indignities that Americans will inflict on the innocent and brave horses that have walked with us, carried us and pulled our carriages and plows since the early days of the Republic?
What would Paul Revere’s warning have been without “Brown Betty,” the mare he rode to warn patriots that the “British Are Coming?”
Please watch this video entitled “An American Horse,” that was created by John Holland, an American human being who believes American equines deserve better than slaughter. There are graphic images at the conclusion of the video.
