They Also Served

So long, Mojave burros

Comments (0) By Deanne Stillman Tuesday, Jan 31 2006

There’s a statue of Brighty the burro in the Grand Canyon Lodge. Brighty lived at the Grand Canyon from 1892 to 1922, along with countless other burros whose ancestors had come with the Spanish and carried the ensuing parade up mountains, across deserts, into mines and history. Named after the Bright Angel Creek in the canyon, Brighty originally belonged to a gold prospector. When the prospector was killed, Brighty was adopted by the park service. He helped build the canyon’s first suspension bridge across the Colorado River and carried Teddy Roosevelt’s packs on a hunt for mountain lions. He was an icon of the West when he died, and it would seem only fitting that the government honor his life by making sure that others of his kind could flourish in their desert home.

Illustrations by John E. Miner

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Passage of the federal Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act in 1971 did exactly that — but in spirit only. It gave authority for mustangs and burros to the Bureau of Land Management, which meant that other agencies such as the National Park Service could make their own policy toward these animals if they lived on NPS land. To the park service, burros were not free-roaming but non-native, which meant that they had to go. In 1979, the extirpation began — with Brighty’s descendants. Because getting them out of the Grand Canyon would be difficult, all 577 of them were to be shot. The late writer and animal defender Cleveland Amory intervened, along with his organization, the Fund for Animals, putting together a daring and complicated rescue in which the burros were airlifted from the canyon and taken to his Black Beauty Ranch in Texas, which he founded for this occasion.

That was the beginning of the end for the burro in national parks and preserves, which the park service oversees. Since then, NPS has continued its policy of “direct reduction,” and thousands of burros have either been shot by contract hunters or harried to their doom or into overcrowded government adoption pipelines in cruel airborne roundups. From 1987 to 1994, the park service shot 400 burros in Death Valley alone — just one of various burro sites all over the desert West. When Death Valley went from monument to park status in ’94, the park service amped up its plans to remove burros — and Death Valley’s remaining wild horses.

But another friend of the burro stepped up, just in time. This was Diana Chontos. In 1990, the longtime rescuer of burros had taken six of them and made a two-year cross-country wilderness trek through California to draw attention to their plight. When she heard what was about to happen to the Death Valley burros in ’94, she approached NPS with a plan. After lengthy and difficult talks, she and NPS came to an agreement: The agency would not shoot burros if her organization, Wild Burro Rescue in Olancha, California, just to the west of Death Valley, would organize, pay for and remove the burros itself.

And that’s what she’s been doing ever since. “These annual live captures are conducted in hazardous conditions in rugged and remote mountain wilderness,” she says. She almost died of renal failure at a recent capture because she just couldn’t get enough water over a six-day period. There were only two people aiding in the capture — Chontos and her late partner, Tom Allewelt, who trimmed the hooves of the rescued burros and horses and helped to gentle them at their sanctuary in the Owens Valley.

There are still a few burros in Death Valley and soon, perhaps sometime this year, another capture will be planned — if Chontos can raise the funds and head off a park-service hunt.

In 2006, the last of the Mojave Preserve burros may be taken off the land forever. Then the burros will be gone, visible only as statues at parks, or ancient greeters of tourists in ghost towns. For the park service that runs the Mojave National Preserve has now turned its sights on the last remaining burros in that part of the desert, including the Clark Mountain herds, whose home turf is the highest peak in the Mojave Desert at 7,929 feet. This is on the north side of the preserve, and sometimes, if you’re driving east on I-15, you can see them hanging out at Excelsior Mine Road. As with wild horses, there’s a dispute about exactly how many burros are left. Locals say maybe 30; NPS says 200 to 300.

Last fall, another herd was taken off the preserve, and — according to the desert grapevine — two burros may have been shot in the process. There are photos of one burro with a bullet to the head circulating in the ether. The rumor is that he died a very slow and painful death as the contractors stood by. Not surprising if true; I have heard and seen evidence of a staggering amount of tax-subsidized government abuse before, during and after roundups of wild horses and burros. Two years ago in Nevada, six mustangs, presumably rounded up to keep them from dying of thirst during a drought, died of thirst in a BLM corral after a worker forgot to turn on a spigot and then left for several days; a couple of months ago in Colorado, six more died after eating a poison weed in a corral where they should not have had access to toxic plants; and since October 2005, 46 wild horses at the BLM corral in Susanville, California, have died of strangles, an upper-respiratory infection that can kick in after a horse is stressed — or after, for instance, being run too hard during a helicopter roundup. ?