Guarding Their Flanks
by Chris Lord
Title
Guarding Their Flanks
Artist
Chris Lord
Medium
Photograph - Digital Photography
Description
An image that was captured while spending four days among the Onaqui Mountain herd of wild mustangs in the Rush Valley near Dugway, Utah. These beautiful animals are the descendants of Pony Express horses who were turned loose after the Pony Express company lost its contract with the U.S Postal Service. This herd of 200 or so horses roams on 43,000 acres of federal land unfortunately in competition with sheep and cattle whose owners bribe the bosses of the government Bureau of Land Management (whose mandate is to look after the land for the horses) to keep the horses low in number. Horses have in the recent past been rounded up by helicopter, breaking up families and the natural hierarchy of the herd. The mustangs are then often sold off to Mexico to end up as dog food. While we were there one afternoon volunteers arrived to shoot contraceptive darts into the mares in order to keep numbers low and prevent the BLM from its cruel dastardly deeds.
Uploaded
June 27th, 2022
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Comments (1)
Meg Shearer
Awesome shot! Beautiful work Chris!
Chris Lord replied:
The strangest thing was the rest period in the afternoon. Starting with the older horses each horse would come to a standstill until all of them were stationary. No horse moved at all for about 20 minutes. Not an ear twitch among them. Every horse was motionless and completely still just standing looking ahead. It was as if you stood among statures. And then they would start to come back to life and the younger ones would start to run around. Thanks so much for the kind words, Meg
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