The Tamers and the Tamed - Part Five of High Altitude Tales

Recidivism rates in the U.S. are some of the highest in the world, and in Wyoming, 33 percent of inmates are back in prison within the first year. But studies show that animal therapy can help reduce that by teaching things like responsibility, nonviolence and empathy. Most programs pair inmates with dogs. But Wyoming has a special program – one of only five in the country – that teaches inmates how to tame wild horses.

Today, I’m headed out to visit a prison, the Wyoming Honor Farm in central Wyoming. On the outskirts of Riverton, I take a long driveway shaded by cottonwoods not quite budding out for spring. Nothing about the place looks like my preconceived notions of a prison. Like, where’s the towering chain link fences with coiled barbed wire on top? And why are all these guys in red inmate shirts wandering around? Couldn’t they just hop this fence and walk away? I pull up to a low gate – like, low enough for a game of limbo! – and a prison guard comes out to take my driver’s license.

“Been here before?” a prison guard asks me at my car window.

“Nope,” I say.

“Okay, so you’ll go in and park in the parking lot. Just find a spot, it doesn’t matter where. And then just head into the right side of the building,” he says.

“Where it says ‘administration’ over the door?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, got it, thank you,” I say and drive into the prison farm and find a spot to park.

Five Inmates Milking Cows

Inside, I’m greeted by a guy in a big white cowboy hat, Travis Shoopman. Mr. Shoopman, I should say since, at the Honor Farm, everyone addresses each other formally as an expression of respect – whether they’re talking to an employee or a prisoner. Mr. Shoopman is the authority on all things farming around here. Because, no joke, this is a real farm. 

We get in his truck and he takes me for a tour. He starts off by giving me a little history. 

“It started out with like five inmates milking cows,” Mr. Shoopman says. “And the inmates of the time would actually have a cot in the stall with the cows, and they milked them. And we sent the milk to Rawlins. That was the purpose of the farm at the time. We had pigs, chickens, and dairy cattle, and it all got sent to the prison.”

To feed the prisoners at the state penitentiary. That was in 1931. These days, the prison gets its food from food delivery companies. And there’s no milk cows. But there are lots of beef cows. The herd is some 700 strong.

“This year, we have 324 pregnant mama cows,” Mr. Shoopman says. “And there's a whole crew that takes care of them as well. We feed them. It's kind of like stepping back in time a little bit, as far as we pick up all the square bales by hand, we stack them all by hand. There's not a stack wagon here. There's not a skid loader to clean up manure. It's all by hand. But we have a very large workforce that needs jobs.”

The prison has room enough for about 250 guys. Right now, it’s calving season on the farm and so there’s also a crew of prisoners who are bringing all those baby cows into the world. It’s around the clock work. To feed their cattle they raise hay, oats, corn and other crops. And when they sell the beef, that money goes back into the budget to run this prison farm. 

“There's a lot of talent that comes through with the inmates. There's plumbers, there's electricians, there's roofers and we get to utilize a lot of that. Every inmate here has to have a job. Whether it's peeling potatoes in the kitchen, janitor, admin, welders. As you saw as you drove in, everyone's fairly busy. We have a dog handling program,” he says, nodding at an inmate walking a dog down the road. Through the windshield, I can see the inmate’s lips moving as he talks to his dog and pulls up his leash to make him sit to let us drive pass. 

But it’s not just cows and dogs that the inmates are training here. We drive up and park next to a bunch of corrals where inmates are working with horses. But these aren’t just any horses. These are wild Wyoming mustangs. And they’re here to be tamed – but also, they might just do a little taming themselves.

Pressure and Release

I ask Mr. Shoopman about the Honor Farm’s wild horse training philosophy. Do they break horses like they did in the olden days?

“We don't break anything. It's a terrible term,” he says. “But all of the theories came from Tom Dorrance and Ray Hunt. They were the guys that came up with Natural Horsemanship, or the yielding to pressure. We've come leaps and bounds and miles from where we were 30 years ago on how to train a horse. We don't force anything because it doesn't work.”

That’s pretty much their philosophy for training prisoners too. The idea is to introduce these wild horses to novel experiences. Loud country music blares through speakers. It’s one kind of pressure to yield to. 

But the same goes for the inmates, training horses is a novel experience for most of them. Mr. Shoopman takes me over to see some of the horses that are brand new to this human world. Horses that not so long ago were roaming the range in search of enough grass to forage, enough water to drink. It’s kind of funny to look at, these grown men just standing around in a pen with a horse. They look like kids on the schoolyard, pretending to be cool, like, la dee da, I’m not trying to make friends with this horse.

“As we're watching this horse, that guy is standing within a foot or two feet of this horse, and the horse is handling it really well,” Mr. Shoopman says. “And it's just early beginnings of this horse being okay by himself, this horse being okay with a human in the pen. And just now we're not petting his forehead yet, but like, we can actually touch his neck. And he's okay with it, he's not leaving.”

In another pen, the petting progresses far enough that the prisoner introduces a halter, just holds it in his hand then drops it on the ground. The horse nuzzles it.

“These are the coolest things to see every day. Like, it's those little steps of progress. And it’s the same for the men. Like some of them haven't known a lot of other things. And it's those little steps of progress. Getting up every day, being on time. This horse has never been touched, never had a halter on him. And now we have him, he's quiet. He can pet him. He's gonna get the halter on this horse for the first time. Here's a serious accomplishment.”

That accomplishment leads to the next and the next, and before you know it you’ve got a prisoner who may have zero riding experience up on a horse who’s never in its life been ridden. 

Mr. Chapman

Like Stumpy here, a little black and white and brown patched gelding who’s made some big progress, thanks to the training of inmate Jon Chapman. Mr. Chapman sits comfortably in Stumpy’s saddle, even though he’s a big guy on that small horse. A handsome guy, balding, with a broad smile through his silver beard. I ask him what he’s working on with Stumpy today.

“Working on his neck reining,” Mr. Chapman says. “I want him to feel the neck reining in here and he's doing really super good with his neck reining. Ho!” he says to the horse as he circles him around the pen. “And stopping so he stops really good. Getting him to be calm. Nice calm ride with him. I don't want to have to pull on the reins. I want him to stay nice and easy. Walk!” he tells Stumpy.

Mr. Chapman shows me how Stumpy will hold still while he opens and closes a gate from the saddle, or climbs off and on. He says he’s learned getting a wild horse to stay calm means staying calm inside yourself.

“You can't be frustrated or mad or angry or have something going on. Because if you do, you might as well not get on the horse and honestly just get off and go do something else. Because you're not going to be able to get the horse to do what this horse is doing without being calm and collected,” says Mr. Chapman.

But being calm and collected didn’t come easy to Mr. Chapman. Growing up, his mom was a veterinarian for zoos and circuses across the American West. She specialized in African lions and trained them to perform on T.V. and in movies. 

“We ended up with wild animals, hurt animals. People ended up bringing deer that’d been hit by a car. We'd nurse that deer back up and we did that with elk. We did that with moose and deer and raccoons and porcupine and we ended up with all kinds of animals in there.”

As a child, it was part of his chores to help take care of them all. And it helped him understand the mind of the wild animal.

“I understand the thinking of the wild animal. Their independence, their aggressiveness. You can't change that, you can't. You can't take that out.”

That independence and aggression grew within him as well, especially trying to defend himself against a violent stepfather.

“I have a short fuse, which has to be addressed because I have to learn just to step down a lot,” Mr. Chapman says. “Otherwise, it's not good. I always tell everybody, there's only one thing in life I ever feared and that was my stepfather, and he beat that out of me. So yeah, I come from a very rough, very rough – five brothers, three sisters  – I come from a very rough, rough, rough brand.”

As an adult, he became a hotshot firefighter and worked on building roads and bridges in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, all over the world. He also cleaned up after natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Eventually he worked in the oilfields, and got married and bought a house outside Green River, Wyoming. One day, something happened to change the course of his life. He says a stranger came to his house, stalking his wife. But he didn’t know that. He’d driven out to clean his horse pens a few miles from home.

“That day, I just happened not to go to the dump,” he recalls. “I’d just loaded the trailer with the manure, just was not in the mood. So I came home early. I walked in on a mess. I was accused of shooting him in the head, chased him down, shot him in the head. So they gave me the secondary degree attempted murder here, 25 to 50 years. I've got just over 16 years in.”

Mr. Chapman says the dead man was the stalker who’d just attacked his wife. He was sentenced to 25 to 50 years for a second degree murder attempt of the man. He’s now served 14 of those.

“You kind of just get stuck into the prison system, and you learn to cope real quick,” he says. “You’re either going to be stuck in the hole and locked down. You can learn to cope with people, or you're going to be locked away and it's just a decision you have to make: do I want to be sitting in the hole? Or do I want to be able to go outside?  Do I want to be able to go to the store every week? Do I want to be able to walk the track? Do I want to be able to lift weights? Do I want to be able to do an educational program?”

Mr. Chapman recently got certified as a paralegal and aspires to becoming a federal immigration attorney when he gets out. He’s up for parole in a few months, but none of it came easy. For years, he’s been trying to get to the Honor Farm but his murder conviction and his bad temper kept him from getting selected.

“I was told that you never will. Take your name off the list, you’re not going. So I finally took my name off the list and said I don't want to go, I'm done with it. And three days later, I was on a bus here – so I was like, I should have done this a long time ago,” he says with a big laugh.

Now Mr. Chapman is doing what he loves – spending time with wild animals. In the year he’s been here, he’s trained 74 mustangs. There’s one horse he really admires.

“He was running into the fences and bouncing off everything, they couldn't get in the pen with him. But watching him for a day or two, I put him in a small pen and crawled in with him and had hands on him within 20 minutes, because he just had anxiety issues going on,” says Mr. Chapman. “It wasn't really fear or anything, he just had real high anxiety. I got him in there and got him to stand still and got to that anxiety and he turned out to be a beautiful, beautiful horse. And within a few weeks, he was following me around.”

In other words, he wasn’t bad – just anxious and needing some one-on-one attention. Mr. Chapman says his favorite horses are those ornery ones, the spunky ones, the ones that resist getting tamed.

“The ones that were born here and raised, they're not going to have that as much as the ones that come up out of the wild. Just like a person who ends up in prison depending on who you see, people come back and the residual stuff comes back. They have that thing,” Mr. Chapman says.

“There’s a piece of them that’s  a little wild. It’s always going to be there?” I ask.

“Yeah, it's like that temper, that short fuse, it's always there. And you can feel it.”

Mr. Chapman is perfectly aware of how similar his own temperament is to the wild horses he’s training. Maybe part of him will always struggle with anger. But he uses that knowledge to make him a better horse tamer.

“You’re gonna fight the 1000 pound horse? What are you going to do? Really?” he asks. “You can yell, scream, get mad, kick. And then in the end, you’re going have to figure yourself out or figure out the horse, okay? Because you got to work on yourself to be able to work on the horse. If you can't get the horse to do something, you got to step back and figure out what you're doing. Because it's not the horse. It's you. Okay? That's the bottom line. It don't matter. At the end of the day. If he ain't doing what he’s supposed to do, it's because of you, that's not because of the horse. Okay? Because I got any horse out here, I can do anything I want to do. I promise you. It's not the horse.”

It’s not the horse, it’s you. It’s a lesson we could all learn. 

An Iconic Symbol of Wildness

Driving across southern Wyoming to get to the Honor Farm, I saw dozens of wild horses, every shape and size and color. I always get a thrill seeing them. Who doesn’t? They’re just so cool…an iconic image of our wild western mythology. A symbol of freedom, of wildness itself. But over the years, they’ve become more and more contentious. That’s because these days, the herds are just getting too large for the range to sustain. Back in the early 70’s there were only about 17,000 across the west…now? Over 83,000. Once, I saw a mare and her colt, their ribs showing through their skin, heads hanging in search of stubbly grass. Wild horse advocates will tell you that this range could sustain the wild horses, if there were only fewer cows allowed to graze these lands, leaving more grass for the horses. The BLM disputes that, saying they manage the range for multiple uses, and wild horses are just one of those. 

In the meantime, the BLM continues to conduct wild horse roundups. Big ones, using helicopters to herd them together. A couple years ago, over 4,000 horses were removed from the wild. Many ended up in long term holding pastures in the midwest. The BLM says they don’t directly send the horses to slaughter but the horses can end up in the hands of other middle men who do put them down or even send them to international markets for their meat. A few of the younger mustangs, though, are brought here to the Honor Farm where they are tamed and sold at auction to good homes. Mr. Shoopman, the prison’s agricultural manager, says it’s a pretty unique approach.

“The more skill sets that we give that horse, the more training, the more value he has in this world. That horse being feral, wild, untouchable, not ridable doesn't have a lot of value to a lot of people,” says Mr. Shoopman.

The same could be said of these inmates, right? By giving them agricultural skills, they’ll also have more value in society when they leave. 

“And there's an overpopulation problem with the wild horses. We're a part of the solution, but we're not the solution,” says Mr. Shoopman. “What we do and the partnership we've had with the BLM, we've had it for 35 years. And I've seen a lot of partnerships and I've never seen one that serves both sides so unselfishly as what ours does.”

Parallels Between Horses and Men

I meet up with Curtis Moffat, the Honor Farm’s prison warden, in his office, a view of some prisoners welding a fence outside his window. He tells me there used to be more farm prisons like this across the west. But now, not so many.

“Well, I think it's because we're a small state, based on our population, and also a horse population, it kind of arose out of necessity,” Warden Moffat says. “And it's been a good partnership with the BLM since 1988. And that's Wyoming, we're a smaller state, we can do things a little differently.”

Farm prisons are more common in the southern U.S. and more controversial there because they’re considered forced labor. Some state prisons, like Angola in Louisiana, are in partnership with private industry and critics say that motivates the prison to prioritize profits. The Wyoming Honor Farm is not a partnership with any industry. When the wild horses are sold at auction, that money goes back into the prison’s budget. Warden Moffat says the emphasis here is on animal therapy and providing meaningful work in hopes that these men won’t end up back in jail. And studies show that animal therapy programs in prisons do help with recidivism. But most animal therapy prison programs pair prisoners with dogs. Horse programs are rare And wild horse programs? Only five in the whole country. Mr. Moffat says, there’s something special about the inmate/wild horse bond.

“There's a lot of parallels between the horses and the men; the horses coming from the wild, they have to adapt to their surroundings – a lot of what these guys do, too. So I think they can relate to them a little bit. And plus, it gives them some responsibility that maybe they've never had before. The horses probably are a better read on people than people are themselves. And it goes a long way once they get out too, with dealing with other people, being responsible, and I'm sure it has a positive reflection on a lot of these guys with the recidivism.”

But he says there’s a high bar for prisoners to get into this program. For one thing, they only come from Wyoming prisons. And there’s only room for about 250 guys.

“Every inmate we have here has minimum custody, which means several factors are considered with that, and it's basically risk factors,” he says. “So it's the crime, the length of sentence, their institutional behavior, all that's considered as part of their classification. The key thing for us is every inmate here is within eight years of the potential release date, which for some of these guys, they're serving a long sentence, it takes them a while to get here. Chapman, for instance, would be one of those.”

Mr. Meece

But Taylar Meece, another inmate at the Honor Farm, doesn’t have such a long sentence. He was born and raised in Gillette, Wyoming and worked as a restaurant chef and at odd jobs as a plumber, and in construction. But in his teens, life started to snowball him.

“My mom died when I was 16,” Mr. Meece says. “And ever since then it's kind of been like my family was fractured. And I tried to fill up those gaps. Most of them, not healthy. And when I felt kind of like I was alone at that point. I think my dad was dealing with the tragedy in his ways as well. And so I did my best, you know, I'd gotten in trouble here and there. And then I started getting DUIs. I'm still ashamed to this day, I think I'll probably be ashamed of those DUIs my entire life.” Ashamed because now he had a record for driving under the influence. 

“And then I was accused of a crime that I didn't commit, years later. And it is really hard to defend yourself when it's already on the books that you're this person. But it's pretty much impossible, once you've been accused, it is a very deep pit to get out of.”

He was sentenced to 8 to 13 years for second degree sexual abuse of a minor. Meece is only in his early 30’s, blond, blue eyed, with a big smile under his mustache. I sit with him inside a two-story office building next door to the horse corrals. Mr. Shoopman keeps an eye on us from across the room, his radio crackling on his hip. Every inch of this building, inside and out, was built by the hands of inmates like him. 

Mr. Meece remembers how one minute he was free, the next, “I was in county jail for like ten and a half months, which is enough time for you to lose your mind in county jail.” 

“What was that like?” I ask.

“It was horrible. It was a concrete box. It's a really tough environment to be in. I was pretty much fighting for my liberty at that time until I was completely stressed out. And I had for sure lost my mind twice in county jail.”

After that ten months in the jail cell, he went to prison for a month. Originally he wanted to work on a conservation prison crew in the Black Hills because it was closer to his family. Instead, he got transferred to the Honor Farm. Somewhere along the way, Mr. Meece decided to make this tragic experience something he could learn from. He has a motto he lives by. It’s from an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust.

“Viktor Frankl helped me a lot, he says ‘you can take all these things away from a man, but you can't take away the choices that he makes within himself.’ And so I started making some big choices, because that's what I could do. And that's the control that I had.”

Big choices like what job he wanted to request to do at the Honor Farm. 

“I have never done anything in agriculture before and so I kind of just threw it to the wind. I'm like, ‘let's do this. This is my goal. I wanted to learn to train and ride horses. That's what I want to do.’ And my family, they're like, ‘What do you do?’”

One reason his family was skeptical was that Mr. Meece had very little experience with horses. One of the only ones was, well…

“This horse bit me on the face!”

“No!” I say. “Why did you choose to do horses?”

“Because I made a decision. I'm not gonna be afraid of horses. Like all these guys can ride and train horses. Like I can do it too, right? But it scared me. It's scary when there's big teeth. And he got a hold of me. But I was determined to not let that hold me back.”

But it wasn’t just his childhood fear that held him back. 

“Well, first it was kind of rough,” he says. “You don't show up here and they give you a horse. That's not how it works. You have to work at first, which is fine.”

The Natural Horsemanship philosophy of training horses – pressure and release. Mr. Meece was feeling that pressure, big time. For months, he didn’t touch a horse. He just shoveled their manure. Then he finally got to climb in the pen with some of the wild mustangs.

“I had this palomino horse, it was the first horse I'd ever put hands on myself, which is a big deal. To let you do that you have to gain their trust. And I put my hands on this horse for the first time. So I was feeling like a rock star,” Mr. Meece says. “And then they go to clean up his feet. And I don't know what happens in the shoe pen, like he gets stuck in one of these parts and ends up breaking his foot as the part comes off. And it's pretty horrible. And unfortunately, they had to put that horse down. And so that was a big tragedy to me.”

Mr. Meece’s severe anxiety symptoms started flaring up again. 

“So emotionally, yeah, that was definitely pretty hard to deal with. And then somewhere throughout all this, they started making me take this medication that I had stopped taking. And it was prescribed to me, but since I've been here, I didn't really feel like I needed it. And then they kind of roped me into a corner where I had to start taking this medication again.”

The anti-anxiety medication made him sick so he stopped taking it. Things started spiraling.

“I wasn't really committing myself to the program through all this, I had kind of started withdrawing a little bit, and then I wasn't showing up to work as often,” he says. “And then, the winter hit, and it was like one of the worst winters ever. Just as in terms of the weather and like we were outside, we had to clean up pens, but most of the time we were huddled around the stove and the tack room and like being cramped in small spaces with all these guys.” 

But then, a little buckskin mare named Belle came along.

Horse Hugs 

“Somebody gave me this little year and a half year old mare,” Mr. Meece says. “And I would work her every day. And then I really started seeing results with her. Consistency is a big deal when you're training horses; showing up to work one day and half a day the next and not showing up that day, you'll see it directly in your horse's behavior. You can't hide your behavior from them, you can't hide your emotions, your habits, like they will be a direct reflection of that. And I seen that 100% with that horse. And then I was like, ‘Okay, I gotta double down like, this horse’s success depends on me now. And if I want her to be successful, if I want her to go to a good home, then I've got to buck up and start showing up to work every day and taking advice and learning as much as I can.’”

Pressure and release. Belle was just what Mr. Meece needed to shift his worldview.

“Horses will make you feel like a million bucks or they'll make you feel like dirt sometimes. For a moment, I was feeling like a million bucks.”

The time came to put Belle up for auction. Sometimes inmates get pretty emotional when the time comes to sell the horses they’ve bonded with. But for Mr. Meece, it felt great.

“The lady who bought her, a doctor, sent me a picture of her, which is so cool. So I'm like now I can immortalize that horse, and I see her every morning. And I was like, ‘man, we've come a long way.’ But I'll never forget how much that horse taught me. And that's what it is really, like, they'll teach you a lot if you learn to listen to them. It was like, I can do this. I sold a horse. It was not a lot of money,” Mr. Meece says with a laugh.

“How much was it?” I ask.

“$125, but I can do it. I stood by that horse. She certainly wasn't the most well trained horse up there, but she had a good foundation, I could say that about her. And I stood by that horse during the auction, and I sold her.”

That $125 dollars wasn’t his; it went right back into the Honor Farm’s budget. But since then, he’s come to recognize the healing power of the human/horse connection. 

He gestures out the office window at the corrals.

“If I could take my meals up here and stay until the sun sets, I absolutely would, for sure,” he says. “You know, being able to talk to a horse. And horse hugs are the best hugs in the world, because they're huge, and they'll wrap their head around you and stuff like that. And so I mean, if that doesn't calm me down, like eternally, like, I don't know what will, so it’s absolutely helped my anxiety.”

Scarlet

These days, Mr. Meece is working with a new horse named Scarlet. She’s big but gentle with a white freeze brand on her neck that she got during the BLM’s roundup. Mr. Meece sits up in her saddle and has one goal he’d like to achieve with her today.

“She stops fairly well, but I want more of a sharper stop,” Mr. Meece says over the din of the corrals. “I’m kind of wanting her to dig in with their butt. So if we can make some progress on that today, that'd be great.”

He says, he and Scarlet had a bumpy start. She’d already been ridden once but now it was up to Mr. Meece to apply some new pressure.

“So it was kind of up to me to pick up the pace. So for a couple of days, we just walked around a little bit so she can get comfortable with me. I think like day three when I asked her to pick it up into a trot, I just squeezed on her a little bit and she bucked me. There was no thinking about it. She just knew that's what she wanted to do,” Mr. Meece says with a chuckle.

Scarlet isn’t so sure about having me out in her pen with her, waving around a microphone. She throws her head and won’t walk the circle of the pen. Plus, Mr. Shoopman is out there with me. Mr. Meece is the kind of guy who is almost always smiling; now, I can see he’s getting stressed out with how poorly Scarlet is behaving.

“She's really paying attention to you guys. She's got one ear kind of focused on you. She's very aware of you right now.”

Mr. Shoopman steps in and offers some advice. “Take a deep breath, just relax, Mr. Meece. It’ll be fine.” Then he turns to me and says, “It’s just a little bit how they sense as well, like, he's a little nervous, she's a little nervous.”

Mr. Shoopman can see that Mr. Meece is getting anxious, tense in the saddle, his voice tight as he talks to the horse. It reminds me that, oh yeah, this is a wild horse! Then the radio on Mr. Shoopman belt starts squawking. An inmate has gone missing on the farm. It doesn’t happen often; only six inmates have escaped in the last 24 years and all of them were apprehended. 

But still, Mr. Shoopman says, “If we can't find the guy, they're gonna do an emergency lockdown. It's all okay. We're just trying to locate one. We might have to put everyone up here in a minute.”

Then over the radio we hear, “Facility census clears.”

“Okay, we’re cleared,” Mr. Shoopman says. “I was listening to the radio and getting a little worried, sorry.”

Come to find out the inmate was taking a nap. But the incident reminds me, oh yeah, this is a prison! But the moment passes. Mr. Shoopman’s radio goes quiet. Scarlet calms down. Mr. Meece decides it’s time to apply a little pressure.

“For her not listening to me very well, I’m not gonna give her a break here,” says Mr. Meece. “She's got to kind of work for that break and show me something that I like. So I’m going to pick her back up to a trot.”

“How are you going feel giving up Scarlet for adoption?” I ask him.

“It's bittersweet,” he says. “Yeah, we'll get to see something you've worked on for a while, like, kind of lead you. But they're kind of in prison too, in a way. Just like she gets to be free. She gets to go to a home. Maybe they’ll have a job for her to do there. Hopefully, they'll treat her nice – I’m sure they will. She'll get lots of good treats and probably have a good chunk of land to run around on. So that's the most that we can hope for.”

Mr. Meece wishes he had the skills as a trainer to teach Scarlet how to pull things. But the auction is coming up in only a few weeks from now. She’d be good at it, he thinks, since she’s such a big girl; that’s a goal he’s set for himself for the future. He has three and a half years to learn lots more horseman skills. That’s how much time he has left on his sentence. But he’s already been thinking about what’s next. When he gets out of prison, a rancher he knows back home in Gillette says he’d hire him and Mr. Meece thinks that sounds pretty good. But he’s also cooking up this other plan.

“There's one horse here right now, I asked my friend, ‘if you come and buy her, I'll pay you back as soon as I get out, feed and everything.’”

“Tell me about this horse,” I say.

“So she's a buckskin. She's young. She's like two and a half years old. She's kind of got these black markings over her eyes. She's super beautiful. And she's a little bit smaller. But she's super willing. She wants to have fun and she's really nice, but she's spirited still. That's what I like about these wild horses – they’re spirited. And she's just a really good fit for me.”

Her name is Bruja because she’s a Spanish buckskin. He says wild horses make the best companions.

“You know, wild horses are special because they're on the prairie,” he says. “Just the tough life that they have out there, but they become strong over generations and generations living out there. So they are super strong animals. Their feet are strong. And they're smart, too. So you got to be smart to live out there. They want to work for you. What more could you ask for in a horse?”

Once again, the parallels between horse and men in every word he says. Just like these mustangs, these Wyoming men have also led really tough lives. Generations of tough lives behind them. But that makes them special and strong and worth teaching. At the Honor Farm, the message is loud and clear: As a community, we can’t give up on them – wild horses or men – because maybe, eventually, someday, someone will give them a good home.

Music Credits:

“Procrastinating” by Jangwa, licensed by Attribution 4.0 International License

“Acoustic Meditation” by Jason Shaw, license by Attribution 3.0 United States License

“Chiado” by Jahzzar, license by Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 International License