Blaze, Hannah & Baby Belle Star

We were contacted by Laura Leigh from Wild Horse Education at the end of 2018 right after the Fish Creek roundup. There was a very special family of wild horses who she had known for years and desperately wanted to keep them together and safe. We worked together to get their tag numbers and asked the BLM to adopt them as a family. They said yes to our taking six of them and we just needed to get our paperwork in.

Right at that time the whole twins adoption was announced and it was followed by the most disgusting onslaught of negativity from certain groups and people. It is unbelievable the insanity and hostility that was stirred up about our adopting that family. The ridiculous lies that were told had us spending all our time addressing that. Sadly, two weeks went by before we sent our paperwork in. For some strange reason, the horses were all shipped to various facilities around the west. His two lead mares were sent to Long Term Holding in Nebraska.

Blaze, the patriarch of the family, had been sorted in a pen that was ready to ship to Long Term Holding as well. Then a wrangler agreed to sort him for us and in January we went to get him and bring him home to Skydog. We asked for help finding the others and were able to locate one mare in Idaho, who belonged to Blaze. We applied to adopt her. Both Blaze and Hannah were sold to us for $25 each Sale Authority.

We reunited Blaze and his mare Hannah and it was spectacular with Blaze crashing through the woods to reach his love. A couple of months later we welcomed the last foal of these two beautiful horses as Hannah had been pregnant on the range before they were rounded up. Baby Belle Star is the perfect blend of her mother and father, a gorgeous buckskin baby with a star on her forehead. She gets to grow up with her parents at her side teaching her how to be a wild horse and in the spring they will all go out on hundreds of acres to enjoy being wild again.

We cannot fathom why it is that the BLM and their supporters feel such anger toward reuniting families. It’s astounding how far they will go to deny captured horses this kindness. They deny familial bonds exist among horses and insist they have no feelings or emotions. They need to consider them livestock with no other value than how humans choose to use them. To believe otherwise, would make it much harder to treat them with the contempt and cruelty that they do. Over and over, time and again, we prove the opposite is true: Family is everything to wild horses. We shall keep reuniting them, regardless of what the BLM does to prevent it. Blaze, Hannah and Belle Star are just one of many families now living happily and together forever at Skydog.