WHO’S KILLING THE WILD HORSES
Winter had frozen over the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests in late January 2019 when Betty Nixon saw the dead stallion, known to locals as Raven. His right leg bone was shattered by a bullet, and near him lay a red-coated pregnant mare, Sparrow, who had been shot in her belly and neck. Not far away, behind a stand of junipers, the mare’s filly stood alone, lost.
As Nixon approached, the filly took off, racing past the dead bodies of Raven and her mother.
Three years later, Nixon has chronicled the shootings of at least 40 wild horses in this forest in northeastern Arizona, where several hundred of the Heber herd, named for the unincorporated town surrounded by the forest, roam. Each day she sets out on often miles-long treks, recording the live horses she sees and the ones she finds too late. The most recent shootings that anyone knows of were in late December, when three dead wild horses were found. So far, necropsies have yielded few clues.
“I just don’t understand who would shoot a horse and leave it there,” says Jeffrey Todd, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service, Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. “It’s strange.”
After the December killings, the Forest Service announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction. Wild horses are federally protected, and killing one on public land is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine, under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971.
But in the 51 years since
