In December of 2023, Animals’ Angels reported about the horrific attack on Wyoming’s wild horses, which were being shipped straight to known kill buyers by the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes. Some of them were even shipped straight to Bouvry Exports.Since then, we have further investigated the situation and found that the callous removal and transfer to known slaughter buyers continued and, in some cases, even increased.
A new investigation by Animals’ Angels confirms that 864 horses, among them 347 stallions, were shipped to kill buyers Aquilla Martinez and Dennis Chavez in New Mexico. The horses were shipped by the Southwest Wyoming Feral Horse Association and rancher Carl Larson from Lyman, WY. Larson raises sheep on his 160-acre property, which shares the same address with the Feral Horse Association.
Once the horses arrived in New Mexico, no time was wasted to disperse of the animals: Hundreds of horses went straight to the Presidio export pens for immediate slaughter in Mexico. Others were distributed to known kill buyers/horse traders Earnie Schenker (MO) and Dustin Parham (MS), some were sold at the Missouri Horse Auction and the Interstate Regional Stockyards.
These are the facts. What is left to the imagination is pure horror. How were 347 stallions – all of them used to roaming free - transported to New Mexico? They surely couldn’t have been segregated, so most likely they were crammed together in trailers each holding 35-43 of them. And what happened next? Mexican slaughter plants do not like stallions in their shipments, so they would have to be gelded. We have witnessed with our own eyes the results of carelessly carried out castrations at Dennis Chavez’s feedlot. And how did the horses fair when they were distributed to Parham and Schenker? Chavez still uses his go-to vet, Dr. Florian Sanchez, to sign off on the paperwork needed for transporting horses, who (as we know from previous investigations) has no issues okaying the shipment of 3-month-old, sickish foals across the country.
Sanchez approved all the shipments of the Wyoming horses to Missouri, Kansas and Arkansas. The health certificates show that mares, geldings and males were in the shipments. Were the male horses properly segregated then? We don’t know.
We do know that the attack on Wyoming’s wild horses will continue and that large numbers will continue to be rounded up, both from the Wind River Reservation and BLM lands. The only way to stop the threat of these horses ending up in the horse slaughter pipeline is to ban the slaughter of US horses for good. Please continue to urge your representative to support legislation that will achieve that goal.