Lack of money is forcing the closure of a 3-year-old program in which state prisoners tamed and trained wild horses that were then put up for adoption, officials said.
The last shipment of wild horses left the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility's Mustang Ranch Friday morning for a ranch in Texas.The Las Cruces prison training program was the last of three to close in New Mexico in the past two years because of a lack of funding, said Jim McCormick of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Las Cruces office.
"The BLM and the state Corrections Department tried, but we just couldn't do it with the small budgets we had," McCormick said.
The program had been heralded by state officials as excellent for rehabilitating prisoners, who were employed to tame the horses.
The program was the product of a 1989 agreement between the bureau and the Corrections Department, McCormick said.
As wild horses were rounded up from ranges across the West, some older animals were sent to the prisons for training and taming and then put up for adoption.
The bureau paid the Correction Department's prison industries program about $1.85 per horse per day for boarding and feed. It paid the prison about $56 per horse once the animals were trained.
Similar programs were set up at prisons in Los Lunas and Santa Fe. The Los Lunas program closed in the summer of 1991, and the Santa Fe program closed in March.
States that have maintained prison horse training programs amid federal budget cutting include Colorado, California, Utah and Wyoming. McCormick said those states agreed to fund the program to some degree.
McCormick said the New Mexico program employed a maximum of 20 to 30 prisoners at any one time. The Las Cruces prison tamed as many as 600 horses a year.