Bison are cool again

Bison are given health checks at Antelope Island State Park Saturday Nov. 2, 2019 in Utah. The park rounds up wild bison that roam the park annually. After the roundup, the bison rest in corals for a few days to reduce their stress. Once they are accustomed to the corals, they are checked one at a time to administer vaccinations. Additionally, the bison receive individual health screenings including pregnancy checks, and medicine to prevent parasites. After the bison are checked, they may be released back onto the island to continue a wild existence or they may be slated to be sold in a public auction. The 16-mile long island can support a healthy herd of 500-700 bison, so when the population increases, some animals are sold.

Before European settlers wiped out the bison in the 19th century, sometimes shooting them from trains, vast herds made up of thousands used to roam the American Plains. At one point their number was reduced to a pitiful few hundred. Conservation projects have brought the numbers back up to an estimated 500,000 in North America today, but that is mostly made of up small herds of less than 500. Sadly, less than 4% (about 19,000 bison) roam freely in conservation herds. Most bison today are raised for commercial purposes i.e. bison burgers. For this reason, scientists say that bison have become ecologically extinct.

Hemp Bathing

A black SUV carrying a car full of middle aged opioid addicts pulled into a 40 acre, wind swept hemp farm in Delta, Utah. Four men tumbled out of the car like puppies at the dog park. With unbridled joy they proceeded to prance from plant to plant gently cradling the buds in their hands to sniff, taking selfies, giggling without a care in the world. The Japanese have a word, “Shinrin-yoku”, which has been translated popularly as “forest bathing, ” or spending time in the forest in a mindful way as a benefit to one’s body and mind. The spectacle of these grown men skipping amongst rows of ripe hemp could easily be called ”hemp-bathing”.

Shane Ericksen and men who use CBD to manage drug addictions take photos with hemp plants.

The men came to the farm to help with the harvest. 2019 is the first year hemp has been legal to farm here, this was the first crop ever. The farmer was in need of workers. Shane Ericksen, the founder of the Men’s Tribal House, a home in Salt Lake City for men in recovery where CBD and medical marijuana are used to combat drug addictions saw an opportunity. The CBD slated to be extracted from the hemp was contracted to be used in a medicinal lotion he produces. So, he organized some of the men in the house to assist with the harvest.

Utah is the number one state for Opioid deaths, an estimated six people perish from prescription overdoses every week. In a response to this as well as his own experiences, Ericksen founded a recovery home and recently acquired a house that used to belong to a massive polygamist family. The many bedrooms, bathrooms, 4 kitchens, multiple dining rooms make it ideal to house a large number of people. 

Ryan Severe, who uses CBD to fight his opioid addiction reacts as he strolls though rows of plant on a hemp farm.

Some of the men living in the home take CBD as well a medical THC to get their lives back on track. In Utah, that means getting a letter from a medical professional. Dr Angela Loving, who works with addicts recommends THC when patients are hesitant to use suboxone or sublocade, which are also technically addictive. Loving attributes the success of THC “Its the head-change that they are looking for, the high without being on the hard stuff,” adding “It seems to me that most substance abuse clients often are trying to self medicate for something: pain, anxiety, depression, bipolar, whatever it may be. The great thing about THC is that is helps with those diagnoses but also provides them with a reason not to use other substances.”

Charlie Wall, hemp-bathing

Ericksen started using cannabis to combat an opioid addiction five years ago. He says he immediately noticed a difference with other methods. “It helped me get over the withdrawal symptoms much quicker than any other time I had quit opiates before. Then I started to notice that with daily cannabis use I didn’t have the cravings. I got off pain pills all together and it was such a great part of my routine. But for years I thought I was just crazy, I was doing it in secret, I was a little bit ashamed of it.” In November. 2018, The Utah Medical Cannabis Act was passed, making medical use less shameful as well as legal.

Men from the Tribal Men’s House set up camp in the hemp field. Charlie Wall, opted to sleep outside under the boughs of the plants.

A hemp plant cola in the sunset, ready to be harvested.

Additionally, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which boasts many members in Utah has come out supporting the medical use of cannabis. In an official statement the church revealed, “We respect the wise counsel of the medical doctors of Utah. The public interest is best served when all new drugs designed to relieve suffering and illness and the procedures by which they are made available to the public undergo the scrutiny of medical scientists and official approval bodies.” 

At group meetings in the house, Ericksen says the men discuss the virtues of cannabis use in meetings and agree that it has a remarkable power. He says, “On those days when life if just too fricken’ much, you’re going to relapse, you reach for the cannabis, and that moment, the moment you use the medical marijuana, the last thing you want to do is go get high. You don’t want to go find meth or crack. You don’t want to go drink. You don’t want to isolate. You want to become part of the group. You want you assimilate. You want to come home. You want to sleep in your own bed.”

Charlie Wall and others from the Tribal Men’s House move drying racks to prepare for the incoming biomass.

Shane Ericksen (C) places hemp on a drying rack.

Farmer Lacee McPherson (C) and men from the Tribal men’s house shuck freshly harvest cannabis.

Recovering opioid addict, David Turpin, 61 helps with the hemp harvest.

Perched in a rickety old folding chair, David Turpin, 61, sat methodically turning and trimming freshly harvested buds with a pair of gummed up garden shears. A chorus of snips punctuated the the dusty barn air while a thin version of Spirit in the Sky played from a tinny bluetooth speaker. 

Turpin has been at the house for for three months and says he has successfully been using cannabis to suppress addictions to other drugs. When he was 37, he underwent a quadruple bypass and subsequently became addicted to pain pills. His doctor prescribed Lortab 10 which contains the opiate hydrocodone, of which he took 8 tablets a day, for 20 years. At 57 another doctor slashed his prescription to 60 pills a month. He says he had the choice of turning to heroin or meth to navigate the pain. He picked meth. 

Today, he’s on a daily regimen of 500mg full spectrum CBD as well as the lotion made by Erickson.  Back pain has been a chronic problem for Turpin, acquired from a long career in construction, lifting heavy loads, that began when he was just 15. “I swear to it, hell yeah, anybody that’s older and has doctors like I used to have, putting me on different pills all the time, so many...” his voice trailed off as he grabbed a heavy branch from little green pile of weed.

A chubby coyote is seen in a hemp field.

Ericksen says the harvest was therapeutic for the Tribal House men, “They all felt like they were giving back, helping to spread good medicine, to help other people in recovery. They had good associations and felt like their work was important and valuable.”  Some of men set up a tent amongst the rows of hemp and Charlie Wall, set a sleeping bag down in between two bushy ripe plants, their boughs heavy with juicy colas where he slept under the stars.

Electrofishing on the Provo River

Biologists from Utah Department of Wildlife Resources used a low-level electric current to temporarily stun fish to collect essential data, such as length, weight and species type, before returning them to the water unharmed. Shot for the Daily Herald - here is a link to the full story

Volunteers and Department of Wildlife Resources staff get ready to trawl the river.

Volunteer Lance Holter (C) and DRW staff scoop up stunned fish.

A volunteer gently places a brown trout in to a collection bucket.

Mike Slater, Sport Fish Project Leader (C) measures a fish’s length and weight with Jason Vernon (R) and student Rebecca Macgregor (R).

Wild Mustang Auction

A cast iron sculpture of a cowboy contemplating a bucking horse greets visitors at the entrance of the Wyoming Honor Farm in Riverton, Wyoming. An inscription reads, “There is nothing better for inside of a man than the outside of a horse.” The farm is not an ordinary farm, it’s also a low security prison where the inmates are rehabilitated though the labor of agricultural work as well as the powerful power of animal therapy, training or “gentling” wild mustangs.

Inmate, Travis Bogard (L) talks about the temperament of a yearling he trained with a prospective buyer at the Wyoming Honor farm.

Inmate Travis Bogard, standing in a coral of leggy yearlings, said that trainers with experience can train a horse, from “wild to saddle” in about two months but for novices, it takes longer. He explained that the yearlings were still too small to ride and that many of them had arrived to the farm without their mothers. In some cases the inmates have to bottle feed the foals.

The training starts with the horse and the inmate building trust through physical proximity and touch. For many inmates it will be the first time they have ever touched a horse.

 Next, the horses are slowly  introduced to halters, saddle blankets, saddles, a snaffle bit is placed in its mouth. The goal is to teach the horse to be gentle and familiar with humans. Once the horses accept a saddle on their back, its one step closer to being able to sit on their backs and ride off.

Rick Conner, shares a tender moment with a gelding named Nine-Ball he trained.

Wild horses and burros are descendants of animals released by or escaped from Spanish explorers, ranchers, miners, the U.S. Cavalry and native Americans. Horses and burros were crucial to survival for settlers and pioneers, who depended on them for transportation and agricultural chores. American wild horses were once at the brink of being eradicated. In recent years, however, they have flourished under the protection afforded by federal laws passed in 1971, the  “The Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 .” The act covered the management, protection and study of "unbranded and unclaimed horses and burros on public lands in the United States."

Since then, The wild horse and burro population has expanded to over 81,000. The BLM now battles balancing, managing, protecting, and controlling the herds. Given that wild horses and burros have no natural predators in the American West, herd populations double about every four years.

An inmate smiles as he watches horses he’s helped train get auctioned to bidders.

One inmate, Jesse Fretter, said “When I first came up here, I had no intention to join this horse program, and then they heard I could ride and they said ‘hey come on.’ As soon as I hit leather, everything melted away, it was just me and the horse and that’s how I spend my days. I’m blessed, how could I not be? There are 100 horses out here, I and I get to ride anyone I want.”

A woman with a blue manicured nails pets a yearling’s muzzle.

In each auction about 50 horses and a few dozen burros and yearlings are adopted. Earlier in 2019 a gelding fetched a record price of $5700. All the money goes to the BLM, who pay the prison a daily fee to board the horses.

Inmates handle horses in a pen.

Dusty Davison, an inmate rides a trained wild mustang around a pen during an auction to demonstrate the horse's rideability.

With the expanding population of feral horses the Bureau of Land Management adopts out about 4600 horses and burros every year in to private care. The American Wild Horse Group has been critical of the Bureau of Land Management's other proposed methods, including a variety of “inhumane, unscientific and publicly unacceptable methods.” These practices include surgical and chemical sterilization, culling or sale for slaughter of 100,000 mustangs and burros annually.

A gelding is bid upon.

Bidding underway at the auction.

Nicole Fader reacts with joy at her successful bid to adopt a silvery mustang named Cloud.

Serial adopter Nicole Fader reacted with tears of joy at her successful bid to adopt a silvery mustang named Cloud. Fader said she felt an instant bond with the horse when she saw him at an auction earlier in the year, but due to a clerical mix up she was not able to adopt him at that time. She and her husband Nick, traveled three hours from Lyman, Wyoming to try again, and adopted Cloud for $1500. The Faders have six other horses that they take on pack hikes in the mountains and said that all of their horses were acquired through BLM wild mustang programs. Some of their horses were wild when they got them, and they worked to train and "gentle" them. The Faders said they have hired professional trainers to help but they do the "groundwork" themselves. Nick explained groundwork constituted teaching the horse things like, "Don't be rude," and "Don't bite me."

Cloud is seen peering out of the Fader’s horse trailer on his way to his new life.

Once they got to Fader’s ranch, Cloud met his new horse brothers and sisters and became very attached to Nicole, who changed her facebook profile photo to an image of her new charge. “ He’s doing wonderfully,” she said “ He’s a total sweetheart and follows me constantly, even leaving his food to come to the fence and wait for me whenever he sees me.”

Leah Huckaby, in a horse themed t-shirt. Her father, James Huckaby, owner of the Stacked Heart ranch which specializes in rescuing wild mustangs took home two geldings. He said of the horses, that this was either the best day, or worst day of their lives.er father

Dusty Davison, (R) pulls a BamBam a burro, that refused to get in to a horse trailer, living up to the burro stereotype.

The federal government says Arizona public lands can support a maximum of 1,676 wild burros. However in 2017 an estimated 6,241 burros roaming the state.. While all the horses at auction came from the Wyoming, the burros were imported, some from Arizona.

Burros are often kept as pets, admired for their adorableness. Gary Adles made a successful bid for the burro Bam Bam, who was on her way to becoming a pet and a companion to horses on a ranch. Aldes explained his love of, “Donks” saying “ They’re fun! Fun little buggers to be around – we had one years ago, a little brown jack donk, and I’d holler his name and he’d come running like a dog.” Other adopters plan to use the burros for hunting, packing killed animals and supplies on long hikes.

A horse is led through a chute to a waiting trailer, en route to his new home.

Billy Terhune, a former inmate at the Wyoming Honor farm, poses for a portrait with Pard.

Former inmate, Billy Terhune, was once a construction worker, but while incarcerated at the Honor Farm he learned to train horses.

Terhune said he thrived in the program and felt fortunate to have his life redirected by it, “It was a really good program for me, in fact, I’ve decided to become a horse trainer over the deal.  I’ve been riding horses my whole life, but never really got to know the inner workings of it, and I learned that there. It’s intriguing, very fulfilling and very rewarding.”

Terhune traveled to Riverton with his family, where his parents bid on and successfully bought Pard, the horse he trained for him. “The mission was to get Pard. I really connected with him. Some other guys had him and were having problems, in fact, they called him “knuckle.” I got in the round pen with him and started working with him, introducing him to saddles and so on. I was talking to him as I put a saddle blanket on him, he sniffed it and looked me in the eye for about 10 seconds, and from them on he trusted me. So I’m like, I’m coming back to get you buddy.”

 Terhune joked he was in town to break his horse out of jail.