Wild horses to be auctioned via satellite

Sandra Chereb

Monday, May 22, 2000 | 9:12 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - Last year, Jennifer Nelson bought something that was a bit more unusual than a mere toy, a cute collectable or a book. She purchased a mustang colt.

Expecting a scruffy, short-legged nag, the Bloomington, Ill., native said she got much more. "I was surprised at the quality," she said. "This is a very elegant, beautifully built little horse."

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has gone high-tech to promote its Wild Horse and Burro Adoption program and find willing owners like Nelson for animals in need of a new home.

On Tuesday, the agency plans to hold its second satellite auction in less than a year, putting up for bid about 130 free-roaming mustangs and 10 wild burros removed from Western rangeland.

Most of the horses were gathered from Nevada after last summer's wildfires destroyed 1.6 million acres of rangeland and the horses' stomping grounds.

Superior Livestock Auction of Fort Worth, Texas, will handle the bidding on the animals, most of which are at the bureau's wild horse adoption center in Palomino Valley north of Reno.

The auction will be televised live to C-band satellite subscribers who may view the auction in real time and make bids by telephone.

"It's a new market," said bureau spokeswoman Maxine Shane in Sparks.

The stars of Tuesday's show are previewed on the bureau's Web site. Since pictures of the adoptees were posted in mid-April, the site has received more than 6,200 hits.

Melanie Jackson of Front Royal, Va., bought a gelding during the bureau's first satellite auction in August.

"I just thought I wanted to give a home to a horse that needed a home," she said of the pet she named Shadow. "That's why I wanted a mustang."

Jackson bought her first mustang the year before on an Internet auction, when the bureau first moved the adoption process out of the corral into the emerging world of new technology.

The idea of auctioning horses via satellite was posed by cattlemen's groups to help rid the range of an overabundance of wild horses that compete with livestock for fodder.

There are roughly 1.6 million C-band users in the United States, said Joe Lichtie of Superior Livestock. The company uses satellite transmissions to auction up to 30,000 head of cattle, "from Florida to Washington state and all places in-between" on a single day.

"You hit a lot of folks," he said.

The bureau, which manages the estimated 44,000 wild horses around the West, said promoting the adoption program on the Internet and having live auctions has increased awareness and made it easier for people to adopt the animals.

Minimum bid is $125, the bureau's standard fee for wild horse and burro adoptions. But the animals can go for much higher. During last year's test run, one gelding sold for $1,000, while a mare and colt went for $950 as a package deal and one stud sold for $750, Shane said.

The bureau will even deliver animals purchased from the Palomino Valley site to one of the agency's horse facilities closest to home: Ridgecrest, Calif.; Piney Woods, Miss.; Elm Creek, Neb.; Pauls Valley, Okla.; Washington, Pa.; Cross Plains, Tenn.; or Milwaukee.

All the money goes back into the Wild Horse and Burro Program, Shane said.