Wild horses, gentler men: Inmates break horses, learn about selves

Mike Buchanan can look into the eyes of a horse and tell what's in a man's soul.

Was the man abused or was he the abuser?

Did he betray the trust of a young child with his sexual urges or did he betray himself through drug addiction?

On this day, standing in the August-baked dust, he begins to read the men who line the fence of a round pen.

His tool is a wild horse that bolts into the ring, its eyes wide with the unknown, its entire frame girded for possible danger.

Buchanan, a weathered horseman and rancher of 37-plus years, falls silent and lets the horse do the talking.

The animal canters the ring's perimeter, eyeing each of the nine convicts as it passes. When the horse finally "settles" on an inmate, it pauses in front of Roy Davis, letting out a snort, twitching its ears.

"He'll pick out the most aggressive of the bunch," Buchanan whispers. "He'll stop right in front of 'em and say, 'Bring it on."'

Davis, as it turns out, is wearing an orange shirt that day — a color denoting his status as a troublemaker and recipient of recent disciplinary action.

"I'm the ornery one of the bunch," he later boasts.

The little bay is on the move again, trotting around the men, putting its head low as it pauses near another inmate.

All is quiet as all watch.

The horse moves away slowly.

"That man's been abused. That horse can pick him out right off, he senses immediately that he's no threat," Buchanan says.

Later in a conversation away from the earshot of others, the man confirms he was beaten as a child.

"The horse will tell me the life crimes of an inmate," Buchanan says. "I use the horse to tell me the type of guy I've got coming up the vine."

It's important for Buchanan to know.

Buchanan gentles men by teaching them how to gentle horses at the Wyoming Honor Farm in Riverton, Wyo.

Tucked away on the outskirts of town, the 1,086-acre farm is a minimum-security facility within the Wyoming Department of Corrections.

In partnership with the Bureau of Land Management, Horse Hill receives wild horses that have been gathered off the ranges of Wyoming, Utah and Nevada. Qualified inmates under Buchanan's direction work with the wild horses through a four-level program designed to ready both man and animal for the general public.

At the end of the training, the saddle-gentled horses are then adopted by the public. Since its inception in 1988, 3,021 horses have been adopted and 817 men have graduated from the program, which is the second-oldest of its kind operated in partnership with the BLM.

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