Horse preserve idea rides off into the sunset

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — The idea may have worked if county officials had come up with a way to get horses to eat less food.

But horses being the way they are, the McKinley County Commission agreed Tuesday to drop the idea of a horse preserve here.

The idea was first brought up several years ago by Patricia Lundstrom, director of the Northwest New Mexico Council of Governments.

She had been getting phone calls, she said, from people upset about all of the abandoned horses in the area. At the same time, she had been hearing of reports of other areas in the nation setting up horse preserves and making it profitable.

So she wondered if a horse preserve would work in McKinley County. The state provided some money for a feasibility study and the county set up a horse preserve task force to look at the idea. She thought it also might become a tourist attraction, as it was in other parts of the country.

But Evan Williams, a planner for the Council of Governments, said the feasibility study indicated a horse preserve would cost more to operate than it would bring in. So unless the county could get some state grants or figure out some way to subsidize it, the idea wasn't feasible.

Billy Moore, chairman of the commission, said Wednesday he was skeptical about the idea from the beginning.

Taking care of horses, he said, can be expensive, considering feed bills and vet bills.

It takes, he said, about 40 acres of land to feed one horse per year. Otherwise, you have to purchase supplemental feed, and that becomes expensive.

The feasibility study came up with the annual operating cost for such a horse preserve here at about $302,550 for the first year with projected revenues of about $35,200. That's a $267,350 loss just for the first year.

The study only projected $7,500 from tourists paying a fee to tour the preserve and $16,000 in souvenirs purchased at the gift shop.

The study pointed out that there would not be competition since the closest horse preserve to here is in Lompoc, Calif., some 900 miles away.

Then there's the land issue.

The only area that could feasibly work, commissioners said at Tuesday's meeting, was Fort Wingate.

The study said that the only way to make the project work was probably going the way of Lompoc, which is operated by a nonprofit organization called the Return to Freedom Wild Horse Sanctuary. It operates on a budget of about $755,000 and raises much of its revenue from programs such as "Sponsor a Horse" or "Sponsor an Acre." In 2004, the organization had 22,000 individual donors and raised $680,000 toward the expenses.

The commissioners said, however, that the idea of a horse preserve probably would work here but left the door open in case some private individual or organization wanted to take up the cause.