CENTENNIAL - Ron Hawkins has been ranching in the Centennial Valley for 15 years, running cows, calves and yearlings on the 91 Ranch south of Wyoming Highway 130.

Although he intends to continue running cattle on a portion of the 3,500-acre ranch he leases, Hawkins has now turned to a different type of operation: wild horses.

He sees it as an opportunity to ranch and save a symbol of the American West.

Under a new program of the Bureau of Land Management - which allows for purchase of older, "unadoptable" wild horses for the rock-bottom price of $50 a head - Hawkins and four partners have formed Wild Horses Wyoming, a limited partnership company. They have already bought 200 head of mares - all of them at least 10 years old, and probably 70-80 percent of them expected to foal this spring and summer.

The horses came out of Nevada and California, with the last bunch trucked to the 91 Ranch on Friday from Utah, Hawkins said. The mares will be allowed to "live out their lives" on the high prairie pastures of the 3,500-acre ranch. The foals may be sold in the future.

Both Hawkins and partner Sean Mater, a real estate developer from Fort Collins, Colo., said they have no intention of selling these mares. However, their Web site clearly outlines a sponsorship program that will bring in revenue for the maintenance of the horse herd, and it runs the gamut from a $50 donation that will support a horse for one month to $5,000 for actual "ownership" of one of the mares, complete with a photograph and biography of the animal, the right to visit the property, see the horse herd, and in certain instances even take physical possession of an animal.

Other ranchers in the Centennial Valley have raised no red flags about having wild horses in fenced pastures on private land in the area, and townspeople said they also have no concerns. The 91 Ranch has no federal grazing leases.

Wild horses and their management stimulate emotions that range from complete support for their ability to roam free to a desire to get them off the range and avoid conflict with wildlife and other range animals.

"I didn't realize that wild horses were the second most controversial thing in the United States, second only to the Vietnam War," Hawkins said Friday.

Saving horses

The new federal law under which Wild Horses Wyoming obtained the 200 mares allows older, unadoptable wild horses to be purchased with no restrictions - meaning they can be sold for slaughter. A 34-year ban on the slaughter of wild horses was repealed by Congress in December when Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., attached it as an amendment to a spending bill signed by President Bush. Horse advocates fear the law will lead to the animals ending up as horse meat for human consumption overseas or as dog food.

While some people may intend to buy the wild horses for $50 and sell them on the commodity market for values ranging upward of $500, Hawkins, Mater and their partners plan to hold on to the horses.

"We are in the business of saving horses," Mater said. "Our mission of stewardship is to save the American wild horse while progressively expanding areas of safe harbor, providing the peoples of the world with opportunities to view and learn from the mustang in its natural habitat," the company said on its Web site.

"Wild Horses Wyoming is committed to keep the 200 mares that we have purchased for the rest of their lives," Hawkins said. "If we can find people to come and sponsor these horses … that allows us to go purchase additional horses."

Mater said the company hopes to secure more land and eventually acquire up to 5,000 mustangs.

"That's our goal," said Bill Clark, a Fort Collins real estate broker and another partner in the venture. "Everybody is along the same track, and nobody's backing off here."

Funding for the venture so far has come from the partners themselves, Mater and Hawkins said.

In time Hawkins also hopes to begin a selective breeding program, keeping the bloodlines "wild" by using stallions gathered during future wild horse roundups.

Finding homes

BLM and Interior Department officials have said they hope to find homes for roughly 8,400 horses affected by the new law, instead of sending them to slaughterhouses. The BLM said the 37,000 free-roaming wild horses and burros on the Western range are about 9,000 more than natural forage can sustain. About 19,000 wild horses are in Nevada. The BLM's aim is to bring the total population down to about 28,000 through government roundups.

The horses owned by Wild Horses Wyoming are being fed grass hay to supplement natural grazing available in the Centennial Valley, but ultimately Hawkins hopes they will be independent of any supplemental feeding program. The current feeding is being done in part to "condition" the animals and get them used to people. Both Mater and Hawkins said they must be able to handle the horses occasionally, such as when they wean foals from mares.

In some places, wild horses are a tourist draw. The Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in Hot Springs, S.D., for example, cares for 400 horses on 11,000 acres of privately owned land. To augment expenses, the sanctuary has built a tourism business serving from 7,000 to 13,000 visitors a year by offering bus tours and, for $750, a private tour guided by ranch owner Dayton Hyde.

Hawkins said there will be a roadside pullout overlooking the 91 Ranch so visitors can see the horses. There will be some "outside public involvement with these horses, but not to the extent that it takes away from their wild horse status. There is not going to be canopy fringe top bus tours through these horses," he said.

Wild Horses Wyoming is now in the process of leasing an additional 10,000 acres in the Centennial Valley for expanded range for the horses, Hawkins said.

Hawkins was involved in an earlier, separate project that was a pilot program of the BLM, in which he obtained 100 head of wild geldings that he runs on 23,000 private acres of the Sheep Mountain Ranch in northern Colorado. He said Sheep Mountain Properties and Wild Horses Wyoming are two separate businesses; the former is a totally private operation with no plans for any public viewing of those animals.

Star-Tribune correspondent Candy Moulton can be reached at candywwa@aol.com.