On a recent Friday, Ronda Johnson visited a corral near the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence and came home with two new pets.
Their names are Rhea and Jenny – wild burros found roaming on land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
“I know that they should always go in pairs, and we saw them earlier in the pen together and they seem to do really well together,” Johnson said.
For more than a decade, the BLM and the Arizona Correctional Industries – a division of the Arizona Department of Corrections – have been working together to train wild horses and burros for adoption through their inmate training program.
On August 14, more than 30 people showed up at the prison in Florence to bid on several of those burros, both trained and untrained.
Individuals can take them home as pets or use them as working farm animals.The animals can also be adopted by law enforcement agencies like the U.S. Border Patrol or U.S. Forest Service.
The inmate training program is one of six in the nation.
“I think it’s such a good hands-on experience for them and as the trainer was saying earlier, when the guys get out, they have that knowledge to take with them,” Johnson said. “I’m glad we’re able to adopt from here and help that cause.”
Untrained burros start at $125, while trained burros begin at $500.
For each adopted burro, $125 goes to the BLM and the additional funds goes back into the training program.
On Friday, one burro named Rusty sold for more than $4,000, which is uncommon, says BLM spokesperson Dolores Garcia.
“The burros that we have in the facility, 99% of them are coming from Arizona herd management areas. Horses, when we do have them available in facility, are coming from herd management areas in other parts of the western U.S., so anywhere from Utah to Nevada to Oregon to Washington,” Garcia said.
There are eight wild horse and burro herd management areas throughout the state, spanning across the 2.3 million acres of public lands that the BLM manages.
The agency is responsible for maintaining appropriate management levels for each herd through a variety of management processes like birth control or removing animals that exceed management levels.
Garcia says the animals need to be removed due to increasing populations and a lack of food supply on the range.
“It also becomes a health issue, because when there’s no food in the deserts for them in their habitat, they start moving into the urban interface, those communities, those roads,” Garcia said. “It becomes a public safety issue not just for the animal, but for the people that end up encountering those burros in the road unexpectedly.”
Garcia noted that there are frequent incidents involving burros and vehicles near the herd management areas, especially where people feed the animals on the roadside.
“It’s not uncommon for the burros to get accustomed to that and literally hop in the front to make you slow down and stop for the potential of a carrot, apple or whatever,” Garcia said.
The agency has been managing the wild populations since 1971, after Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act which enshrined efforts to manage the wild horses and burros roaming on public lands.
According to the BLM, there are more than 13,000 burros across the herd management areas in Arizona – the appropriate management level is 1,676.
“We have gathers scheduled for the fall and early spring to help with that management,” Garcia said. “It is difficult because they do breed very rapidly and exponentially.”
The state is currently holding more than 1,200 burros at the training facility.
The BLM typically holds placement events during the cooler fall and spring months. Not all events offer trained animals or include auctions for trained animals.
The untrained animals are sold to approved applicants on a first come first serve basis.
The next auction is not yet scheduled.
